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January Bonus Chapter
🕑 Added 2024-01-31 21:17:21 +0000 UTCMy five-step plan to modernize the orphanage progressed at the pace of a caramel river. Fencing lessons, looking after the little ones, doing housework, and learning runeweaving left me with little to no time. I couldn’t comprehend how Elincia used to manage the orphanage on her own. Even with Ginz around, there were days that we remained awake well past bedtime, cleaning the kitchen, fixing a loose shutter, or hunting for hungry rats.
Ilya’s [Mark of the Hunt] was a god-sent skill in those occasions.
That day, I was struck with luck. Captain Kiln had decided to crash into the orphanage to avoid her responsibilities in the Great Hall, so I tasked her with the fencing lessons. The kids were excited to train under one of the most famous combatants of Farcrest, so I left them with the captain and visited Ginz’s workshop in the western wing.
The old pantry was now covered with leather stripes, piles of flax rope, metal discs, bent wooden planks, and dozens of shiny tools. In the center, there was a sturdy table and, next to the window, a small smithy with its furnace. Ginz was sitting at the smithy with the pliers in one hand and a hammer in the other. He wore no protection whatsoever.
“Didn’t expect to see you here so early in the morning,” he greeted me as he hammered a small piece of metal.
“Captain Kiln came to visit, so I let her in charge of the kids,” I replied, closing the door behind me and sitting by the workbench. If she wanted to avoid her responsibilities, she might as well be helpful at the manor.
Ginz left the hammer and the pliers by the side and covered his hands with red gleaming mana. Then, he grabbed the metal disk he was working on and molded it with his bare hands. It wasn’t easy to detect, but [Mana Mastery] revealed a hologram of slim blue lines superposed over the disk with real-time measurements.
“You can work metal now?” I asked as Ginz used a tiny mana scalpel to cut a small semicircular section of the disk.
“Got it last night after you went to sleep. At this rate, I’ll be a Tinkerer in a decade or so,” Ginz replied, full of himself, as he moved the embers of the smithy with his bare hand. “Just feed me more crazy ideas, and I’ll make them reality.”
“I’ll do. Just avoid touching fire in front of the kids,” I sighed.
Ginz winked at me as he cut semicircular sections on the disk until we had a toothed wheel similar to a bike’s chain ring. He quenched the wheel and lifted it before his eyes, enamored by the sight. It was perfect in every sense. That little device will take us one step further to live a comfortable life despite the lack of electricity.
The five steps of my plan to modernize the orphanage were ‘washing,’ ‘heating,’ ‘pumping,’ ‘plumbing,’ and ‘refrigerating.’ ‘Washing’ was the most straightforward step, hence the first. Despite looking like the least important of the least, washing clothing by hand for twelve kids and three adults was almost a form of torture. Elincia wouldn’t complain, but it punished one’s lower back.
Before my arrival, the older kids helped with most of the chores. With the tournament around the corner, I would rather them focus on practicing than washing muddy rags. Luckily, there was a simple artifact to speed up the process: a high-capacity, pedal-powered washing machine. The toothed wheel was the last piece of the puzzle.
“This is a powerful artifact, Robert. I feel it in my hinges,” Ginz said, raising the toothed wheel over his head like a priest with a host.
“Sentences like that are why you don’t get laid,” I replied.
“It’s not like you are getting too much action either,” Ginz mockingly raised an eyebrow.
“By day, I’m a teacher and caretaker; by noon, I’m an inventor; and by night I’m a rune-weaver. I’m sleeping like three hours in a good day,” I grunted, hoping the magical energy drinks Elincia brewed weren’t as addictive as the Devil’s Dandruff because I was drinking them daily.
“Sounds like an excuse. A bad one,” Ginz shrugged his shoulders.
“Enough. Let’s focus on more important things. The washing machine,” I said, knowing I was the one who had brought up the topic.
Ginz left the toothed wheel on the table and touched my shoulder. His hand was hotter than I expected, although not enough to sear my jacket. Traces of igneous mana still lingered over his skin.
“Are you sure you don’t have problems getting la—.”
“Screw off, Ginz,” I said, slapping her hand away from my shoulder. “Let’s focus on the thing.”
“As you wish, My Lord,” Ginz said with a mocking curtsy.
The craftsman left me and approached the washing machine prototype he was assembling. The design was simple: a wooden drum partially submerged into a tub. The drum was rotated by a bike chain and two toothed wheels; one adhered to the side of the drum and the other to a set of pedals.
Ginz assembled the toothed wheel to the pedals and mounted the chain. Unlike our several previous attempts, it was a perfect fit. Ginz then put the feet on the pedals, and the cylindric drum started spinning. After a minute, the contraption hadn’t broken apart.
“Say goodbye to all our back problems,” Ginz said with a smile of relief. “Just give me a few days to work up with the frame and a lighter drum, and the Clarke’s Washing Machine will be functional.”
