They didn’t embark on trying to throw Nathan right away - Stella needed to learn more spellwork first. However, the idea had gotten her excited and she was starting to manipulate the sand with mana.
They did a bit more practicing, and Nathan tried to get a grip on the [Tumbling] skill. It helped him roll more quickly and easily, as well as do things like cartwheels. Nathan had never trained at gymnastics before - so long as you didn’t count learning to do a flip on a trampoline when he was 14 - so he wasn’t very experienced at it. But it seemed like a useful tool in his arsenal. That was especially true when he figured out that the skill helped him regain his feet quickly after being knocked down. It wasn’t hard to use the momentum from falling to roll himself up from almost any position.
{Low-tier Tumbling 2 achieved!}
Not long after, it was time for the private mentoring. Kadid was there, and Nathan walked over to him with a wide smile.
“Heya Kadid, how’s it going?” He turned and they started walking towards the central Adventurer hall.
“Freedom and Brightness, Nathan. I mean to ask, do you want me to continue to come here in the afternoons? Seems like you had things to talk about with Beatred and Poppy, and if you don’t need me then there ain’t much point in me showing up.” The old man was scratching the back of his neck, and looking at some of the other adventurers who seemed to share the Bho family look - dark, wide and tough.
“I think I’ll leave them be for a bit - though if you could drop by later and ask Beatred how it’s going I’d appreciate it. I think she’ll want me to come by at some point, but I don’t want to jog her elbow. I also think it might be best if I weren’t connected with what she’s working on, if you catch my drift.” Nathan tapped the side of his nose.
Kadid looked a bit confused by Nathan’s gesture, but carried on. “A’right. I hear you. You mentioned some Insights the other day and I know an implication when I hear one. I’ll check in with her later. Anythin’ else I can help you with?”
Nathan shrugged. “Don’t think so, but thanks for checking. I’ll probably be in the Heirs’ rooms for the rest of the day. Talk to you tomorrow unless something comes up?”
“Sounds good.” The old man waved to Nathan and turned towards the front of the Guild while Nathan turned towards the back.
He fully expected more questions from Beatred and Poppy - if nothing else about the further secrets of metallurgy and chemistry he’d promised them - but he wanted to minimize the number of times he left the Adventurer guild. He got back to the rooms and sat down in a comfortable chair. Then he found a slate to take notes on. He had a few hours to himself, and wanted some time to think.
Specifically, Nathan had a feeling he needed to systematically go through his knowledge from Earth and make sure he wasn’t missing anything else he could use. He didn’t want to spend social capital to try to acquire the air-stepping Talent from Kia if he could get something similar or superior from his own knowledge. Or see if he was missing some other giant opportunity for applying his knowledge.
Similarly, he had ten utility skills. That was supposed to be the maximum without special circumstances - like that one person Vhala had mentioned. But barring whatever was going on there, Nathan wouldn’t be offered any more utility skills even if he did something that deserved one. So, he wanted to think if there were any other utility skills he could get that would make it worthwhile to drop one of his existing utility skills.
The first step of that was to figure out if there were any utility skills Nathan was ok with dropping. Of course there were - [Lecturing] was just here because it helped Nathan explain guns and math. If he didn’t end up doing a lot of teaching in the future he fully intended to drop the skill. But if he did decide to disseminate more knowledge, then it would be pretty useful.
Depth first search time!
What would make him decide to spread more knowledge? Partially that depended on how his current knowledge worked out. Could they get guns to work? Would Beatred and Poppy get attacked by Giantsrest and get the idea stolen? Arguably it would have been smarter to run this experiment with a less dangerous secret than gunpowder, but guns had the best return on investment and were the easiest thing to implement that Nathan could think of. Especially with the advanced metalwork Beatred had demonstrated.
It was a similar story similar for the scientific insights Nathan had that could help people develop better skills and Talents. Could he really teach Stella to understand light and electricity the way he did? If he could, would she be able to use that knowledge to generate and interact with light and lightning mana? In that case, Nathan was sitting on a gold mine of Insights, and could empower Gemore’s mages to some pretty incredible heights. So long as he kept them from generating a black hole or antimatter or something too destructive.
