I find Merlin at a desk he brought in from somewhere, and see him writing in a piece of parchment.

He must have increased his perception. The light of the moon is not enough for most people to work with papers. The fact perception was the only stat which affected both the physical and the magical realms, did come in handy in his case. Coming to think of it, it was the same for me. I doubt some of the advances I made, would have been possible with lower perception.

Approaching without further delay I greet him.

“Hi, do you need help?”

Having been distracted, he takes a moment to recognize me. Smiling he greets me.

“Definitely. Come take a seat.” I sit by his side and look at the blueprint for the kiln. I notice it had some changes from my design, and he was working to draw the lines of the enchantment we would be cutting in the clay. “I heard you were back, you are the talk of the town. Most people don’t understand why you left.”

Hearing that, I skip the whole line of conversation, by saying:

“Is this the design that was made? I notice a few changes.”

“Yeah, after careful consideration we modified the design a little. The potter also offered a few suggestions.”

“Ok, from what I see, there shouldn’t be any problem. Did you guys manage to figure it out how to make kilns?”

“I’m not very close to the efforts, but from all I heard, we only managed to learn part of the process. Our efforts got better, but there is something we are missing.”

“Could it be a magical process?”

“Unlikely, few of the people who are working in the kiln have mana manipulation. They didn't sense anything.”

“Perhaps their mana manipulation was not high enough, or their perception was too low.”

“Possible, I will choose someone to observe it the next time closely. Perhaps a scout with high perception.”

In a joking tone, I say:

“You the boss.”

“Come help me, cavemen. I was trying to finalize the design to be inscribed when I heard you came back. I think we should work together.”

“That would be for the best.”

Together we work. We spend hours coming up with the perfect design, and I see the amount of work Merling has put in his craft. In a few areas, he has even surpassed me. In some aspects, I was years ahead because of my Aether, but he was just a natural. A genius in his craft. And he dedicated most of his time to magic, instead of splitting his efforts like me. Hours later we had our finished design, and it was a thing of beauty.

Sleek lines and a concise formation, we had ended up with a better air blower design than I anticipated. Now we just had to translate this to the smelter.

The ideal condition would have been to make this while the clay was malleable. After the cooking of the smelter our work became much harder, but doing the right way, was not a real option for us.

I see chalk sticks and I ask.

“Where did we get chalk?”

Chuckling he says: “We found a secondary deposit in the limestone mine. One of the workers quit and has been making this for a couple of days. He even sells them cheap. A copper per box. It’s really useful stuff. Most serious magic users have one laying around.”

I chuckle and shake my head. “Enterprising individual. Good for him, we need people with this initiative.”

“People were complaining, they seem to think it should be a guild effort.”

“The guild can’t do everything. It’s not feasible and would just create complacency.”

“I agree, if everyone applied their knowledge, we might be in an even better position. To deliver all the impetus to the guild is be a good way to take the wind from so many of our efforts.”

Stoping our discussions on these topics and moving on to what advances we had made in the study of magic we start to work. With great care, we traced the outside of the kiln and part of the inside of the intake tube. The chalk lines are precise and form exactly what we intended.

With an interesting tool, we alternate in tracing the groves for the lines. The small wheel leaving an indentation on the clay.

To finish up we use a chisel to give the rough shape and a file to sand away the rough edges. The final result is not perfect, and the tools are ruined in the process, but we finish it.

“Time to put mana in?” I ask.

“Yeah, let’s try one point for starters.”

I put one mana and the blower takes a few seconds to start working. Seeing the result he says.

“Let’s test it exhaustively, I will put 3 points of mana now.”

Exhaustively is how we test the machine. We both end up with empty mana pools in half an hour. All the features of the Kilt-nator 3000 work as intended. As expected, it would use about 60 mana per hour for normal working.

It has a mode that needed 10 mana every minute trying to imitate what I did while meditating in the smithy. It was wasteful but it worked and gave us the option of increasing the temperature without me being present.

The whole thing as a work of beauty. Not the beauty you see in sculptures, but the beauty of seeing something that works well. The whitish color of the clay that was selected would change as because of the fumes and temperature, but for now, we had a big kiln that would do everything we needed.

Merlin then asks me:

“How much do you think we will be able to produce with this kiln?”

“It is not the best design, but I think we can make 12 hours 2 cycle batches. Each batch should give us 200 ingots. That’s 400 ingots or kilos of steel per day.”

“No need for technical jargon.”

“The steel goes in 2 times. One is when we put ore to get iron. That is the big opening for a dozen big smelting cups. In the next process, we make the steel and eliminate the impurities using this other door.” I go through with him on the process and explain a few details.

“We even have space for smelting other metals in this second door. The flow of air we made in the enchantment is the exact shape to avoid the gasses from one metal contaminating the others. I’m not sure that would even be a problem, but better safe than sorry.”

“The airflow you wanted was annoying to get right. I just thought it had to do with temperature."

“That as well. Anyway, let’s tell the guys the smelter is done.”

“Let me take care of that.”

We part ways and heads to tell the people in charge of mining and preparing the ore their workload had just increased. I pay attention to the time and head to the guild. Now it is 5 am. I should have the time to experiment a little.

I find a dozen people willing to give me their mana to run a few experiments.

“Ok guys, for now, I will experiment with something I don’t understand much. I run into a de-spawning wolf. I managed to observe the process and it looks to me as if he was teleporting away.”

“Holy shit,” one of my oldest students says. I smile and continue.

