NOVEL NEXT [Vol.5] Ch.6 Mana Drain
After eight more days of work, I finished building the prototype windmill for the well, and had Karsh help shape a straight steel rod of the necessary size for the pump. The snow started melting on the mountain half-way through my work, which then resulted in nagging from Tiberius that I should go brave the remaining snow to get him crystals. I retorted that if he had simply hauled enough water to the lab in the first place, I wouldn't have felt the need to build this well first, so he'll have to wait until I finish my project. Never mind the fact that I wouldn't actually travel up through the snow, even if most of it is melted. That's just asking to get buried in an avalanche or mudslide.
For now the plan is just to get the well working, but with the way I've set it up, I can install different diameter pipes to get data on the most efficient way to draw water out of the well, including potential data to reduce overall wear and tear on the check valves. Though to do that properly I'll need someone to record the actual data for total flow rate from the pump in various wind conditions, and I don't plan on being the one to do that. I have other tasks to complete that don't involve working at the lab, so for now the idea of optimizing this well is just something for someone to do in the future.
Though it took some small changes, getting the well functioning and building the water tank with an overflow valve only took three more days of work and one day of monitoring to make sure it didn't break. I didn't have much lightstone left over from the work I was doing previously, and I used the remainder of it coating the pump rod to finish the windmill.
Though the wind isn't constant, over the course of a day it seems like it averages about 50 gallons an hour, which is more than enough to satisfy a significant amount of water needs for drinking for any future wells we might dig. Here though, that water will largely be used if we need it for experiments.
Given the sheer excess of water flow from the well, I've installed a shut off on the windmill itself which locks the fan in place. This way we don't waste water, or wear out the check valves more than necessary. With that completed, I've started getting ready to travel back up the mountain to grow a moderately sized crystal. Before I do that though, I want to run the test to see if I can transport them over the surface, and see how long that might work for.
For the experiment I plan on distilling some of the toxin I discovered years ago which burns mana. If I submerge the crystal in that solution, I suspect that it may, at least temporarily, prevent crystals which are submerged from overcharging and breaking. If that experiment fails, then there isn't a good reason for me to stay up on the mountain to grow a medium crystal.
After another six days, the snow had melted completely, and I felt comfortable heading up to the cave. In the six days while I waited, I started helping with extending the fishing jetty again. At my suggestion, the construction crew had started to dig out a new quarry area that will eventually become a new artificial tide pool in the other valley as a source for construction stone, as well as a place for more goblins to manually break rocks in an attempt to gain access to stone shaping. So I spent my half-asleep time cutting and hauling stone from that quarry, and then during my wakeful time worked on the jetty, since I didn't particularly want to be diving in the water while half-asleep.
On the sixth day, I made the trip up the mountain, but took a detour for a few hours collecting the plants that produced the mana-burning toxin. Once I was confident that I had enough to do a basic test, I completed the trip up the mountain and got to work distilling the toxin from the plants, and building a chamber that would hold some crystals suspended in the center of the liquid.
The next day, I began my test. I selected a number of similarly sized large crystals, and suspended one in the chamber within the cave after draining its mana, surrounded it with the liquid, then hauled the chamber to the surface. For this particular test, I've left the top of the chamber open so I can easily observe what happens inside.
As I traveled closer to the surface the crystal still started to glow more than before, which had me initially concerned. One of my hopes was that the toxin worked as a mana insulator as it would absorb the ambient mana before it could be used. The experiment wasn't a failure though. Despite the crystal starting to glow, it halted at a certain point well below the point where the crystal would shatter. Thanks to some impurities in the water, I could also tell that some form of convection was also occurring within the liquid itself. I couldn't tell the source of the convection, but I'm assuming it's the crystal.
Over the course of six hours, the crystal steadily grew brighter and brighter until it finally cracked and started to deteriorate. As it deteriorated, the black flakes sunk to the bottom of the surrounding fluid, and gas bubbled off the crystal and out into the atmosphere. My first test could be considered a success, but not a perfect one. Six hours is cutting it close for transporting a crystal all the way to the lab, and there are still too many variables to determine the effect that different crystal size or toxin concentration might cause. I have a few more experiments I'll try to get a better idea of what will need done.
I spent another five days doing various tests until I was confident in some basic predictions. I only used very similarly sized crystals for my tests, to remove that as a variable, though I can't discount that they might have caused minor fluctuations. I tried running the experiment at night, changing the total volume of the liquid with the dissolved toxin, and both increasing and decreasing its concentration. What I found was that the length of time it took for the crystals to break was fairly straightforward.
I found a few useful pieces of data. The time it takes for the crystal to break seems to vary linearly with the volume of liquid present. If I double the volume while keeping the concentration the same, it takes twice as long for the crystal to break. The same is true for concentration, but only to a point. If I dilute the concentration too much, the property begins to disappear, and by the time it's seven times as dilute as what I prepared initially, it no longer is capable of preventing the crystal from breaking. On the other end of the spectrum, if I concentrate it down to five times the concentration, the liquid becomes very viscous after a short while of being on the surface, and the crystal breaks quite early.
Based on those observations, I hypothesize that the convection I observed before is strong enough to allow reasonable mixing of the fluid for even moderately large volumes. When the concentration is too low, convection slows too much and the capacity of the fluid is too low to prevent the crystals I've chosen from breaking. When the concentration is too high, the fluid becomes too viscous and slows convection, preventing the majority of the fluid from being useful.
Finally, at night I observed that the crystals take about 30% longer to break, which seems consistent with my findings on how quickly I regenerate mana between day and night. The last test I want to do before making a slightly larger crystal to test with is to test a crystal during the solar eclipse which will occur two days from now. During eclipses, we normally get significantly less mana, almost a 90% reduction, so I feel like that is a good check to make.
During the eclipse, I ran four tests simultaneously, since the eclipses only happen once a month. The eclipse itself lasts about eight hours, which is a significant part of a day. During it, I ran the first test again, a test with a tenth the volume of liquid, a fifth the volume of liquid, and half the volume of liquid.
All of the tests except the smallest volume ran past the eclipse, and then broke at different points afterwards. The one-tenth volume test broke at the four hour mark, which was a little earlier than I expected, but I can potentially attribute to their general affinity for drawing in mana. The one-fifth volume broke about thirty minutes after the eclipse ended, and the half and full volume ones ran for about two and five hours after the eclipse ended respectively.
With this new information at hand, I estimate that I can get about six times the duration on the surface for a submerged crystal by transporting it during an eclipse. I imagine that if I was willing to wait a few months until the eclipses start occurring when it is nighttime on the island, I'd be able to get even more duration from the liquid. As it stands, the largest natural crystals can easily make the trip to the new lab during an eclipse, but the lab itself isn't quite deep enough to prevent them from breaking at that depth, so I'll need to grow slightly larger crystals. As long as those crystals don't behave too differently, we should be able to transport them during an eclipse following their completion.