Nathan spent a moment feeling sorry for himself. Davrar’s magic was so cool. He would have loved to spend time experimenting with mana, using scientific principles to pick apart spells and create new mana types. But instead he was anathema to mana in all its forms. Every step of the way to this point had been reasonable, even necessary. As a [Spellbreaker Juggernaut] Nathan was probably better suited to fighting Giantsrest than he would be as a mage.
I dunno. Nuking people. Punching people. Not equivalent across multiple axes.
If he’d just arrived in Gemore instead of Taoel’s damned mage tower, everything would be better. He’d be free to explore magic, free of his vendetta against Giantsrest.
Now that was an interesting thought. If he’d arrived here in Gemore, never met Taeol, how would he view Giantsrest? He’d probably look at it the same way that most of the people in Gemore did. To them, Giantsrest was an enemy, but one among many. And not the most pressing enemy. Giantsrest would be an evil to him, but a distant one, and farther down the priority list than it currently was. There were Adventurers like the Giantraiders who made it their mission to fight Giantsrest - but they all had lost something to Giantsrest.
And in that sense, so had Nathan. He’d told Sudraiel most of it - but his beef with Giantsrest ran deeper than just his lost opportunities on Earth. Nathan realized he’d had a kind of innocence, before. He hadn’t truly believed that somebody would just… so casually dismiss him as a person. Taeol hadn’t even tried to be particularly convincing. The only reason he’d started out that way is because it would have been easier, if Nathan had helped him willingly. He hadn’t done it because he would have preferred not to dominate Nathan. To Taeol, Nathan was worthless beyond what he could do for Taoel. And that thought was what repulsed Nathan, what lay at the root of his desire to fight Giantsrest.
He knew about it intellectually, of course. Slavery and explotation existed in many forms on Earth, and he would have viewed Giantsrest that same way. But when Taoel tried to enslave Nathan, embed him into a golem core, it became personal. Now, the thought that Taeol and the other mages of Giantsrest were acting that same way to hundreds - thousands - of people was something that Nathan could not ignore. He couldn’t just squirrel it away in the back of his head the way he probably could have if somebody had just described it to him.
It’s illogical - the evil is the same whether I have experienced it or not. But it’s human nature, and I won’t judge hypothetical-Nathan who never had to deal with Taeol for not instantly declaring a vendetta to the death against Giantsrest. And it won’t change my mind either - I’m different than I would have been without that experience. I’m going to be on a hair-trigger for that sort of behavior for the rest of my life, and unable to move on until I’ve done something about it. I don’t think that’s a bad thing - I am who I am because of my experiences, and Taoel’s tower was a formative one.
Nathan hadn’t really been angry that much on Earth. He hadn’t had that much to be angry about, especially personally. And now he did. The ember of rage that smoldered in his chest even now had been born of Taeol’s treatment of him, and Nathan’s introspection on what it meant for a whole society to act like that.
Anyway! Nathan looked down at the slate, which remained empty. He’d been trying to think about things from Earth he could use here. He’d wait on more technology until the fallout of guns was more clear, and on more mage-insights until his lessons with Stella got further along. Realistically, he’d just teach Stella more things. They were on the same team, she was a genius mage and Nathan was pretty sure it wasn’t a bad thing if she owed him favors. Both of these processes were likely to take months, and could blow up in his face if he rushed them.
And if I do develop that [Regeneration] upgrade for biochemical control, then I have time. I will take a delayed and more certain victory against Giantsrest over a faster but riskier attempt.
So. Nothing urgent yet. On that note, what Insights did Nathan have to trade Kia for the stepping-on-air skill? Well, he’d likely have some credit with Stella and her parents if his tutoring worked out. And if guns worked out, he’d have credit with Stanel. That might be enough, but it might not, either. Nathan had no idea how Insight-trading worked around here. Was there anything else?
