Chapter 20: [Vol-1] Ch.20 A New Material

When I wake up, I go and check the cavern again today. Still nothing so far. I munch on more of the dried imp that I have while I mark another tally mark on the wall to track days since the goblin arrived here. If he doesn't show up in the next week or so, I'm going to run out of food. Well, yesterday I decided that I'd actually do some analysis on stat blocks. I go over to my shelf, and pull the common imp slab down.

I had only written what I remembered of my level 0 and level 100 stats down. Thankfully the math right now is easy. I gained 200 hp and 20 mp over those 100 levels. I take this info down. I also divide it out and put it into a per level stat. 2hp/lvl and 0.2mp/lvl. As far as I can remember on any check, it's seemed to be linear. Just in case though, I get another tablet out, and make notes to check this hypothesis in the future if I ever get the chance. I'd need test subjects though... and they'd need to be able to communicate as well. Well, it's a good thing I'm writing this down somewhere then, since that'll likely be a long time in the future.

I already did a lot of simple arithmetic for estimating how much hp I keep when I prestige, and as I pour through all the data I've collected, it seems to hold that I keep 5% of my gained hp. I still am having issues with evaluation of mana. Basically, whatever mana affinity is, it makes it hard to evaluate how much I'm keeping between prestige. I can get the jist of how much mana I've been gaining per level, and I note that down, but the actual value is obscured through the extra gains from mana affinity. Well, as long as I note all these values down in my notes, if I get the chance in the future to compare the data with a regular imp, that should shed light on it.

I'm only about halfway through my day so far, and I've done all the evaluation and note taking I plan to for now with my data. I've noted all the hp and mp gains per level, and taken some notes on hypothesis for how prestige works overall. After checking the cavern and seeing it empty again, I've got to decide what to do to pass the time until the goblin shows up again.

I sit for a while and think about things I could try to do. Most of the things I come up with are a little too risky given the likelihood of the goblin arriving at any time. I ultimately settle on experimentation with rock. Right now, I know that I can compress the rock by removing space within it, but I wonder if I can do anything else, like removal of impurities.

I take a small amount of stone from a wall in the entryway to test with. The stone in its current form is mostly a black igneous rock with speckling. Before I reformed the rock without any air pockets in it, making it more solid overall. This time though, my goal is to separate out the different speckling of colors. Unfortunately, the initial try of trying to only focus on the particular different colors and pull them out doesn't work very well. In short, since all of it is considered stone, I can only really specify location as a format for removal, not different materials within it. I think the reason I could remove the gas and compress the stone before was because I can't manipulate the gas, so by just compressing all the stone, I removed the gas.

That is okay though, I've got some time on hand until the goblin shows up, so a labor intensive process doesn't bother me that much. So I start going piece by piece, removing little bits of different color minerals from the stone, and putting them in a pile on one side of my desk, and then carving off bigger sheets of the baseline material, forming a second pile.

It's very slow going though. I took a 1 foot cube, and by the time I am ready to go to sleep, I've only gotten through a quarter of it. With a very small pile of a lighter color material and a larger pile of the blackish material. I once again check the cavern for any signs of the goblin before I go to sleep.

---

When I wake up, I once again check the cavern. Spotting nothing, I eat some food, then continue manual separation of the rock sample. Every couple of hours, I stop to check the cavern, and find nothing. I'm starting to wonder if the goblin won't be coming back any time soon. In a few days I'll run out of imp meat if he doesn't, and I'll need to go out and get more food. For now though, I'll just sit in here and shave away at rock.

By the end of the day today, I'm almost three quarters of the way through the separation process. Tomorrow I'll attempt to reform all the small bits of rock back into a solid rock of a more pure material. Tonight though, I need sleep.

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Nothing in the morning again today, so I continue my separation process, and by halfway through the day, I'm finally done. I have a small pile of lighter material, and a larger pile of the darker material. I use stone shaping to form each into a solid cube of their own. The larger one is quite a bit smaller than the original cube thanks to me removing all the air, and I still notice some small impurities within it, but overall it's much more uniform than before. The small cube is about an inch on each side, and is a very light color, but it too has some small dark spots within it.

The next step is comparing the material properties of each cube. The darker cube is pretty similar to the original material when in its compressed form. I can't really notice any initial differences between the two. I'd have to do extensive detailed tests on it to see if it has better tensile or compressive strengths. Setting that cube aside, I begin investigating the lighter colored cube. It's actually a little lighter in weight than I'd expected. It also seems to be a little physically harder than the darker material, as its corners are capable of scratching the desk when I run a corner across it. So it's lighter weight, and harder.

I take a portion from the bigger cube, of equal size to the small cube, and then form it into a somewhat thin rod, and repeat for the light colored material. Then, I attempt to snap each. The darker colored rod is quite a bit easier to snap than the light colored one. I also note that when the dark colored rod breaks, some dust actually settles out between the two halves, but the light colored rod seems to have formed a clean break.

These results annoy me slightly. After all, I basically have found out that I can make a reasonably better stone material than I currently have. Being both lighter, and more durable, but it is pretty labor intensive for me to make currently. A cubic inch of the material took me two days to filter from a cubic foot of rock. I guess I'll have to reserve its use for things that need it. At some point maybe my weapon and buckler would be good to have made out of it. Each would be weeks of work to make though. I'll put separations on the backburner as an activity for the time being. If I ever need a downtime activity, then I can work on it, since it really doesn't take much brain power to actually do.

I'm only a little past halfway done with today, so I decide to go to my storeroom, and haul some buckets. First, buckets to put in the slaughterhouse area. I forgot to actually place the buckets in the floor for blood collecting. Next, I get two more empty buckets and put them in my room, and then grab a bucket with the compresses marbles from digging. Until the goblin shows up, I'm just going to manually separate off any of the light colored material from the marble surface, and put it in one empty bucket, and throw the marred marble in the other empty bucket. While I know I'm not getting all the light colored material from the marble, it's a bit faster than doing a full separation.

By the end of the day, I'm only about a fifth of the way through the marble bucket, and I only have a small pile of the light material in the bottom of the bucket for light material, but that's fine by me, since I know this is going to be a long process. For today though, I've done enough. Verifying that the cavern is still empty, I go to bed.

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