The air was cool and dry, the last of the water in the Weeping Grotto had finally been drained out. It had taken me several trips but I had managed to move most of my materials and equipment from the shoddy tool shed at the back of the orphanage here. I had even brought some wooden planks and nails to assemble a makeshift table.
The opening in the roof provided sufficient light during the daytime, and also created a slight upward draft that drew fresh air in gradually from the cave opening. The cave was surprisingly pleasant if you ignored the roots of trees sticking out from the walls. A wrapped bundle of deliciousness was also placed on my work table along side the rest of my tools.
I had learnt my lesson of missing lunch every time I ventured into the Greywoods. Now that I was not on the move and had a place to actually settle down, Marta was kind enough to prepare what passed for a sandwich in this world for me to bring along. She was able to buy flour to make fresh bread now that the financial situation of the orphanage had improved.
I had given her the idea to get Garrick to help sell some soap through the right channels to the baroness. It had apparently been a hit, but I had told Marta to keep the quantities supplied low to keep the prices high. The lack of progress in chemistry and basic physics in this world was not really a surprise, given that they had magic and majority of the research had been focused there. Even excluding Ironhold who was currently waging war against the entire west continent, there would always be small skirmishes and disagreement between neighboring countries. This led to the focus of magic to be revolved around military applications, rather than improving day to day lives of the commoners.
I now had all the materials I need, or at least I think I did, to move on to the next part of my experiment. I needed to create a storage device that could release a high amount of lightning mana to feed the enchantment that powered the coils.
It had taken me some time but I had inscribed storage runes on several copper plates and arranged them in parallel without touching each other. It was a fusion of modern physics and magical enchantment. Which I was not sure if it would completely work.
The idea was to use several parallel plates to act as capacitors, supported additionally by storage runes to hold the lightning mana. The pair of plates were connected in parallel to allow of simultaneous discharge.
Rather than having a single Intake Rune for the entire assembly, I had inscribed intake runes for every single pair so that I could charge the capacitors faster when my Lightning Infusion allows for it.
Assembling this and taken more time than I had expected, not because of the inscribing or the copper plates. It was actually the soldering. Discharging as much lightning using Lightning Bolt when I was trying to kill my target was easy enough. Having the precise control to repurpose my lightning as an arc welder was another story. If not for my innate lightning resistance, I would have run out of fingers to practice by burning the tips off early on.
I casted Electro Perception and kept it on as I began charging the mini capacitor banks with Lightning Infusion. I kept the feed slow and steady initially and only increased the output slowly when it was stable. I could see the glow of lightning energy between the plates increase in intensity. I had to estimate the maximum capacity using the intensity of the glow in my vision and the resistance I was feeling when pushing through with Lightning Infusion.
My core was about halfway empty when it was full from what I estimated. That would definitely pack a punch if released all at once. I held my breath as I cut off my infusion. "Holy shit, its actually working!" I couldn't help but mutter.
I probably spoke too soon as I watched the glow start to recede slowly. It was not a sudden drain but a slow leak. I had missed the leakage from the sides of the plate due to the intensity of the glow coming from the plates itself when I was charging it. But now that I knew there was a leak, I could see faint discharge to the ambient air between the plates.
While the principles of physics carried over, I was not really dealing with pure electricity in this case. The enchantments had allowed the simple capacitor to hold on to more energy than what was possible back on Earth, but it had also created complications that I did not account for.
While I could theoretically charge it to the maximum capacity and quickly fire it, it would not be a practical in combat. I could deal with a slower rate of leakage that might require me to charge the battery every few days. The current rate of leakage would probably empty the battery in half an hour or so.
While proper gemstones specialized to hold lightning mana could potentially solve this, I did not have nearly enough coin to even afford a small one, let alone one large enough for my needs. It was back to the drawing board for me in this case.
Another good thing about having a large cavern floor made of soil was that I could use it as a drawing board. Paper was too expensive in this world for me to waste them sketching , and I did not have a chalk and a white board. I was sure the academies would fashion something that was more viable as a teaching tool but that was not something I had access to at the moment.