Nathan already had two Talents that people kept mentioning were incredible, and their Insights would be valuable. The problem was, he wasn’t sure if he could package them up in neat Insights. Or if he wanted to.
[Magic Resistance] was the first one - but the core component of it had been the ‘magic resistant alchemical ingredients’. And Nathan had no idea what those were. Presumably something from Earth that wasn’t present here, but what could that be? Plastic? Vaccines? Food additives? Nathan had no idea, and no easy way to start trying to figure it out. With access to even a basic lab he might be able to take samples of his own body and try to separate out whatever the anti-magic ingredients were. That assumed they were still present in his body, and hadn’t been broken down or passed, leaving him only capable of antimagic through the Talent.
It was a frustrating problem, because there was so little information to go off of. It wouldn't make a lot of sense for it to be a mundane chemical structure, since biological metabolism natively had a lot of weird chemicals, including plastic monomers. Maybe he should ask around for any known ingredients or creatures that had antimagic, then try to find similarities?
The other Talent was trickier, in that Nathan could probably try to teach somebody to understand biology like he did and guide them to [Regeneration]. But that… sounded hard. Harder than teaching somebody to understand Maxwell’s equations. To Nathan, stem cell biology was built on a vast pyramid of underlying knowledge. Metabolism required understanding of chemistry and thermodynamics, regulation required kinetics and genetics which required evolution.
It was like building a tower of knowledge. For Maxwell’s equations, Nathan needed to go through algebra to calculus. He might need to detour to linear algebra and geometry, but then he could go through multivariable calculus which would give Stella the mathematical language necessary to understand electricity, magnetism and light. The tower he needed to build was tall, but it was thin.
For stem cell biology, the tower was more like a pyramid, and the peak was higher. He’d learned Maxwell’s equations in the sophomore year of college. He’d learned stem cell biology, really learned it, while studying for the qualifying exams that had qualified him for a masters degree if he’d dropped out of his PhD program. And what would teaching all of that to somebody do? Let them heal themselves with stamina. Sure, a [Curing] couldn’t fix lost limbs, but more advanced spells could.
[Regeneration] wasn’t worth the investment for most people on Davrar. Not unless their build was designed around it from the start. Or they wanted to get really buff. Nathan flexed his arm, examining his bicep.
It was possible he could figure out some less comprehensive Insight for acquiring the Talent. But - how? Get ten people, give #1 the full rundown, tell #2 to accept some basic things on faith, tell #10 as little as possible? People were too variable for that to mean much beyond generalities.
No, he wasn’t planning to teach people how to get [Regeneration] unless the situation seemed really appropriate. What other information did Nathan have that could be useful?
I know a lot about sanitation, and it’s not that hard to synthesize sulfonamide antibiotics, though I’d need to start some kind of chemical industry for that. More likely, do experiments to find the right fungus, then go from there for a natural antibiotic.
But Nathan hadn’t seen much sign of sickness or disease in Gemore. Sickness was usually dealt with via [Curing] long before it presented a danger. They had running clean water, and ate a varied diet from the villages. Maybe it was worse in the villages, but Nathan didn’t think so.
So, there wasn’t a point in him trying to spearhead a revolution in Gemore’s health when they’d already solved the problem with magic. What else?
He knew - or could recall - a lot of things. Alloys of metals used for industrial steels. The principles behind an internal combustion engine. The problem was - there were a lot of details there he didn’t know. He’d gotten curious at various points about what the elemental makeup of modern metals was, and had looked it up.
What he hadn’t looked up was the treatment processes necessary to get to those incredible alloys. How you quenched, tempered and hardened metal was just as important as the exact elemental makeup, and Nathan hadn’t looked up most of those processes. He spent a few minutes using [Enhanced Memory] - but Nathan had just never looked up how to properly treat metals on Earth, so he couldn’t remember it now..
