I was right about them noticing things on the mainland. When I had made it back to the city, I was informed that Kao had sent a message a few days prior via the elf communication birds, and the bird was being kept around waiting for a response to be sent if we had one. So, I made my way to see what the message Kao had sent was exactly, and I was a little disappointed, but also slightly relieved.

In short, Kao has noticed eagles leaving to sea, and assumes we've once again made a large crystal. He intends to send a ship this winter to pick up his remaining few dwarves still on the island, but that we won't be allowed to do any trade by order of the dwarven king. Gauging by the number of eagles that have left, he's already assumed we've either made a larger crystal, or done something very different from before. In either case, he encourages us to exercise caution, as mainland sentiment towards demons has been plummeting in recent years, and people are already spreading rumors that we're stealing the eagles away so that the next demon invasion will be more successful.

I had to take a little time to process his note before coming up with a response. Despite everything, I still find it difficult to think about the mainland impacts that we have, and what that might be perceived as. At heart, I'm no politician, it's why I leave that to Zaka, not that he's much more of a politician than me in practice. Regardless, our response was short, but conveyed what we needed to.

"Don't sent ship for at least a few years. Island surrounded by tens of leviathans. Working on solving problem. Eagles being treated as well as we can. One died in a territorial dispute, others all fine."

I then had both our insignia, and Shasta's signature put on the paper, to verify the information inside. Even if the rest of the mainland turns against us, having at least a few neutral parties who we can agree with could become invaluable. In our current state, I'm actually fairly certain that if we are capable of clearing out the leviathans, the only real threat to our existence are the elves. Perhaps it's because of their long lifespan, or some other reason unknown to us, but they wield such immense amounts of mana in their bodies that I can't gauge their actual danger level.

I'm certain that leviathans also have a decent amount of magic power inside themselves, but they're also beasts, and from what I've seen, they lack high intelligence. Perhaps if I could go to the mainland to observe the elves for a time, I'd have a better idea of how much of a threat they actually are, as I've only really seen a matriarch overwhelm a fort and kill hundreds of humans. They might just be glass cannons, but I really just have no way of knowing.

In any case, it's clear that Elora also read our note before it was sent, which I suppose shouldn't be very surprising, I know that she's essentially functioning as a spy for the elves. The reason it's clear that she read it is that she's now suddenly very intrigued in what we're doing, and how we plan to kill a leviathan. She's very diplomatic, but given her lack of curiosity before as compared to now, it's clear that something has changed.

I felt no real obligation to answer her questions directly. Instead, I gave vague answers to try to get her to reveal more information in the form of questions. I'd answer, but with only the bare minimum, such that she'd need to ask more direct questions if she wanted answers. This all was happening while I went to use tectonic sense in the exploratory tunnel to see if we'd potentially found anything yet. I used mental concentration on tectonic sense as an excuse for why my answers were short. She also seemed to choose this time to ask because it would put me under more mental stress, making it harder for me to lie.

I don't remember most of the back and forth discussion, but I did get a good glimpse into her mindset. Her questions essentially started centered around our large mana crystal, then moved towards the fluorite crystals once it was clear that the large mana crystal wasn't how we planned to try to kill leviathans. Ultimately, she got to the bottom of our plan to send an explosive barge out to sea.

Based on her response that essentially boiled down to 'Good luck with that', she doesn't seem to confident that will work. The more interesting part to me is that the order she pursued questions basically went from most to least magical. In short, the reason she might not have been spying as much as I'd expect is that her world view might be so drastically different from mine that she perceives all the work I'm doing as practically useless.

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I could see how that might be the case, though it's just a guess as to how she's thinking. Elves have immense magical power, and I could conceivably believe that they're capable of killing a leviathan, or at least the most powerful among them could do it. Comparatively, the other races use mundane tools to assist them in fighting, and are individually vastly weaker than the elves. Given that mindset, if you looked at what we were doing, we're essentially taking magic power, and converting it to do mundane things, essentially wasting it. From that perspective, the only major advancement we've done is turn mundane materials into a large mana crystal. I could see how from that point of view, we've done very little.

I also wouldn't be surprised to learn that, at some points in history, people tried using black powder barges to kill leviathans, and failed. That'd be unsurprising to me, as black powder isn't a high explosive. It doesn't actually detonate, it conflagrates. Further, water will dampen the effect of the powder drastically. To use black powder to kill something that size would be significantly more challenging. Not only will nitroglycerin work when wet, but it actually detonates, meaning the force shockwave from the blast will amplify as more goes off, and will deal significantly more damage. Whether it'll actually be enough, however, is something we'll have to wait to see.

In fact, I don't know if anyone has seen a high explosive blast on this world. Perhaps some magics exist that do it, but if that is the case, they probably wouldn't recognize it for what it is. If, and this is a big if, we manage to kill, or even just maim, a leviathan with this we might need to keep a closer eye on Elora. It's the sort of thing that could shift her world view enough that she might end up sounding alarm bells on the mainland.

On a more upbeat note, we did find a new pocket of mana crystals in the exploratory mine shaft. Which means every time they excavate a bubble and recover the crystals, I'm going to need to use tectonic sense again to see if there are other nearby bubbles, meaning I'll be here for a while. It's unfortunate that we found them now, rather than earlier, but mana crystals are mana crystals, and we have plenty of uses for them.

There were actually quite a few pockets of mana crystals in the deposit, and it took 37 days before we reached a dead end where I couldn't detect any new pockets from the existing ones. If we factor in supplementing growth with argon, we gathered about enough crystal material to make a 10-foot crystal. With extra crystal material available, I'd actually like to try to determine exactly what the solid crystal slag is comprised of. If we could determine that, we'd have made the first steps to being able to artificially reproduce mana crystals without needing to destroy existing crystals for material.

I've also received a few requests from other interested parties for uses for these crystals. The excavation team would like to have the two 2-foot crystals in the central area of the tunnel to be replaced with a singular larger crystal, which I think is reasonable and doable. There are some drawbacks to doing this that we need to mitigate, however. The first concern is if they mine into a natural fluorite deposit. Depending on the kind of fluorite present, having excess mana in the tunnels could be deadly. Our existing fluorite deposit has become completely unusable since we installed our 16-foot crystal due to the extra heat its generating due to the extra mana all over the island.

To mitigate that danger, we'll ensure that the crystal can easily be removed from where it's kept and moved out of the tunnel. It also shouldn't be too big, to mitigate the level of failure an exposed fluorite deposit would potentially cause. If push comes to shove, the crystal might end up being destroyed by bringing it outside, but ideally, we can use the mana draining poison to transport it to a safe storage facility underground elsewhere. I'm thinking we'll put a 5-foot crystal in the central area.

Tiberius has also made a request for one of the 2-foot crystals, which coincides well with replacing the ones in the tunnel currently. Once we have their replacement crystal for the tunnel, I'll probably grant his request. I do, however, want to oversee what he has planned, to make sure we aren't just wasting material.

Zeb would also like one of the 8-foot crystals from before made, even at the risk of it breaking in the near future. He made a good argument for the pace at which construction can be done in remote areas of the island with a semi-mobile large surface crystal. Even if it eventually is destroyed, the sheer amount of work done in that time, he argued, makes up for the loss of material. I agreed with his assessment, but also said that it's going to be the lowest of my priorities for the material, since we'll be cutting it close between the uses I've already agreed to. If we can figure out what they're made of, then wasting what we have will be fine.

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