I had hoped we'd have enough cryogenic fluid stockpiled to go do another round of blasting, but we were still a little ways from having a viable amount. So, I worked on some of the other projects while I waited. I took four days going through the 44 samples of stones collected from around the island to pick out the best ones for making the casing bottoms for our shells. In that time I narrowed it down to four choices, then had the sample collector guide me to where the samples were taken from, with each site taking an additional day to ensure that I had a good grasp of the stone deposits.

After seeing all four, I determined that two of them were far worse than the other half. They were in remote areas that would take a lot of infrastructure or labor to be made viable. If they were our only options, I'd be hard pressed to convince Zeb that it'd be worth the effort to upgrade our artillery if getting to those deposits was a requirement.

The other two, however, were viable, with one being truly standout in ease of access. This particular layer of rock was found down the first mining tunnel, about two-thirds of the way to the surface. So, I gathered a few larger samples of the stone to use for testing and development. At times like this, it'd actually be more beneficial if we had dwarven stonecutting magic rather than stoneshaping, since the output blocks would be uniform with minimal effort. As it stands, I'll have to make any machine have a higher tolerance for error for the splitting of stones into appropriate sizes.

After twenty days of testing, I've come to some annoying conclusions. In practice, this is going to require more laborers than I thought. In essence, we're going to have to cut these stones in a similar manner to how the quartz cutting works. We simply lack enough electronic or mechanical controls to allow automatic cutting of the stone to the right size, since the stone coming in can be too irregular and occasionally fails. The good news is that it can still be done without stoneshapers needing to do all the steps.

Large blocks come in, they're cut down to appropriately sized squares, and finally cut into discs to be sent out. Considering how much I want to be made, we'll need dozens of machines for cutting in a building meant to once again protect the operators, like the quartz cutting building. Finally, we'll probably need a dedicated repair team meant to fix and maintain the machines, given the abrasive nature of the work.

I think that most of the facility should be straightforward from existing designs. While I plan on having the military construction corp help build out the facility, I'm going to ask Zeb if he can help with schematic design and lend the mechanics team for a week or so to help get the machines set up once the main building is done. We should be getting pretty close to having enough materials for a second round of blasting at the fluorite mine now as well. These machines all require a power source, and that power source is usually mana engines, which in turn means we need more fluorite. Hopefully after a few more cycles of blasting, the heat will come down enough to let others work in the mine and my time will be freed up again.

The second round of fluorite blasting didn't quite go as smoothly as the first. While I was checking everything as I made my way in after we blasted out the area, the rod I was using to make sure the ceiling was secure hit some loose rock and caused a partial cave-in. A decent chunk of the ceiling in the fluorite bearing area collapsed. While I was safe, and the rock does bear fluorite, the increased surface area of this extra large mass of rubble has resulted in the mine being exceptionally hot again, meaning the amount I can actually harvest in one go will be slowed for a while.

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Looking at it from another perspective, however, it means that there is a larger amount of fluorite to harvest in total from this blast. I'll have to be quite careful though, since the collapse has made it impossible to check further in for any stability, so I'll also have to periodically waste a harvesting cycle to re-check the walls and ceiling for loose rocks.

For the first fifteen days, I was only pulling out about 2 tons of rock a day due to the unbearable heat. In the meantime, I was steadily making my way through the list of more important information to copy down. Some items on that list are a lot more complicated to put to paper than others. The periodic table is a pretty information-dense piece of visual aid. By comparison, trying to write out various aspects of algebra takes a long time across multiple pages.

It's also exceptionally mentally draining trying to make sure I don't forget anything important to an entire field of mathematics. As a consequence, I've taken a bit of a shortcut that I can perhaps resolve in the future. I haven't actually be writing out any of the complicated proofs for any of it. I should, obviously, do so at some point, but that takes a lot of time and the list of things I want to write down is very long.

For the last eight days or so, I've been trying to work out a design for a depth charge that would be capable of dealing with the leviathans deep underwater around our island. After finishing writing down a few more high priority theories, I had gone back to the city to restock on food. While there, I decided to check in with both fisherdemons and some of the military personnel as to how things with the leviathans are going.

While they don't seem to be directly harmful to us, they present a problem currently and moving forward. We've had plenty of time to observe them, and they do eat an inordinate amount of food. The clam-like leviathans are spread out with quite a large amount of space between them and wherever they are settled, there is very little other life about. They don't seem to be toxic or attacking anything, so I presume they're filter feeding and eating almost all of the bottom of the food chain in their areas.

That means that no food chain can exist above them, meaning less total area for fish to survive that we can later catch. The problem gets worse when you consider two types of bottom feeding leviathans that are slowly moving about in our territory. One kind is a sea-star like creature which I'm very concerned about. If they work like sea-stars from earth, it'll be exceptionally hard to kill them. The other kind is a slug like creature that I'm a little less worried about being able to kill. Neither seems to be particularly aggressive, but we also haven't provoked them, so we don't know what they're capable of.

The bottom feeding leviathans are also slowly eating up the biological waste and carcasses, resulting in less bio-available material in the ecosystem. In short, we need to start dealing with these creatures or else our food supply will eventually dwindle away. The clams are the first target, since they don't move as much as the others. They'll require a significant blast to kill, probably quite a bit bigger than the 50 tons we were using previously, and it'll require an entirely new delivery device.

Unlike previously, however, we can likely haul the device with our new ship without worrying about any major surface leviathan attacking it. So all we really need is a way to haul the device up to the clam, then safely detonate it once the ship is far enough away. I have a few designs that I've sketched out for a tow-able bomb so that I'll be ready to start making prototypes whenever I get a good opportunity to do so.

I am somewhat concerned in general though, since the clams are absolutely massive, measuring hundreds of feet across, with massive amounts of water being filter fed at a time. Their shells are exceptionally thick too, making the problem potentially even harder to deal with. We'll have to see how a trial run goes, and hope that it doesn't cause cascading problems. The good news will hopefully be that each leviathan clam should provide us with thousands of tons of calcium carbonate in the form of their shells, if we can figure out a way to recover them.

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