Chapter 76: Chapter 75 – Moving forward.

Roland was sitting with a cup of tea in his hand. It looked like he was in a small dim-lit room. He was taking a sip of some kind of black tea that was still giving out steam.

There was only one small table, one chair, and a small single-person bed squeezed inside of here. This made the young man recall some of the old dorm rooms that he used to stay in back in another life. That time he used to hate it now it might have been something that he looked back to fondly. It was a simpler time, no monsters or evil cults were lurking in the darkness to get him back in those days.

On the small table lay a box, a music box to be exact. It wasn’t exactly in working order any more as the springs and screws that kept it in place were laid out on the table. This was the very same item that he had bought at the auction house.

He was now examining it after getting a place to stay for the night. The inns in the city were still jam packet but the adventurers still evaded the ones that cost a bit more. They would rather spend the night in the stables while spending the rest on food and alcohol. Then the following day they could spend the rest on health potions for the next expedition into the dungeon.

This cycle continued till the adventurer in question either made enough money to rent themselves a room or they perished while trying. Not many adventurers could afford a home like Roland did, gathering up a hundred small gold coins would be something that would take years. Maybe if someone were lucky to find themselves a magic blade to pawn off, they could speed up the process.

”This is a bit unexpected, I guess the answer was right under my nose…”

Roland picked up a part of the music box that had runic patterns on it. Lucky for him this item was of that variety and not a regular enchanted one. The weapons and armor that were auctioned off were mostly regular enchanted ones instead. He wasn’t sure but maybe the drops in the dungeon were of that type of magic equipment.

What he was holding was just a plate of metal made from deep iron. The runic structure was condensed on it which made it look smaller than whatever he could make. This item was certainly made by someone that was more skillful than he was. That didn’t mean that he wouldn’t be able to recreate it, with his debugging skill this would prove rather easy. The only problem would be improving on the design with his own knowledge.

Roland expected to find some kind of special device or an item responsible for this music box working. This he did but instead of one, it was a combination. The small plate that had the runic components in them also had a socket. This socket contained a marble-like item, an item that he was familiar with.

‘A slime core, huh?’

This slime core was the magical mineral that was apparently able to store mana inside of it. There was a specialized runic structure around this socket that kept the slime core inside of it. He had examined it before dismantling the music box. What he saw was a siphoning effect that funneled the mana from the surrounding area into this slime core.

This core worked as some kind of generator or battery. It was constantly discharging the mana it had stored back into the runic structure. Thus the music box was able to function, the button on the side that activated it just moved some parts and connected some runic traces.

There was also one mana stone present to purify the mana from the surroundings. It was directly connected to the slime core, probably allowing it to work more efficiently by being in closer proximity to the ‘battery’.

From how it looked the runic components only needed a little jolt of magic at the start before they would work on their own. Besides the slime core, there was deep iron involved. He could clearly tell that the runic components were not deteriorating that fast.

The small rune design and its simplicity gave the item longevity, even when constantly turned on it was working just fine. It looked that if the magic rune didn’t pass a certain threshold of mana usage, the runic components that it was composed of wouldn’t break down.

At least not when made from this deep iron. If this was some kind of other metal with a special mana gathering attribute was unknown. He would need to test it out on other metals to see if there was a difference.

“Well, this clears up a couple of things. The person that made this was probably an experienced runesmith, you don’t see many runes at the high grade.”

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This rune was of the ‘high’ grade which was something rare. Most of the items out on the market were of the intermediate grade, while high and above were hard to find. This was also why the wares that he made sold quite well. Probably the craftsmen weren’t willing to give away the knowledge of their designs to just anyone.

Thus most runesmiths ended up with average knowledge and made average grade runes. Improving on the design was a lot harder without a lot of trial and error. This would be a time-consuming process, it could also be costly if something went wrong. Badly connected rune components could be volatile, even explode.

Roland was just happy that he could skip that process with his debugging skill. If he didn’t have it he would probably be still stuck scribing low-level runes. Maybe he would have to go work for some kind of runesmith that was willing to share their knowledge with him.

With this skill, he had attained a degree of freedom but this also caused him to have some holes in his basic knowledge. Was this battery structure something hard to make? It didn’t look out of the ordinary. He was a classical case of someone that started running without having learned to walk properly first.

Roland had placed the piece of metal to the side and got ready to go to bed. With this, he had something to look forward to. He had also ordered a basic forge to be made at his home, the building company luckily was able to do that. They would place it in the log cabin for now while his secret workshop remained underground.

There he was planning to build his own furnace, one that was composed of runes. Through this he could only do after completing his runic generator design. Now after looking over this toy it was finally a possibility. First, he would need to get his house back, he would also need copper wire and magnets.

This was something he would need to create an electric generator, this was a device that converts mechanical energy into electrical power. How this worked was common knowledge from his old world and it wouldn’t be that hard to produce with his current skills. The hard part would be to harness this electrical current to then produce mana.

He also needed it to produce more mana than there was introduced into the runic structure. Without that the generator idea would fall flat. The first prototype would probably be quite crude but he needed to test if this thing even had the merit to be improved later on.

He had copper and magnets in his workshop already. He had gotten a few strong ones for his refrigerator design; they sealed the doors quite nicely. While thinking about the next few days he went to sleep. Before anything could be done he needed his house to be in working order.

The following day Roland woke up early, he visited some shops to try and buy anything that could help him with the future mana generator design. One of the problems would be placing wires along his house to deliver the mana to all of his appliances.

The ethereal pathways had a very limited range, so he would need to actually attach them to his generator. The people of this world did make wires for fences so he would be able to just buy that. Those wires were thicker than electrical wires but that would just make it easier to inscribe the runic traces on them.

They would also deteriorate quite slowly with only runic pathways on them, without runic components that had a spell structure the metals didn’t suffer that much damage. He could also place more than just one pathway for the mana to travel through the cable. This was all still only theoretical as he still needed to make the devices capable of using these cables. Those would mostly be power tools like a drill or a belt grinder.

This would have to wait till he got his hands on some better crafting utensils. For now, Roland used his time to check the shops for anything useful. The rest of his time was spent down in the dungeon, leveling up to level 75 was still very much on his agenda. It wouldn’t hurt to have a tier 2 class sooner rather than later.

So he did, this time venturing to the levels below. What he found were more skeletons that were on fire along with more slimes. He was sure to hunt the latter ones more as the slime cores could be used for his generator. Roland wasn’t sure how many of them he could use but he could hold on selling them until he figured out that part.

Those two weren’t the only monsters that he found down there. He was facing another common creature that he had faced before, it was a giant rat. This was a variation of the old foe that was dark crimson in coloring.

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