After all the planning to have us close to the shoreline for this barge launch, it ended up being useless, as the barge was miles out before a leviathan bit into it. Another eel like leviathan fell victim this time, though the barge detonated in its mouth rather than throat this time. Given the potential for a large number of levels, we stationed a few hundred individuals around this time. At least they got to view the barge detonation first hand.

Many individuals from the city had started to show growing interest in what exactly the barges were doing. They had a general idea of what was happening, but just hearing a muffled explosion that you can't see was enough reason to spark their curiosity. The thing that has been troubling me somewhat is figuring out at what point the leviathans have actually been taken care of. I suppose once we send barges out and nothing happens, we can start to do smaller boat searches using viewing glass to try to peer into the water to look for them.

I'm less concerned about the bottom dwelling leviathans though. If a few clams or starfish are somewhat peacefully living on the bottom of the ocean, then so be it. If, after observation, they turn out to have some major negative effect on the environment, then we could always try to create a depth charge to drop on them. Though by then, we might have better technology to deal with them. I was planning on immediately continuing work on the paper mill, but Tiberius asked for some help with the shelled crystal research, so I'll be doing that for a little bit.

Tiberius was somewhat limited in his research by the need to wait for fluorite crystals to be grown so that he could record their data values in relation to the mana crystals that he would embed in them. Long story short, he'd used up the sample mana crystals I'd given him for collecting data, and presented the data to me while requesting that I grow him larger mana crystals to continue the research.

Before I agreed to that and given his propensity for creating dangerous situations for himself and others, I reviewed the data that he'd collected first. In many ways, the data was as I'd expected. Thicker sections of fluorite shielded the inner mana crystal more, allowing it get closer to the surface before breaking. There was still a small but measurable increase in the mass of the fluorite with a mana crystal versus a hollow one, even after accounting for the missing mass from the mana crystal itself. Due to there being too many variables between the thickness of fluorite and the amount of shielding that it provides to the internal mana crystal, it was inconclusive whether the thickness of the exterior shell had a positive or negative impact on that second order mass effect.

It seemed, from that data, that it probably would benefit us to try to increase the size of the mana crystals being used, and repeat the process. I had only grown him some small crystals before, for obvious reasons. So I spent 40 days growing him some new sample crystals, which ended up converting most of our available crystal material into a handful of 8 and 12 inch mana crystals. I ended up constructing a few more small crystal growth chambers to speed up future processes while I waited around for the slow process of dripping liquid crystalline material into each chamber. He got a few fluorite tests crystals ready in that time, but he'll be waiting for a while for some larger ones to be grown, so I should have a few months to work on the paper mill again.

I didn't have that long to continue my research on the black sludge recovery before the next barge, but I spent the 35 days testing different processes. What I found was that a multi-stage process using multiple different kinds of stages did a good job of getting the sludge to a very viscous, and ultimately flammable, resultant product. The first stage is a simple evaporator, designed to recover a large amount of the sodium hydroxide still left in the mixture.

Once the thick resin starts to form, a rotating scraper can be lowered into the evaporator to pull this resin material off the top and allow evaporation to easily continue. However, once the liquid boils down to about 40% of it's original volume, it starts to have issues with evaporation as it becomes more viscous. At this stage, I transfer it to a special evaporator with multiple nearly vertical plates. The plates are heated from the sides, and the sludge is poured continuously down the plates to evaporate liquids out from the thin film running down. After a few cycles, the sludge becomes so viscous that it has trouble in this stage, and moves on to the next one.

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For the last stage, the viscous sludge is added to a large spinning drum, which centrifugally separates out even more of the remaining liquids. By this point, it seems as though we've recovered most of the sodium hydroxide and dissolved sodium sulfate, and despite the impurities, it can be reintroduced into the original process, giving us a pretty effective recovery cycle. The remaining highly viscous sludge is very flammable, and as such, can be burned away alongside the resin like material we recovered earlier. That heat could be recaptured and used, but designing a whole process to do so takes a lot of time. Likewise, I'm sure that resin could find uses in future products. Someday, I would hope someone else will do so or maybe I'll come back and do it myself, but I have too many things I'd like to work on to spend time making this less wasteful.

This most recent barge nearly caused some real problems for us, though it ended up working out. This time, the barge almost completed its long turn and made it back to shore on one side of the island. After a few hours of slow progress, it had turned in a wide arc and nearly made it back when, less than a half-mile from shore, a crab claw snapped shut and blew the barge up. The claw was even more damaged than the first barge, due to the larger size of the newer barges.

The crab started to thrash, and it seemed like it was headed straight for us along the shoreline, though I expect it was just trying to get to shallower water for safety. In either case, before it got much closer to us, a large jawed fish leviathan briefly fought with it, killing it. This time, the few hundred of us observers ended up gaining quite a bit of experience. I myself gained a few levels, and most of the goblins said they maxed out their levels. Despite the risk, it was a treasure trove of experience for us.

<LAVA DEMON> Level: 58 HP: 5529/5529 MP: 2498/2498 Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation, Improved Dexterity, Heat Resistance, Partial Sleep Magic: Improved Stone Shaping, Tectonic Sense, Improved Earth Spike, Thermal Hands, Pulverize, Thermal Regulation

I wonder if, despite the immediate death of sea life in the nearby area around the leviathan, the reason we haven't noticed any real drop in sea life is potentially due to this effect. I don't know the lifecycle of the sea life around us, but if leveling perhaps equates somewhat to maturity, the mass death might also cause nearby fish to reach reproductive maturity, and spawn new fish in short fashion, allowing a rapid bounce back in the population. That's just a hypothesis, but maybe in the future we can create an aquarium and sea-life research facility to determine things like that.

I'm glad that I'm getting close to finishing the design for the new paper facility, as we've been continually ramping up nitroglycerin production. Our paper stockpile is due to run out in the next year or so, despite the old facility running full force. The biggest problem with the old facility is the way the paper is dried, which is the last part of the process that I'm working on designing over here. In the old facility, we're using hand meshes to create the sheets of paper. Here, I've been working on a continuous paper making machine.

I'm not quite satisfied with it yet, but I'm starting to get the process figured out. One of the difficult parts, that I waited 28 days to be produced, was a large mesh roll of copper that I could use as part of the process. There are a few problems that I've solved, and a few problems that I still need to solve to finish this process. The hardest part to design, and the part that I'm ultimately still working on to a degree, is accelerating the initial drying process. Heating the wet pulp doesn't actually help much initially. What I needed to do was actively pull the water out. To do that, I ended up settling on needing a large amount of vacuum suction to remove water from the pulp at various stages.

For now, I've been manually pulling the vacuum in testing to get the water out before moving the pulp into later stages of the process. I'll need to design a mechanical vacuum pump for the continuous process moving forward. From that stage, I've essentially started replicating some parts of our manual paper process, utilizing felt wicks to pull more paper out, then drying the felt again. Once the paper is mostly dry, we can heat the paper while we dry it further, then compress it down with high pressure to make the final paper product. Meaning the only problems I have yet to solve are the vacuum pumping, and laying out the whole thing as a continuous process, rather than the batch processing I've been doing in my test setup.

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