It had drawn up several versions to try and solve my leakage problem but my limited knowledge of enchantment runes was holding me back. In the end, the simplest solution I had thought of was to find insulating material to wrap the capacitor, and only limit the leakage through the intake port.
And I had just the tool in my arsenal to hopefully find what I need in the woods.
All this while when I had used Electro Perception, it had been about looking for things with strong signatures as presence of life, or for precious materials. However, there was also an ambient static that I had learned to ignore with time.
In theory, I could use this ambient static to look for pockets completely devoid of signature in my vision. A material that could insulate well against lightning energy and mana should work well for my purpose. My only hope was that there would be the equivalent of a rubber tree in this world.
Using the Weeping Grotto as the starting point, I started marking trees to make sure I could find my way back as I explored the Greywoods over the next few days. I had not seen anything made out of rubber in this world so I hoped it was just not discovered, instead of it not being available.
It was another three days before I made any progress and found what I need. The good news was that the source probably had way more materials that I needed for my battery design. The bad news was that it wasn't a rubber tree I found. It was a giant mound full of ants, or more specifically the material the mound was made out of.
It was not apparent at first as there were giant rat sized ants crawling all over the mound as they entered and exited their nest. But when I paid close attention, the ants' signature were completely hidden the moment they entered the mound. I circled around to a section that had less ants crawling in and out and I could see in my vision with Electro Perception turned on that there was an empty void where the mound was sitting.
I recall reading about these ants in the beast compendium. These ants were known as Geomyre ants. After the last encounter with the weepwrym, I had made sure I would not be caught unaware again.
The mound was probably made a mix of secretion from the ants and regular mud or clay. Their Earth affinity cores probably helped in giving the mixture their insulation properties. There was probably some evolutionary function for this property but it was not listed in the book.
The problem now was getting close enough to break off some of the mound. I doubt they would agree to me destroying their home even if I asked nicely. The ants by themselves don't look too strong, as they were way smaller than the Glimmerwasps, and they could not fly.
These ants were not strong individually, with most of the nest consisting of Red cored worker ants, there were also some bigger Orange cored soldier ants that were closer to the size of a cat. The largest ant would be the Queen that would likely be at Yellow but she would usually be immobile due to her large size and specialized abdomen for laying eggs.
These ants were typically foragers and scavengers. It would occasionally chase away a predator from its prey if the predator could not move it away in time. The ants might be weak individually, but what they lack in strength, they made up for in numbers.
The book had mentioned that unwitting beasts that ignored the ants surrounding them would often find themselves swarmed and bitten to death before they escaped. The beasts that were smarter tend to just abandon their prey once they see more than a single ant approaching.
I could definitely out run these ants but the problem was whether I could get close enough to the mound to harvest any materials. Before approaching the mound, I casted a Lightning Bolt from afar to break off a chunk of it. Immediately I could see an increase in number of ants swarming out of the mound. They started spreading out looking for the source of the threat.
It did not take long before some of the ants spotted me and started approaching me. I did not need a strong discharge to kill these ants, so I kept the Lightning Bolt low powered to conserve my mana and increase my casting speed.
I had thought that I could kill the ants fast enough and make my way to the nest to grab the piece of mound but the ants were coming faster that I could kill. I tried doubling my killing speed by dual casting the ionization trail and dividing the discharge from the Lightning Bolt, effectively casting two bolts per hand. Despite doubling my killing speed, they were still coming faster that I could clear them.
It was regrettable but I made a note of where the nest was and decided on a strategic retreat before the ants could swarm me. I had learnt not to be over confident from the recent near miss. I used Lightning Infusion to increase my speed took a round about route back to the grotto incase some of them followed me back.
I was back to my cave and staring at the floor, trying to come up with a plan for approaching the ant mound. While I walked away empty handed, I did make a mental note from my spark of inspiration on how I could upgrade my Lightning Bolt spell when it reaches level 10.
I was ruminating on the potential approaches I could take to wipe out the swarm, but then remembered that I did not necessarily have to wipe them out. I just needed a distraction to bait out enough ants to approach the mound. Perhaps it was time to take a page out of Timon and Pumba's playbook.