We laughed. A small victory was a victory nonetheless. My role in phase one of my five-step plan to modernize the orphanage was complete, which led me to the second phase. Heating. Currently, the orphanage’s heat source was the kitchen stove and braziers for the bedrooms.
The braziers worried me. Hot embers in a room full of energetic orphans were a health hazard in my books. Even if we hadn’t had any accidents this season, the soot marks on the wall beside the brazier. No matter how controlled it was, the by-products of combustion were equally dangerous.
Luckily, ‘washing’ and ‘heating’ were the two more manageable tasks on my list. With ‘pumping’ and ‘plumbing,’ things would get more challenging. But that was a problem for the future me.
My idea to heat the kid’s bedroom was straightforward: a mana-powered stove.
There was a catch, though. Unlike producing light, producing heat required exponentially more mana, so the heating system would only be operative while Elincia or I was in the orphanage. I wonder if Ginz had leveled up enough to meet the requirements of the mana-powered stove. I spied on him as he bent a thin oak plank using magic. He might have enough mana too, which made me wonder how many titles he had gained since our first encounter.
I shook my head and focused on the task ahead.
On a wax tablet, I sketched the Clarke’s Stove. The heating core should be made of metal to heat a room without melting. It needed a platform to insulate it from the floor and an enclosure to separate the incandescent metal from the kids.
Ginz continued with his efforts to build a light drum for the washing machine while I drew a couple of sketches. I knew Ginz would completely change them later, but giving him a vague idea of what I wanted was enough for him to come up with something marvelous. I wondered how much he was coming up with stuff and how much was the System’s skills putting work.
In the end, it didn’t matter.
I re-draw the Clarke’s Stove and added a removable dome that exposed the metallic heating plate so a kettle could be put to boil. I made a mental note to make the iron plate flat and wide so the kettle wouldn’t tip over. For the next fifteen minutes, I made several iterations, adding and removing stuff, until I was satisfied with the outcome.
The final design of the Clarke’s Stove was a portable birdcage-like stove that doubled as a simple cooking station. I was a sucker for the steampunk vibe, so I went with bronze as the primary material and used one of the old, adorned stools as a model for the stand.
Like a proud kid, I showed the result to Ginz. He wasn’t particularly surprised with the design. A moment later, the tablet was ripped from my hands.
“A single plate is lame. Not all nights are equally cold; you need a way to control the temperature. The cage will heat quickly if you make it of bronze. It would be best if you also had a mechanism to ‘refuel’ the stove without touching it,” Ginz said as he scribbled over my poor Clarke’s Stove Final Version. “Extra points for the cupola if you overlook that you stole the idea from a common brazier.”
A minute later, my design was completely changed.
“Harsh,” I sighed.
“You are my best student, Robbo. I’m not entertaining mediocrity with you,” Ginz replied.
“I like you more when you become a yes-man,” I sighed, peeking over Ginz’s shoulder to see my botched creation. I couldn’t help but notice that Ginz’s design was a straight improvement over mine.
The single heating plate had been replaced by a hexagon of smaller plates, with the main plate on top to keep the kettle heating functionality. The enclosure could be separated from the base to make it easier to move around. The base had an airflow so that the room would heat faster. All of that while retaining the steampunk-esque looks of my initial design.
“Man, I’m glad you came to the orphanage,” I said in awe.
“You are not my type. I’m sorry,” Ginz replied with a grin.
I let out a huge sigh. Where did the stuttering craftsman go? The dozen levels Ginz had gained in the last months might have catapulted his self-confidence through the roof: that and the fact we were making serious bank with all the custom orders the nobles were making.
The sound of metal against metal brought me back to the land of the living. Ginz had placed a mountain of metal plates, ingots, and bits over the workbench. I quickly understood the major oversight in my design. A fully charged lightstone the size of my hand would give light for four or five hours, but the amount of heat a metal plate would provide was still unknown.
“Figure things out while I finish the washing machine,” Ginz smiled.
The moment I had been dreading had finally come; instead of brute-forcing things as usual, I had to use my brains. Ideally, I wanted to avoid cooking the kids alive while providing a comfortable sleeping temperature, but I lacked a way of measuring the temperature or the heat exchange rate.
Sure, I could calculate the heat required to boil a set amount of water, but that wouldn’t give me helpful information about metal-to-air heating. I decided to leave that problem for later. First, I wanted to know if heating metal plates with runes was safe. My intuition told me different materials had different maximum amounts of heat they could radiate.
Looking at the Blanket of Warmth, the creator had to enchant one of every seven threads to reach the sweet spot of temperature. That might mean wool had a set temperature for the ‘heat’ rune. Otherwise, the creator would’ve enchanted the whole blanket, each strand at a lower temperature.
“I’m going to need pliers, water, gloves, and safety goggles,” I said.
Ginz gave me a mocking glance.
“I’m not fireproof like you,” I replied.
