Year 2, Winter, Third Month, First Week.

Karl looked at the disciples energetically discussing their ideas and couldn’t help but sigh, he had lost their attention again. When he started teaching them, his main concern was how to stimulate creative and logical thinking, after all, they have been treated as unintelligent tools since they were born. However, he didn’t expect that one day he would be complaining about their over-eagerness and unrestrained creativity. Actually, the problem wasn’t their creativity, you couldn’t have too much of something that inspired progress. The problem lay in their inability to concentrated and guide their thoughts into productive actions and planning.

Reiner also shared her son’s worries, as someone that didn’t dive into crafting itself, she was capable of maintaining her focus on the goals, results and the process. Why couldn’t the disciples be a little more like Kar? She considered him a genius, if not only because he would constantly teach them new things, but also because of his ability to maintain a straightforward developing process. Ironically, she would never know that this ability was extensively trained into his mind by Master AI. Either way, if they wanted to increase the Alchemy Department’s productivity, they would have to find a way to organize and guide the disciple’s creativity. Fortunately, his own Master was there for him when he needed it.

“-- You could try guiding their reasoning into a more productive process. For example, creating specif periods for every step. Unrestrained ideas sometimes are necessary but other times become a problem. When you start creating something or have to overcome a challenge, letting your mind wander through dozens of impractical ideas will probably help you think of an unconventional solution. However, once you decide on a model design, restraining and guiding your thoughts based on the guidelines of the project is necessary to ensure progress.--”

As usual, it didn’t matter how complicated Master AI’s teachings were, Karl would always comprehend them as if the meaning was transmitted instead of words. With a new method to test, Karl’s confidence in guiding his disciples was renewed. He cleaned the stone wall he was using to draw ideas and started writing a few things with one of the chalk pieces they got from Keller. Currently, even with Reiner’s efforts, only a few disciples knew how to read, but even so, Karl made a point of drawing representative images to help them record the ideas.

“Ahem… Ahem… Listen, everybody, from now on, we’ll use a new method to discuss our ideas and draw our plans. Every project will have three steps, idea, planning and execution. In the idea stage, after discussing it among yourselves for a few minutes, everyone gets to present one idea. Then, everyone can vote on one idea that isn’t their own. The most voted idea would then be chosen for further consideration, except for the times when I consider an idea to be much better than the chosen one. The second stage is planning, whoever can think of problems with the chosen idea can point it out, then we would explore possible solutions for the problems. Finally, after we decide on the design, we would point a team to construct, test and adjust the tool.”

The disciples stop talking amongst themselves and paid close attention to Karl’s instructions. Even though they were a little dissatisfied with having to choose only one idea, they also considered the benefits of using this method. Most of the time, their idea wouldn’t be even listened much less discussed or considered. With this method, everyone would have a chance of being heard, probably, the stars like the direct disciples would still be ahead due to their popularity, but this was better than only discussing with their friends.

Unsurprisingly, the Alchemy Department had dozens of problems to solve, so Karl decided to start with something easy to get them going. After making a short presentation about the problem and explaining some elements and properties that could be used, he opened the first round of discussions for the construction problem. Once they discussed among themselves and polished their ideas for ten minutes, they started to describe them one by one. Karl carefully represented each idea with a drawing, in this round he would accept similar ideas, but in the future, he would explain that only original ideas would be represented, if someone had a similar but better proposal they should just vote on the first idea and propose the improvements later.

Of course, this would cause some dissent and a few promising ideas could end up not being selected because the first presented idea might have too many shortcomings. Even so, Karl decided to follow this method, the disciples had to learn to identify similar ideas and improve them together before presenting them. The goal was for each time to have fewer but better ideas supported by a group.

In the first round, the chosen solution was a tool that would use earth to build the temporary huts. After they saw the earth barrier structure, using the earth element become the most obvious solution. Aside from the chosen idea, the other ideas mostly presented wood as the option.

The next point was discussing the problems with the idea. Unfortunately, the disciples still didn’t understand the need to simplify their opinions, so many pointed the same problem. However, Karl decided to let it slide, after all, everybody was eager to show their opinions. After reducing the problems to two main points, they started to discuss possible solutions.

The first was how to give stability without wasting energy, since the barrier property overdid in terms of strengthening. Karl already thought of a solution but he would prefer if they could solve it themselves, and he was almost giving up when a third-level disciple proposed a viable solution. The diligence of the boy surprised everyone, apparently, since he learned how to write, he has been recording all the properties of crystals in wooden planks that he got from his father, who was a crafter. Later, this boy would become the person to go when deciding which properties to use.

The solution was using the hardening property of a MQ earth crystal. The property could harden the soil and make it more stable and stronger. The second problem was the form of the earth walls, this time around, they decided to test two possible solutions, using a rectangular Array to give form to the wall or building a big Array to erect the four walls in one go.

In both options, the earth affinity would control the soil to raise a wall while hardening it with the harden property. Of course, the tool would need a lot of adjustments to guarantee stability. From a practical perspective, erecting four walls at the same time seemed to be easier besides saving time. However, the performance of the tool could only be estimated after testing, Karl already had some suggestions but he would refrain from given them and let the disciples learn from experience.

[Option to build one wall]

[Option to build the four walls at the same time]

[In the one-wall option, the brown plank is the tool with the Arrays pointing to the wall (yellow). In the four-walls options, the rectangles on the base (outside and inside the cube) are part of the tool. The cube represents the four walls]

Before finishing the earth builder plan, Karl asked for his mother to step forward and decide on the disciples that would execute the plan. With that solved, they moved on to the other designs. They discussed and planned a few improvements for the weapons until they had to address more pressing matters, something that was taking away Karl’s sleep, the magic poisoning problem.

Before collecting their ideas, Karl explained the problem and presented a few of his observations. He felt like the Fighters’ techniques to use magic energy could somehow point to a permanent solution. After repeating Lew’s words about how they absorbed and transferred the energy to some parts of their body to power their movements, Karl gave them 20 minutes to discuss ideas amongst themselves.

When Wein came up with the idea for the magic re-drawer, Karl started to see to value of getting other perspectives for the tools’ designs, so he dare not to underestimate the disciples, maybe they would point to a possible solution. As expected, only a few ideas appeared, however, one amongst those hit Karl like the sun illuminating the day.

The second level disciple just proposed a straightforward approach, which was so simple that made Karl feel like he was an idiot. He confirmed it with Master AI two times before allowing himself to cheer for it. The idea wasn’t miraculous, so it wouldn’t cure the people suffering from magic poisoning, but it would prevent their situation from turning worse and even avoid new cases. Like she said, if the problem was the excess magic energy, just take it out.

Using the Manipulation Array, which allowed the control of energies, they could move the excess magic energy out of their bodies. Of course, the energy that was already absorbed by the body, couldn’t be extracted, but doing it to the unabsorbed would be enough to prevent the magic poisoning. And not only that, the idea also had the potential of helping in another important project, creating the first Alchemy Fighters.

However, before they finished working on the specifics for the energy detoxifying tool, Diana interrupted the meeting.

“We have a problem… Samia located…”

“…”