1.1.21 – Can’t Hold It

The air was cool and dry, the last of the water in the Weeping Grotto had finally been drained out. It had taken me several trips but I had managed to move most of my materials and equipment from the shoddy tool shed at the back of the orphanage here. I had even brought some wooden planks and nails to assemble a makeshift table.

The opening in the roof provided sufficient light during the daytime, and also created a slight upward draft that drew fresh air in gradually from the cave opening. The cave was surprisingly pleasant if you ignored the roots of trees sticking out from the walls. A wrapped bundle of deliciousness was also placed on my work table alongside the rest of my tools.

I had learnt my lesson of missing lunch every time I ventured into the Greywoods. Now that I was not on the move and had a place to actually settle down, Marta was kind enough to prepare what passed for a sandwich in this world for me to bring along. She was able to buy flour to make fresh bread now that the financial situation of the orphanage had improved.

I had given her the idea to get Garrick to help sell some soap through the right channels to the baroness. It had apparently been a hit, but I had told Marta to keep the quantities supplied low to keep the prices high. The lack of progress in chemistry and basic physics in this world was not really a surprise, given that they had magic and the majority of the research had been focused there. Even excluding Ironhold who was currently waging war against the entire west continent, there would always be small skirmishes and disagreement between neighboring countries. This led the focus of magic to revolve around military applications, rather than improving day to day lives of the commoners.

I now had all the materials I needed, or at least I thought I did, to move on to the next part of my experiment. I needed to create a storage device that could release a high amount of lightning mana to feed the enchantment that powered the coils.

It had taken me some time but I had inscribed storage runes on several copper plates and arranged them in parallel without touching each other. It was a fusion of modern physics and magical enchantment, which I was not sure would completely work.

The idea was to use several parallel plates to act as capacitors, supported additionally by storage runes to hold the lightning mana. The pair of plates were connected in parallel to allow for simultaneous discharge.

Rather than having a single Intake Rune for the entire assembly, I had inscribed intake runes for every single pair so that I could charge the capacitors faster when my Lightning Infusion allowed for it.

Assembling this had taken more time than I had expected, not because of the inscribing or the copper plates. It was actually the soldering. Discharging as much lightning using Lightning Bolt when I was trying to kill my target was easy enough. Having the precise control to repurpose my lightning as an arc welder was another story. If not for my innate lightning resistance, I would have run out of fingers to practice by burning the tips off early on.

I casted Electro Perception and kept it on as I began charging the mini capacitor banks with Lightning Infusion. I kept the feed slow and steady initially and only increased the output slowly when it was stable. I could see the glow of lightning energy between the plates increase in intensity. I had to estimate the maximum capacity using the intensity of the glow in my vision and the resistance I was feeling when pushing through with Lightning Infusion.

My core was about halfway empty when the capacitor was full, from what I estimated. That would definitely pack a punch if released all at once. I held my breath as I cut off my infusion. “Holy shit, it’s actually working!” I couldn’t help but mutter.

I probably spoke too soon as I watched the glow start to recede slowly. It was not a sudden drain but a slow leak. I had missed the leakage from the sides of the plate due to the intensity of the glow coming from the plates themselves when I was charging it. But now that I knew there was a leak, I could see faint discharge to the ambient air between the plates.

While the principles of physics carried over, I was not really dealing with pure electricity in this case. The enchantments had allowed the simple capacitor to hold on to more energy than what was possible back on Earth, but it had also created complications that I did not account for.

While I could theoretically charge it to the maximum capacity and quickly fire it, it would not be practical in combat. I could deal with a slower rate of leakage that might require me to charge the battery every few days. The current rate of leakage would probably empty the battery in half an hour or so.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

While proper gemstones specialized to hold lightning mana could potentially solve this, I did not have nearly enough coin to even afford a small one, let alone one large enough for my needs. It was back to the drawing board for me in this case.

Another good thing about having a large cavern floor made of soil was that I could use it as a drawing board. Paper was too expensive in this world for me to waste it sketching, and I did not have chalk and a white board. I was sure the academies would fashion something that was more viable as a teaching tool but that was not something I had access to at the moment.

I had drawn up several versions to try and solve my leakage problem but my limited knowledge of enchantment runes was holding me back. In the end, the simplest solution I had thought of was to find insulating material to wrap the capacitor, and only limit the leakage through the intake port.