A moment later, I was sitting by the smithy, protection measures in place. Ginz even gave me an old leather apron covered in burn marks. In case I ruined it somehow, I grabbed a small iron ingot and drew the runes on the surface. Heat, Recharge, Gradual. It was basically a lightstone but for heat instead of light.
Then, using the pliers, I held the enchanted plate over the quenching bucket, and with my free hand, I slowly poured mana. The metal plate lit up. From cold to warm, pleasant to the touch. I could ‘feel’ the runic circuit having much more mana capacity, and after a couple of seconds of pouring my mana, the circuit stopped absorbing it.
“It’s fully charged,” I said.
“Give it to me,” Ginz said as he surrounded his hands with red mana.
The craftsman grabbed the plate and tried to fold it with little success.
“Interesting. It’s not hot enough to work with it,” Ginz heaved.
A quick look into the plate revealed the amount of energy stored was slowly being discharged at a constant rate. It seemed the System’s creator had set a bar for the standard rate of magic use of the ‘gradual’ rune. I wonder if I could develop a loop with ‘gradual’ and ‘abrupt’ runes to control the flow of magic. That would have to wait; for now, we were going with the most straightforward solutions.
“If I knew I was going to be in this situation, I would’ve put more attention to my programming classes,” I sighed. Or maybe I should have studied electrical engineering instead of education.
“Bad student, good teacher. Happens a lot of the time. Just look at Elincia,” Ginz laughed, putting the plate over the small anvil.
At least we knew the iron plates wouldn’t warm up much more than a wood stove. Now, it was a matter of figuring out how big the plate had to be to store enough mana for around eight hours of usage and how many of them we would need to warm the kid’s bedroom.
As far as my experiments went, the more mass, the more mana the ‘Recharge’ rune could store. Figuring how much metal I needed for eight hours of heat would be easy. I grabbed the smallest piece of iron and measured it on the scale. Then, I wrote the same runes, ‘heat,’ ‘gradual,’ and ‘recharge,’ and fully charged it with mana. Using an hourglass, I measured the until the mana ran out and the enchantment died. With basic arithmetic, I had the weight-time ratio.
“Do I have to consider the surface in the equation?” I asked.
“I don’t know, you tell me,” Ginz shrugged.
After another hour of testing, we concluded that the enchantment didn’t care about the room’s surface or temperature. The metal plates emitted the same amount of heat and burnt the same amount of mana despite the size of the surface or the surrounding weather.
“Thank God!” I said, dropping the pliers as the circuit ran out of mana. Otherwise, we would’ve needed hours or even days of experimentation to determine the correct dimensions.
“I’ll make a prototype. Then, we will figure out how many plates we need to light to warm the kid’s bedroom for the night. If we need more, we strap another line of plates,” Ginz said, rubbing his hands. Working with enchanted materials seemed to boost the experience yield for the Craftsmen Class.
I leaned back and stretched my back. The position of the sun told me it was almost lunchtime. The workshop was a chaos of tools and hardware, but I was satisfied with the progress. With the Clarke’s Stove, we could heat rooms we couldn’t usually use in winter. I could even modify the kitchen stove to work with mana; that way, we would save on fuel.
There was still a lot to do to make the orphanage a more comfortable place to live.
“About those so-called power tools—?” Ginz said.
“You can cut metal with your skills. You don’t need power tools,” I interrupted him. As interesting as it was to blow Ginz’s mind with the marvels of engineering and construction, I wasn’t wasting time replicating power tools. Not yet.
“Come on!” Ginz complained. “I need a nail gun.”
“As a matter of fact, you don’t,” I sighed. “But I might reconsider when we finish with our current projects.”
Next in line was creating a water pump, then a piping system, but to construct those, most of the runes I knew were utterly useless. Luckily, we had Ginz on our side. And I planned to make him work until he sweats blood.
“Why are you looking at me like that? It’s creepy,” Ginz stuttered.
“I’m just wondering how many levels you will get after we finish our next project,” I said with a mischievous smile.
Comments
William Castle
it looks like the bonus chapters take place on the Orphanage man's cave. Lol
I Dare Korval
He may have become too valuable to the local nobility for them to afford the risk of loosing him. So shhhhhhh, no telling anyone (especially the Prince)!
Valderan
I feel like I missed something. Wasn't Elencia worried about him revealing he was an enchanter and now he's casually dropping his legendary class's name to Ginz and crafting bespoke enchanted housewares? I mean... Its fine. I was just under the impression that if the marquis found out that he'd be black jacked and sent to the capital within the hour.
David Ellis
Fun! And I feel like we the commenters are part of the reason why you put in that extra hour of testing different properties of the metal's heat dissipation because we (meaning, at least myself) would *absolutely* bring up the Surface Area to Volume ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surface-area-to-volume_ratio on this point. :) Also, typo, I think: "so I let her in charge of the kids" -> "so I left her in charge of the kids" As an aside, what has Patreon done to the paragraph formatting?
