"I need to find a way to contain mana for longer," I muttered as I returned to the forge, and started working. Which meant that I needed more materials, which in turn required more time spent on mining and operating the blast furnace.
With my Quake Hammer, the actual mining didn't take too much time. Carrying the ore to the blast furnace and loading it, on the other hand, took much longer. "No, I need to automate things. I continued working on another steam engine.
This time, it was the improved version, with a separate condenser chamber, meaning the steam cooled down in a separate chamber. That way, the cylinder didn't have to heat up and cool down repeatedly. Therefore, not only did the power strokes move more regularly, but it was also more power efficient.
The trickier part was to connect the power arm to a set of gears and power shafts to convey the power into other materials. Originally, it was not that difficult. Just a thick fabric line would be enough. Unfortunately, here, the fabric didn't survive long under the constant corrosive effect.
"It looks like I have to forge a lot of gear," I said and began working. An hour later, I was looking at a brand-new steam engine, with multiple moving wheels, and gears to transfer power. Then, I started forging a conveyor belt. Unfortunately, I needed to make the moving parts out of thin metal plates rather than another simple fabric.
It was wasteful, but I didn't have any other options. Inventing new materials wasn't as easy without the skills helping me to skip some critical stages midway. A few tricky mechanical parts were difficult to work out without any rubber or plastic, but I managed to do it.
Barely. However, it was more or less the limits of what I could achieve mechanically without additional effort.
The ultimate setup was simple. I had connected the new steam engine to multiple gears, allowing it to take over three critical roles at the same time. Working the conveyor belt, which was connected to a large reservoir into which I piled the raw iron ore I mined. Pumping out the water from the mining pit to keep it easy. And, feeding the blast furnace with materials and bringing away the excess. Well, blast furnaces, as I had built two more to benefit from the automation, which allowed me to stockpile refined iron, just in case.
As for the old atmospheric steam engine, I moved it next to the forge and fashioned it into a simple crusher that would destroy insect shells. It had a main output line, which would channel most of the mana toward the forge so I could use it to reshape metal.
I tried to come up with a way to channel the excess tainted energy toward the secondary experimentation area, but I failed. While the metal contained the tainted energy much better than mana, it was still not enough for it to reach the target almost two hundred yards away.
I might have tried to figure out a method of somehow forcing the monsters to evolve into something more profitable, but I did not. It was just an experiment to understand the dungeon's secrets better, not to mention it was a good way to prepare for the fifth floor.
So, instead of creating a pipe System, I just created an inner cage to hold the foreign energy from the broken shells, which I could carry manually.
With that done, I started another set of experiments. A whole new set of containers, this time all made from the same alloy, but integrating hexagon shapes in different ways. Some, I etched the metal with hexagon shapes. Some, I created overlapping layers of thin containers with nothing but air in between.
As I worked, I periodically visited the cage to feed the monster with the tainted energy, watching it get more and more agitated. Since I expected it to transform into a giant insect, I even forged a new, reinforced cage.
Of the two experiments, the container one was the first to give a positive result.
The best performer was the one that I had shaped as a modified beehive, with the hexagon structure spreading not only as a layer but as a three-dimensional structure. It had outperformed any other container significantly, holding mana inside for more than a minute before it dissipated completely.
"I wonder why hexagons contain mana so much better," I thought to myself. Unfortunately, when it came to science, why was often far more difficult to discover than how. Repeated experiments could discover the latter, but the former required a much deeper theoretical approach.
And I lacked the information necessary for that.
In the end, I decided to take the beehive pattern as an interim success, and start working on a way to mass produce it. While experimenting, I basically etched every hexagonal pattern directly with mana, which allowed me to forge them perfectly.
Unfortunately, it was difficult to make anything truly large-scale using that method. I tried to simplify the design. In the end, I came up with the idea of casting two thin sheets of metal: one smooth and one with a beehive pattern. Then, I would layer them multiple times, and then cut the whole layered sheet into six pieces and weld it together as a hexagonal cylinder.
However, creating a setup for casting was a level of automation I wasn't ready for. Instead, I had forged one by hand, enough to confirm that the principle worked well enough.
"Mass production is not urgent," I muttered as I grabbed another container filled with tainted energy and rushed toward the captured insect. During the last blast, it started trying to get away, so I was hoping to trigger the next development.
It did, but to my surprise, it didn't transform into a giant one, but a flying one.
"Well, that's not good news," I said even as I watched the monster fly with surprising effectiveness. The biggest weakness of the ordinary monsters had been their mobility. However, their flying variant clearly didn't share the same flaw, which was not encouraging for the future.
Even I wasn't sure whether I could handle them if they collapsed around me like some kind of three-dimensional swarm. Not unless I had a better attack.
"Alright, creating a ranged mana attack is back on track," I said as I walked back to the forge.
Of course, this meant that I needed to start my containment experiments from the beginning, this time to find the best patterns to actually increase mana conductivity.
After all, I was still a Blacksmith, and making tools to enable ranged attacks first was much better than blindly practicing the same technique again and again.
Just like that, with the absence of Eleanor and Maria, I found myself locked in a routine for the next two days. I stayed in the dungeon and didn't go back to the town. Most of my time, I spent in my hidden base, alternating between trying to discover new variants of monsters and new materials, and restructuring the base, utilizing the wide availability of materials.
Though, several times, I went upstairs to bring ever-growing piles of monster shells. I had managed to figure out how to cut the shell with a mana attack directly, which allowed me to make almost a hundred gold with each trip. Three trips a day, and two days later, my account had almost reached eight hundred coins, a level of money I couldn't have imagined before.
However, making more money had been the least interesting part of my time.
Experimenting with monsters was far more interesting. I had discovered two new variants of the normal-sized creature, which included a faster melee variant, and an armored one; and three variants for the giant one, one with an even thicker shell, a ranged variant, and one that looked like a burrowing type.
And, while I was experimenting with that, I also discovered why the monsters had been gathered whenever parts of the dungeon had been destroyed. Whenever it was destroyed, the same tainted energy was free, though the amount was not enough to be noticed by my Meditation. The Observe caught it, but only barely.
While it was interesting, the emergence of the new monster types was dangerous and, therefore more important. The potential existence of a flying one was problematic enough, forcing me to make some significant modifications to my base. I had not only created a roof over the forge, but also turned it into a roof garden to dissuade any possible attackers.
The potential risk of the burrowers had been easier to handle. I had just added a thick metal floor to the base to make sure there wouldn't be any nasty surprises if the dungeon started to have more monsters.
The trick with the lure potion had been dangerous enough, I didn't believe that it was the only way people discovered to sabotage dungeons, not even for a second. While I didn't like the general attitude of this new world when it came to research and discovery, not for a moment did I believe that the same negligence applied to dungeons.
Dungeons had military implications with an immediate return, and no research that offered short-term improvements to the military had funding troubles. I had no doubt that the new research institutes I had been applying to — unsuccessfully — were focusing more on that than anything else.
However, while redesigning the base and experimenting with the monsters had taken a lot of time, it wasn't the end of my research. I had also experimented with metals, which gave me an iron-silver alloy that was particularly good at conducting mana.
After several more experiments, I was able to discover that while hexagons were good at capturing mana, triangles were good at directing.
All that remained was to weaponize it.