1.1.17 – Down to the Wire

It was one of the better winters I had experienced since coming to this world. We had enough food, the room was warm, and I had made progress learning magic and taken baby steps towards making a railgun, or more accurately a gauss rifle.

I could see the last of the winter snow falling off the trees from the room’s window while Wyl was snoring away. It had been quieter since Gal left but it seemed like Wyl was training to take his place. We had not had any new children join us in a while. While it seemed like the war intensified, news was it was more frequent probing attacks and more frequent attempts at ambushing the scouts. It had not translated to any large scale skirmishes yet so there were more resources used but less fatalities.

I still had another year or two before another Royal Inspector came to the orphanage. I was torn between making progress with my gauss rifle research and experimentation or trying to progress my core so that I had the strength to leave the orphanage if I had to, but ultimately chose the route that worried Marta less.

The list that old Garrick gave me was useful. I was able to secure additional reagents, herbs, and funguses that tend to appear during the winter. Apparently the prices tend to be a little higher not due to scarcity, but due to how hard it was to look for them in the snow.

I had a little advantage in that department as it seemed like magical plants had higher bioelectrical signatures. I still had to get within a 15 – 20 foot range to spot them but I could spot them through even a few feet of snow.

I had also hunted some boars and the occasional orange beast that wandered closer to the edge of the forest. One was a large bird of prey and the other was some badger looking mammal I could not really identify. Both had been hunting their own prey when they became the hunted.

My hunting efficiency had gone up a lot since upgrading Spark to Lighting Bolt. Having a ranged spell made it a lot easier to take down the targets from afar. That also meant no more jumping from trees for the boars, and adding deer to my prey list as well.

All the hunting and foraging for magical plants had allowed me to push my Electro Perception to the max level of Tier 1. Unfortunately, I had no inspiration nor did the Fundamentals of Spellcraft book provide any examples of how to upgrade a sensory spell to the next tier. I had maxed out my Stage Level as well for my Orange core but the progress towards the next stage had slowed to a crawl without actively hunting Orange cored beasts.

I mentally pulled on the Weave to bring up my status window.

I looked at that barely 500 exp gap between the current level and the next Core Stage up. It would have been trivial if my Lightning Bolt went up a level, or if my Lightning Infusion had leveled another two more levels. However, it seemed that if I did not push the spell to the extreme or creatively, it would take a lot of repetition just to level up the spell a single level.

Now I know how most people without an innate understanding for their element felt when they progressed at this pace. I was half contemplating risking Marta’s wrath to look for the Glimmerwasps again but a promise was a promise.

Also as I expected, the capacity requirement for the next stage was five times the requirement for a single level at Orange. No wonder most commoners stay at Orange or Yellow their whole lives. If they did not have formal training, the simple Tier 1 cantrips at low levels would at most get them through Red and early levels of Orange.

I dismissed the status window and got out of bed. I could hear Marta preparing breakfast downstairs with the others. I had a long day ahead of me as I finally had enough materials to proceed to the next part of the experiments.

I had decided at the start of winter that it was more practical to start with a smaller scale gauss rifle. While some of the physics were different, the challenge with energy density was similar, but on a much smaller scale.

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While copper wire was a common commodity a person could buy from the hardware store in the neighborhood block, it was non-existent in this world. Wires of precious metals were still used but only in jewelry. I managed to get old Garrick to procure a wire drawing tool that jewelers used for their craft.

The copper rods that I had Branwen craft for me were then pulled manually by myself through the wire drawing tool through holes of various sizes. I had to hammer the ends of the rods to taper them and make them smaller to fit through the first hole. The rod would get thinner and longer after I pulled it through with pliers. I had to repeat the process for each hole, reducing the diameter and lengthening the rod after each draw, eventually thinning down to the diameter I needed.

The downside with this process was that after each draw, the copper gets harder and more brittle. Normally the artisan would heat it with a blow torch or in this world, jewelers usually had a fire or metal affinity to anneal the copper, making it softer before the next pass. I had to heat up the copper by conducting a current through it using my Lightning Infusion spell.

That process itself was time consuming, and between searching for magical herbs and hunting for beasts, it took the entire winter to draw the amount of copper wires I needed to make a solenoid of the size needed for an initial prototype.