Initial stages of building out a facility for making sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid from sea water went pretty well. With the help of three construction teams, the buildings necessary were being constructed about as fast as I could draft the design for the facility. We've built it in the second valley, displacing two old salt evaporation ponds to make room. In essence, all we needed to make this work were a few basic materials.

First, we concentrate down salt water to a brine at saturation. Next, we can easily electrolyze the salt water, creating chlorine and hydrogen gases and leaving behind a sodium hydroxide mix as a liquid. Doing so requires a specially shaped glass container to separate the gases and keep the voltage and amperage low in each individual container. There was a small intermediate problem we had to solve with making a good electrode for the chlorine side of the reaction, as it readily destroyed most metals we tried to use, but we had two tricks up our sleeves to solve that.

While we may not be quite at the stage where we can produce actual graphite rods easily, we could still produce decent carbon based electrodes. It required a few extra steps in our pelletization process, such as an acid wash, production of a larger, usable electrode, and then heat treatment in a nitrogen atmosphere to increase the electrical quality. However, after two weeks of work, I was able to make a low quality carbon electrode. Since even a graphite electrode would probably break down over time, this will do as a process for us for a time. The other electrode seemed to work well enough using steel, although it too would slowly break down over time. With a ready supply of iron and carbon though, it shouldn't be much of a problem.

It was relatively easy to bring in a DC generator powered by a mana engine to produce the necessary electricity for the electrolysis process. The hydrogen and chlorine gases produced by electrolysis are then reacted slowly in a thick walled glass chamber. A small static spark is used inside the reactor to start the reaction, and a cooling jacket of water flows around most of the container to keep the exothermic reaction from getting out of hand. More gas is slowly introduced into the chamber via one-way valves, and new sparks are introduced as needed to keep the reaction going. The chamber itself has an inlet for fresh water, which pools at the bottom, and can be drained off in the form of hydrochloric acid.

Ultimately, the whole facility took us just under a month, at 29 days, to build out. It produces about 40 gallons of sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid each a day, and the concentrations seem to be about at 10 Molar. While we were working on this, I had the different demons who processed fish begin stockpiling rendered fish fats for us to use with the sodium hydroxide to produce the glycerol we needed.

In that month or so of work, we had 3 leviathan body parts wash up on shore. One was clearly the final third or so of an eel leviathan. The other two were quite odd, and aren't from any leviathan that I'd seen before, which led me to believe that there are probably leviathans along the sea floor that we never see.

One part seemed to be from either a sea-star like creature, or something with hardened tentacles, given it's tapering appearance. It was hard to tell, based on just how much it had already been destroyed, but it seems to have both a subdermal shell, and a cartilaginous internal rod down it's length.

The last part can only be described as a massive top half of some kind of bivalve shell. What was inside, however, is long gone. Some of these parts are actually something of a windfall for us. Despite it's size, the shell does just seem to be a mostly normal shell, meaning it represents an inordinate amount of calcium carbonate for us to use. The difficult part is extracting it.

Much like the other leviathan parts and corpses, it actually got caught a little ways from the shoreline itself, requiring that we use small wooden boats to go out to break it down. No one wants to go out and do it, given how dangerous the waters currently appear to be. Once the leviathan threat is neutralized though, I expect we'll have an abundance of new resources to use. For now though, I need to continue on the path to producing nitroglycerin to actually get us to that safe point, which sounds oxymoronic to me.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

During the two days after completion of the sodium hydroxide plant, I had begun working on making glycerol from rendered fish fats, when we started to run into the problem that we'd planned in advance for. An eagle arrived. Thankfully, the first one was fairly easy to manage. It found one of the nesting sites up on the mountain, and after a few days, it had figured out where it could find food at our feeding area.

I continued working on making glycerin, and found that I really needed to reduce the concentration down to about 1/40th of the initial concentration to properly process it. When all was said and done, we had about a 10% volumetric yield of glycerol, and a whole bunch of soap as the product. Figuring that out took me a total of nine days from the start of the sodium hydroxide facility.

With that information, I then began the plans for the next facility, which will conveniently be located not far from the sodium hydroxide plant. This facility will render fish fat, and then produce the glycerin and soap we want from it. It's far more convenient for everyone involved if we render the fat as part of the process. All we need to do is go around and collect waste fish fats to bring along for processing.

The glycerol and soap facility was, in some ways simpler, and in others, more complicated. I had our looms use steel wire to make us some metal meshes to use for filtering particulates out of the fats we render, so that the final soap products will be higher quality. Ultimately, the facility is mostly just large metal containers that are heated and stirred to proceed with either rendering or reactions. Fish are actually a fairly lean creature, so the amount of fats we collect daily is actually quite small, even when we collect all the waste fats from our entire city of a few thousand individuals.

It's still enough to make what we need, however. It only took 15 days to get this facility up and running, and in that time, a second eagle arrived, and two more leviathan parts washed ashore. There was a small scuffle between the two eagles, but ultimately, they both found nesting points on top of the mountain, so we dodged a bullet on that one so far. One of the leviathan parts that washed ashore was the smaller of the two claws that went with a crab creature, while the other appeared to be the lower jaw and underbelly from a fish-like creature.

Interestingly, the eagles have started to occasionally go out and pick at exposed meat on leviathan carcasses around the island. As long as they aren't attacking the city, I'm happy. The dwarves seem to be taking it as a good sign for the future, but I'm not as optimistic. They're just scavenging a free meal. Depending on how things go with the nitroglycerin, we might end up agitating the eagles a bit too much with high explosives, and it could cause a cascading problem. I'll hope for the best, but I've already talked with the military about designing anti-air grapeshot cannons that use black powder, based on my old steam cannon design. If the eagles go mad due to the explosions, we need to be ready.

The production of nitroglycerin was, by far, the most dangerous step, and the one I was least initially familiar with. I tinkered for twenty days before I started to get a handle on it. First I found that I needed to concentrate down the nitric and sulfuric acid to even higher purities. After that, I knew it was working due to the sheer number of accidents I caused. I knew it was a sensitive explosive, but it's really something. I received multiple injuries due to reaction chambers just exploding on me for reasons that initially eluded me.

It's very sensitive to shock, and heat, and just about any sort of minor accident really. Manual stirring or adding ingredients was just too prone to sudden failure. I'd slowly drip the glycerol in, only to add a little too much, and have the vessel overheat and explode. Ultimately, the trick was to do everything mechanically and slowly. For safety reasons, we'll be using many small reaction vessels, rather than one big one, meaning the whole facility will need to be quite large with dividers between reactors so a single failure doesn't cause cascading failures throughout the whole place.

Ultimately, the nitroglycerin settles to the bottom of the reaction chamber, and we have to carefully neutralize the leftover acids. Figuring out how to safely wash the nitroglycerin and remove the acids with a weak base took another fifteen days and multiple explosions to figure out. Once I had some nitroglycerin though, I did try my hand at soaking paper in it, which did stabilize it considerably. There is still quite a bit of work to do to make the nitroglycerin at an industrial scale, but we're almost at the point where we can start attempting to deal with leviathans.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.