NOVEL NEXT [Vol.5] Ch.5 Well Water
I continued working on the lab space for another twenty-six days until I finally completed the shell of the space. The facility is built into the hills bordering the side of the valley with no roads currently. While I worked, I spent some time cutting trees down along a trail that led here, so we have the beginnings of a road at least, though I imagine it will be some time before a proper road is built.
The facility itself is quite large with the first floor forming a large U shape, and the much smaller second floor resting against the hillside. The first floor's insides are still empty with structural pillars supporting a large empty hall, it's nearly 30,000 square feet in size, and towers twenty five feet tall. It would be easy to confuse it with a massive warehouse given how empty it is. It's partially built into the hillside, which provided the stone from which it was built. The small second floor, which stands only 15 feet tall internally and with a square footage of 4,000, rests atop the back of the building, built into the hill as well, causing the roof to run directly into the hillside.
Beyond this part of the facility though is an eight foot wide stairwell headed diagonally down, aimed deep under the tallest part of the hills surrounding the valley. There, nearly 100 feet down, I have another space. This space is 10 feet tall, and 50 feet on either side. The whole place had to have it's walls reinforced with stone shaping, to prevent aquifer water from leaking in. This aquifer is a bit below ground, so I'm considering building a well here in the future so water will be easier to access here.
In the future, the underground space can be expanded as needed, but for now I figure it should work for any immediate experiments. Some of the medium sized crystals that I grew in the past could make it closer to the surface than this without breaking, so if we come up with a good way to move crystals here, I think this should function as a decent testing space for them.
I have an idea that I can try related to transporting the crystals over the surface which will hopefully prove fruitful, otherwise, I might have to consider digging a hidden chamber where I can grow more crystals over here, as I know I can transport chambers with deteriorated crystals and regrow them. Though none of that matters until the snow melts, which is still a few weeks away.
I can't quite get a read on whether Tiberius likes the space or not. Sometimes it seems like he's excited by all the possibilities for experiments, and other times he seems overwhelmed and disappointed by the lack of anything being in the space already. The whole facility isn't just for him though. The first floor of the building is divided into five roughly equal sized sections, of which I let Tiberius pick one to use.
I shouldn't have been surprised when he picked the section adjacent to the stairwell headed into the basement. It makes sense given he'll be using the facility more than anyone else. He already has made multiple requests for many different tools and machines for me to make for him, to which I told him to pick carefully, because he's only getting a few of them. I'm not about to become someone's lab assistant. If he wants many different tools, then he needs to pay someone to make them, or start showing valuable results.
The initial tools he wanted for doing blood testing experiments were easy enough to make, so I spent five days making all the various containers for blood, and the apparatus he requested for partially submerging crystals into said blood. While I worked, I advised him to haul plenty of water to the lab space, since I hadn't dug the well yet, and working with blood without any water sounds like it's asking for trouble.
Despite my advice, Tiberius only hauled a small amount here, though it seems he's much more brains than brawn, because he did seem exhausted by the endeavor. I've decided to dig the well sooner rather than later to provide water here, as I'm concerned about health conditions in the area if I don't.
Even the health conditions wouldn't have been quite enough, but I decided I wanted to work on a project that would require some problem solving and could be of some benefit moving forward. This isn't going to just be a manually operated well, I'm hoping to make a wind-powered water well. Prior to gaining access to leather, this would be an exceptional pain to make, but with leather, it should be possible to make decently functioning check valves by which a small windmill can pump water to the surface. If I can get this working, it potentially opens up the construction of more wells, giving us access to deeper fresh water reserves in locations where getting water might otherwise be hard.
One of the biggest challenges with this project will actually be getting the metal to make the pump rod. I intend to have the rod be a steel core with a thin surface coating of lightstone, to help with both rigidity and waterproofing. However, as I've mentioned before, we'll actually need to do some scavenging to get our hands on more iron. Fortunately, I shouldn't need to go diving into sunken ships just yet, because we still have a decent amount of iron on hand thanks to the cannonballs that were fired at us on the far beach.
I shouldn't need that much iron for this project, so I'll just take a wagon to the far side of the island, and load it up with as many cannonballs as I can haul back, and that should be more than enough for this project.
As it turns out, when you don't need to sleep, the round trip to the far beach, including the couple hours picking up cannonballs, only takes a little over three days. Considering how many cannonballs were left buried in the sand, I've decided to put in a request for a few more goblins with wagons to go haul cannonballs back to the city. We'll have good uses for the iron once it's turned into steel, but the cannonballs themselves are cast iron or worse, so they'll need to be reprocessed to remove some of the carbon to make them into higher quality metal.
While I wait for Karsh to reprocess the iron, I'm going to start digging the well. Ultimately, it's going to be a real pain to hand dig the well, then close it up with a pipe so that it works for pumping water, but I don't have a great way to drill down the fifty feet to the aquifer in that area without just digging myself into the hole. I can cut a pipe with stone shaping, but removing the stone would be difficult, and ensuring that it's properly sealed would be hard too if I can't see it.
Once Karsh finishes the initial iron reprocessing, I'll give him instructions for the mechanical gearing, bearings, and valves that I'll need made for the well pump. The windmill to drive this pump will be much smaller than the windmills by the sea, so it shouldn't be quite as complicated to actually assemble.
Digging the well and having Karsh make the parts I requested took nine days in total. I cut a ladder into the wall of the well, and made a harness on my back for hauling rocks as I dug the well. When I reached about thirty-five feet deep, water started to trickle in very slowly from the walls, so I started the process of turning this into an automatic water well.
First, I used my new magic, pulverize, on the floor to create a decently large area of sand in the floor of the well. Then I assembled the pump cylinder with it's leather and steel check valves. I then got a large piece of rope, and draped it down the well with a weight where I wanted my water pipe to be located. Then I slowly worked my way along the rope, stone shaping a pipe around the rope, so I could know that the pipe was relatively straight.
Once I reached the bottom, I dug into the sand where the pipe would connect with the pump cylinder, and after doing multiple measurements, I attached the cylinder and buried it back in the sand. I still need to have Karsh make the actual pump rod, but I need to know the exact length I needed before it can be made. For that I'll also need to build the windmill that will sit on top, as well as it's pipe. I want it to run into a holding tank, so the actual exit from the well should be a little higher up to accommodate that.
Once I get everything hooked up, I can seal the sandy portion of the well off completely, and then I'll make some kind of removable cover for the top of the well to keep anyone from falling in. I don't want to completely seal it though, as the leather in the plunger check valves should be replaced if the flow rate slows down, which is likely to happen at least once a year, if not more frequently than that.