“I got a little lucky and judged the time perfectly. I strained my senses the moment he was teleported away. I don’t have a perfect measure, but it was good enough. I will be drawing the runes in the ground and staying as far away from the action as possible”

They chuckle and help me. I use a very ingenious rune configuration to transport the mana with the smallest possible loss. I use chalk that Merlin gave me. I understand why most people who used runes started to carry a stick around. It was an easy way to make precise and good diagrams, and if you wanted you could test them with after, no need to transfer them from the paper.

The design was ingenious. A line of 10 meters wastes only half the mana inputted. And almost no mana is needed to fill the ‘hose’, so with a point or two of mana I can get the ‘pressure’ for such a long line up.

I need to come up with better terminology. Winging things is gonna get me in trouble someday. For now, in my head with an evil mad scientist voice, the only important words are: ‘Science waits for no man.’

And wait we did not. Hiding behind a drop in the terrain, I send the mana in my first experiment. Nothing happens. I carefully wait for the magic to drain from the magic circuit.

I had set with drains that would empty the diagram. It would take less than 10 seconds to empty it. I did not trust my memory to remember the runic design in exact detail. It was in a split second I sensed the wolf being teleported away.

Quickly I empty everyone’s mana pools. Even the two dozen people who join us later are drained.

In the end, I run through a few things we learned. They start to volunteer what they learned.

“It needs direction to work; otherwise not even the tiny blips don’t manifest.”

“Mana needs to be supplied in a quick burst, any mana below the threshold is useless.”

The conclusions everyone arrived, come in, and I find they were not idle in the while observing. Their skill levels must be at the cap.

Before, I did not experience much trouble with the cap. But now I was thinking of putting all my points in Wisdom. I would probably wait for a class.

The mechanics of how high you could raise your skill were interesting.

Most people caped at their highest stat. If the person tended to the magical or physical side heavily in attributes that reflected a little on their skills. And for people with too high a single stat their skill lagged behind their stats.

In the end, for most people whatever their highest stat was, there you would find a soft cap.

After a few more people contribute their knowledge, one of them surprises me a little.

“I’m not certain, but given our results, I think that the steadier the stream, the less turbulence in the magic, and the longer this phenomenon would last.”

“That is insightful. I also think so, perhaps we could even eventually be able to keep it open for less than 50 mana per second. By the way who volunteers to go through the gate the first time we cast that stays open for at least a second?”

I chuckle at the couple of hands going up. One of them shows how eager he is by saying:

“I volunteer not to go. You can count on me not to go.”

With those words, I finish the class. This time it was even more informal than my usual affair and we all go our separate ways. Now being about 6:30 am, I head to the smithy and see a Li Wei already setting up the forge. I don’t interrupt him and head to the place of the morning meeting.

I find a good place to sit and start to think about the experiments again. Most of my conclusions were fine, but when it came to the way I went about it, there was room for improvement.

Running over what I did and what I assumed in my experimentation, inconsistencies start to pop up. These were the first few runes I worked with that were not given to me by the book. After a few minutes, I take the book from storage and flip over to the last filled pages.

What I see is the biggest info dump since I got the book. There are 5 pages filled with very useful information. Only a few lines deal directly with the ones I found, but there is so much on general magic theory.

The biggest discovery is a conjecture I had for a long time but had nothing to base it on.

‘Runes are neither fixed shapes nor given to sentient beings by the universe. Runes are a construct of people’s beliefs. As long as somewhere, someone believes a certain rune has a specific effect, that runes will have this effect. The standardization found in runes across the universe has confirmed a theory that many people had in the beginning years of the council’s rule.

‘The more people believe in a specific rune, the better the results are. With no people trying to impart different meanings to very similar shapes, the results were consistent. Proper enchanting left the realm of the elite. Enchanted items that lasted decades or even centuries became possible for a skilled apprentice.

‘Efforts to return enchanting to the previous state of affairs was undertaken by the largest enchanting guilds, to no result. A near-universal and almost coordinated effort from nearly all magical users with even a smidge talent in enchanting was taken. They did a fairly good job of spreading the predecessor of the current version of runes in circulation.

‘The council, at first sided with the established organizations over the new enchanting standard. They, however, got involved too late. Too much momentum was behind the moe to a standard rune set. Some of the enemies of the council also put their weight behind the new standard, in an effort to reduce the centralization of knowledge.

‘After so long, schools run by associates of the council teach the council was instrumental in establishing the standard rune set. Speculations on the motives of the council-run rampant. Many people involved in the trade believe in the highest levels of enchanting, something was lost. No definitive answer as to what has been provided.’

That is huge. If I’m correct in my assumptions, we could come up with whatever designs for runes we wanted if we only needed to enchant for a short duration. Something else it took my notice is that we could probably establish our own runic language.

As long as humanity used a consistent set amongst ourselves, we could probably make magical instruments to lasted decades. When they started to fail, we would probably have learned enough about the universal standard.

We didn’t even need something entirely new. We can simply set up an extension, using the runes we already know.

I sit there absorbing everything, the 3 new runes, the ones I remember from the teleportation, and the explanations now much more complete on how magic works.

More and more starts to connect in my mind. I even saw a note on the best metals to use, and predictably, they were precious metals.

I need to get loads of Mithril, Gold, and silver. For now, I would be using the workhorse of enchanters everywhere, Copper. This will be another kick on our behind’s to kick things up a notch.

I hear the mayor start his speech and I get up getting closer to the podium. He probably has nothing interesting to say, but I will want to talk with Charlie after he finishes.

Ohh, how I was wrong about my assumptions.