Being back on Kembora after having been gone for a while felt a little odd. There was a familiarity to it, but some things had changed. More buildings, more government, more individuals doing jobs. There was also the general oddity of having gotten used to being on the mainland where land stretches to the horizon in places, where as being on an island, its ocean on every horizon.

The larger our country becomes, the lower my impact becomes on it. On one hand, that's a good thing. It means its outgrowing its reliance on any one person. Take the train that I just spent about two years working on. To some degree, its sort of a natural extension of the mana engines I already introduced. I also made my initial drafts for a train well before I worked on it recently. It might have taken a few decades, but something similar would probably have come along if I had done nothing. The vacuum tubes we use in our radios are actually probably more impactful if people can figure out how to use them more readily, since that's an easy hopping off basis for electronics.

With this shift, the need for us to adapt to a more renewable and extensive academic system is more important than ever. There are so many different technologies I've introduced that can be improved on steadily with fairly straightforward research, as well as logical extensions and combinations of those same technologies into new ones, that its less of a matter of having the knowledge already, and more of an issue of having the personnel with the necessary training to do the work. I spent all that time writing down what information I remembered, though the list is a long ways from being completed. Having more people to work on various topics and ideas, and can adapt and understand the application, would exponentially help us, and remove the single point of failure that is myself.

I've said it before, but most of my technologies I've introduced are fairly rudimentary versions of what they could become. Some have been refined a little by myself or, very occasionally, someone else, but mostly we're just focusing on mass producing what I'd consider to be shabby replicas. Worse, if we're not doing those improvements ourselves, others will take those designs, copy them, and then improve on the design themselves, resulting in us falling behind.

That's why I'm glad that we're nearing the installation of the mana crystal on the academy city's island. I should stop calling it the second island and academy city, and for that matter, I should really use proper names for more things since we decided on them. It just feels natural to call them what I called them for so long that it takes actual effort to correct myself. The crystal is going to be installed on the island of Drazvok in the city of Vekmora sometime in the first few days of the last month of the year.

If things seem calm for that month, we'll send work to Kao that we're ready to have some dwarven construction help building out the rest of the island. Our hope is that after a year, we'll have enough things built and functional to start operating the academy. We should know if we'll be able to meet the deadline by the halfway point of that year. If we can, Kao will make an announcement to the dwarves to collect individuals who are interested in participating in the academy.

I'm going to use the available time to ensure that everything related to the function and operation of the academy is in order. That means I'll be reviewing construction plans and the charter. There are a few changes I'm sure I'll want to make to the generalized lab spaces based on things I've discovered or optimizations I've made to existing processes. I won't, however, be reviewing non-academy related things on the island. An academy requires a supporting population to produce food and goods, and that isn't my job to set up. I just need to indicate how much of what I need.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Since the idea for moving the new crystal in an unshielded manner was based on an untested theory about how mana operates, I was still quite nervous for the entire process, as well as for the whole month after it was installed. It's now five days into the new year, and we just sent out the ship to inform Kao that we believe the island is ready to start setting up the academy.

While there were quite a few unexpected effects, there wasn't any issue with new leviathans which was my main fear. Some of the eagles from Kembora chose to move to Drazvok, which we had anticipated might happen. A feeding area was set up there preemptively, though the fish for it was shipped in, rather than caught on the island itself.

Since the process of making and moving a mana crystal is so uncommon, I made sure we had manascopes all over the place making regular measurements on both islands. This yielded quite a bit of information. While the areas of the highest absolute mana density were still in the immediate surroundings of the mana crystals, the contour lines of mana density sort of smeared towards the other crystal.

Even when the second crystal was installed all the way in Drazvok, the mana balance on Kembora was shifted. Before, the contour lines on Kembora were basically just concentric circles centered on the mana crystal in Kembora City. Now, those same circles have turned into ovals that are aimed towards Drazvok. While some areas have higher mana, others have lower. Overall on Kembora, the total amount of mana is actually higher, since the ovals are directed over land, where as a lot of the previous circular contour lines concentrated mana over the ocean.

There is a very interesting place between the two crystals as well. There is a very unstable zone where mana fluctuates wildly within a circular area about 100 feet across. The mana levels there go up and down wildly and seemingly at random, but with a small amount of predictability based on the angle the suns are in the sky. Sometimes the mana there is higher than ambient, and other times it's far below. My theory is that, since mana seems to come from the suns, the mana particles are attracted to both crystals and tiny perturbations in the amount of attraction to one crystal versus the other in this reason lead to streams of the particles going towards one crystal or the other. The area just around this region is higher than normal mana, providing further evidence.

Now, the area between the two islands has higher mana, with the density map around the two islands looking like a figure eight. The lowest mana areas are off either end of the eight, with a much smoother transition and higher minimum along the long edge between the two islands. Based on what data I could collect, I don't think the two separate crystals had any sort of multiplicative effect on the amount of overall mana density. They instead appear to simply be additive. That said, since more of the high density areas on Kembora now fall over land, there is more usable mana. Unfortunately, however, we installed the crystal on Drazvok on the side of the island facing Kembora, meaning the far side of the island, while still having elevated levels, has lower levels than anticipated.

Just like with Kembora, the windward side of the island gets significantly more rain than the rest of the island, and that side happens to face Kembora. That means it has most of the freshwater, which feeds the bathhouse the crystal is stored in. If we wanted to move it to the far side of Drazvok, it'd take a lot of work to redirect the water there. In all likelihood, that effort would be better spent just getting the next island ready and installing a crystal there, which would likely even out the mana density.

It isn't a problem for us now, nor will it be a problem for the near future, so we'll leave it be. We've got a lot of work to do to start setting up the academy after all, and splitting hairs over something like this is kind of pointless. I'm eagerly looking forward to getting started on the project as a whole. I'm looking forward to it as something of a transition point in my life, where I'm hopefully freed from engaging in all the hands on stuff in foreign lands. I've lived on this planet for over five decades now, and honestly, I'm ready for some peace. I don't want to jinx it though, since we're actually far enough along that it wouldn't be unusual for another demon lord to attack soon.

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.