I had quite a bit of time to burn until we were going to send out the next barge. We have twice as much production as the last time, but we're also increasing the total payload on the barge. I'd estimated it'd take about five months to produce all the dynamite we'd use for the next barge. I had side projects to complete in the meantime, so I returned to work on those for some time while I waited.

The first containers for transporting mana crystals and mana poison were completed, but since it's springtime, there aren't any of the mana poison plants to harvest, so that project is on hold until mid-summer. Though they're still working on making the larger mana crystal transport container. Instead, I focused my time on completing the floatation separator process for growing more mana crystals.

Working on the floatation separator process ended up being far worse than I'd expected. I had thought I was nearly done, so I was very disappointed when I saw how impure my resultant material was. I spent four days initially setting up a single separation process, and things had looked relatively good. I took some of the material to combine with argon in a small crystal growth chamber to see if things were working as intended.

What I received instead was a very impure mana crystal. Inside, I could see the imperfections in the crystal, and the material itself was very cloudy, as compared to the normal transparent-blue tinge. When I tried to drain a little mana from it, the crystal simply broke apart, and that was the end of that. So, the next thing I tried was doing multiple floatation separation cycles. That resulted in a slightly less cloudy crystal, but it was still overly fragile, and broke apart.

After 84 days of tinkering and testing, I did find a way to make it pure enough that it seemed to be identical to the leftover material we were using before. The start of the process was the same, but after the first floatation separation, I had to add on quite a few steps. It'd go through two more floatation separations after the first, then a second acid wash cycle, followed by another two floatation separations. Then, as a final step, when a decent bulk of material is recovered, someone has to use stoneshaping on the material on top of a vibrating plate to try to pull out any minute particles of rock left inside.

The bulk of the material doesn't react to stoneshaping, but the tiny particles do. By having the vibrating plate involved, it allows those ultra-fine particles enough energy to not get stuck onto the remaining material as the magic attempts to move them. I tried repeatedly to not have a magic step involved, but ultimately, it's the only way I could come up with to purify the material to the degree necessary on a short time span. I'm sure there is some chemical out there that could selectively dissolve only the remaining particulate matter and leave our mystery material behind, but I don't really have the time to sit and try to discover that.

It's one of the many things that I hope to stick someone else on researching when I finally get around to having an academy of sciences built. Since most of the steps are mundane already, however, I had a stockpile area built to store the almost finished product that just needs to be stoneshaped to be completed. Right now, we still have an excess of fish fats that we can use for the separation process, but as production of explosives ramps up, we'll probably have to reduce the amount of this material that we process. It's a true guns or butter economic problem.

We don't really have spare stoneshaping demons to mine the material out right now, so the whole project, while useful for the future, is basically just going to sit for a bit of time. I'll talk with Zeb about the idea of changing over the manual stone mining that we do to get new stoneshaping goblins. Instead, I'd like to have them excavating some of this rock instead, but I'm not going to hold my breath on that. The mana crystal deposits are in fairly inconvenient locations, meaning a lot of work time is wasted just getting to the worksite. Though if mana crystals end up in high demand again, then he'll probably acquiesce.

We also have had four new eagles show up. Three seemed like they were juveniles, and were happy to settle along the lower rung of pre-made nests at the upper edges of the mountain. One, however, required us to make a second attempt at relocation. We made some modifications to the process based on what we had learned last time, as an attempt at preventing brain damage. In essence, we allowed the eagle to regain consciousness after clipping it's wings.

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Transporting it up the mountain was much more difficult as a result, but we had the eagle sedated still with a lower dosage of nitrous oxide mixed with oxygen. The eagle was bound, and a blackout hood was placed over it's head to try to keep it more calm. There were only a few situations where it started to struggle heavily which required us to up the dosage of nitrous for a short while to temporarily knock the eagle back out.

After behaving oddly for the first two days after moving it up the mountain, this one seems to have settled into a more normal behavior pattern. If there was any brain damage, it seems minimal compared to the previous eagle we transported this way.

Talking with Zeb about the matter went about as I expected. We still have a bit of raw material leftover from before, and we'd need the argon to process it anyway. While we do produce a decent amount of argon each year, it gets consumed much faster than production, so we can simply stockpile it for some time and use it when the time comes. We had some other discussions related to the leviathans, and what we're going to do moving forward.

We only had one new leviathan body part wash up along the island in the last three months, meaning they've probably settled into a stable ecosystem configuration. That doesn't mean there isn't conflict though, as we still see fights break out every so often. It just means that those fights likely aren't lethal. While the population has gotten used to the situation, it doesn't mean they're comfortable with it. While we haven't seen any leviathans actually attack towards the land, it's still gives the feeling of living in a cage surrounded by predators.

My next goal is to start testing the dynamite storage to determine how safe it is. It'll probably end up setting us back a few months of nitroglycerin production to do so, but having a good sense of how much dynamite we can safely store in a set area is better for us long term.

I ended up literally blowing through the three months of dynamite production we'd had doing explosive testing. I did three large scale tests after doing a few dozen small ones to get a good feel for exactly what we were dealing with. In short, I was correct that the initial planned storage was being underutilized. I detonated one of the silos as a large scale test, overfilled with dynamite, and it didn't set off any nearby samples of dynamite in other silos, or even in closer haphazard silos I'd built for testing.

I also came up with added design to further help with safe storage. After coming up with the new designs, I had a construction team help me with upgrading the whole facility. It's now much closer to a properly designed facility. To prevent sparking, a few inches of wood lines the inside of each explosive silo. There is then a one-foot thick wall of stoneshaped stone, then a foot of gravel and wood pulp, then a second wall of thick stone. Above each silo, we've also built close walled wooden buildings to further prevent any accidental interactions with the environment. They're still meant to direct their blast upwards, but the extra wood pulp and gravel barrier shock absorbs much better than gravel alone, transferring far less energy into the nearby ground.

Previously, the facility was 25 silos, in a five by five grid. Now, between each silo, another one has been built, bringing the total up to 81 silos in a nine by nine grid. Each silo, by my estimates and testing, should safely store about 10 tons of explosives. Far more than the 1.5 tons I'd initially estimated. Meaning the whole facility can store just over 800 tons of explosives, rather than the 37.5 tons it could before. To further help with dampening and prevent cascading failures, we've also dug a grid of trenches between the silos, six feet wide, and slightly deeper than the silos. These are also filled with wood pulp and gravel to prevent ground shockwaves from travelling between silos.

All in all, we ended up spending 95 days working on the new storage facility. Just before we finished working, the newest set of production lines in the nitroglycerin facility also finished construction. Meaning we're only about 2 months from the next barge going out. Right now, producing 50 tons of dynamite takes about three months. The construction teams and mechanical team are going to continue expanding out the nitroglycerin production lines until we either reach the point where we can't make anymore, or the leviathans are gone. During this last construction cycle, they built out the glycerin facility to be able handle the estimated maximum production of fish fats we could gather. During the next cycle, they'll be upgrading the sodium hydroxide production to also provide more than we'll need going forward.

After that, they'll be building out the sulfuric/nitric acid production facility and nitroglycerin facility a handful of production lines at a time. We're somewhat forced to do it this way, rather than build just one large line, because we're limited by the maximum production our largest mana engines can handle individually. This also helps us ramp production up over time, rather than waiting a long time until all of it is done.

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