He could probably work with Beatred and Poppy to figure out some better alloys, but Nathan wouldn’t be able to do more than provide generalities about the treatment steps. It would probably still have good results, but they weren’t about to start making high-speed tool steel tomorrow. He could probably have a good discussion with Beatred about general steel manufacture - she could definitely make steel, but the Bessemer process was a really efficient way to do it. Nathan made a note to discuss it at some point, though he’d probably wait until she asked.
As for combustion engines, Nathan was quite aware of how much he didn’t know. How did gas vaporization happen? Didn’t the tolerances have to be extremely fine? How did you make the crankshaft attach to the pistons? Nathan knew that solutions existed to all of these things. He might have seen diagrams at some point in his life, but he definitely didn’t know the solutions to every issue that would crop up. They’d be soluble problems, to be sure. But problems that had taken decades to solve on Earth, with thousands of people working on them.
No, he’d have to start with a simpler steam engine. Make a big-ass boiler, pipe water in and use the steam pressure to push pistons or a turbine. It’d require a lot of tricky metalwork, probably much harder than the gun.
But what was the point? Steam engines provided a lot of power to do things like drive transportation or factory crankshafts. But they had relatively cheap bags of holding here. What purpose could trains even serve? And factories - they’d compete with skilled labor that had classes and skills centered around their profession. There’d be a higher barrier for it to be feasible than there’d been on Earth. It had taken a while for steam power to dominate on Earth, and it would be harder to get market share here on Davrar.
Even if it was feasible, did Nathan want to unleash an industrial revolution? Not really. Not only would Giantsrest be better positioned to use the technology, but industrialization was hard to really effect without rampant exploitation of labor. Which was why Giantsrest was better positioned, he supposed.
Electricity had a lot of the same problems. A lot of the things you wanted electricity for were already provided by magic. Nathan looked up to the glowing crystal in the corner. Making electricity on the small scale to help teach Stella about E&M would probably be useful, but Nathan could probably ask Beatred to whip up a hand-cranked generator at some point. Assuming they could find some magnets.
Anything else?
Nathan cast through his knowledge, looking for relevant fields.
Ah. Fields. Yup.
Adaptive crop breeding and fertilizer. One of the heroes of Earth was Normal Borlaug, who had probably saved a billion lives by more than doubling staple crop production between 1950 to 1970. He’d been one of Nathan’s heroes, somebody who had used science to save more people than any one person could ever meet. It’d been a combination of increasing pest resistance and adapting plants to prioritize yield and deprioritize competition with one another. And helping them take advantage of industrial fertilizer.
The fertilizers had happened earlier, and had been tied to the start of the chemical industry. You needed lots of infrastructure for that. The Haber process ran at about a hundred atmospheres and several hundred degrees celcius over beds of special catalysts. You also needed hydrogen gas. The alternatives to the Haber process were probably worse - Nathan didn’t remember the names, but one of them required incredibly high voltages and the other required just stupid amounts of heat, as well as purified hydrogen.
{Mid-tier Enhanced Memory 6 achieved!}
Those… were probably worth considering more. Nathan didn’t know much about Gemore’s food production situation. It happened in the villages, and was heavy on meat. Was food even a limiting resource here? With monsters as such a constant threat, food might not be the thing that controlled population size. But being able to produce more food per unit area would mean they wouldn’t have to protect as many fields.
Yeah, increasing food yield was going on Nathan’s list as something to consider going forward. He was leery of making the large-scale changes that came along with starting a chemical industry. There were a lot of hurdles there, and the outcome was… complicated. There was no way to really do that small-scale, and once you got started making bulk amounts of sulfuric acid, then the genie was really out of the bottle. That allowed nitric acid manufacture which led to nitroglycerin and dynamite. Or you could start making things like mustard gas. But… not yet.
Nathan was more interested in direct crop breeding. It wasn’t something that could be done quickly, and in fact it would take decades to do properly. But it was the kind of thing that could make Davrar that much kinder to those who lived in it. Likely without unleashing some horror upon the world.
Overall Status:
{Status of Nathan Lark:
Permanent Talent 1: Magic Absorption 3
Permanent Talent 2: High-tier Regeneration 4
Talent 3: None
Class: Spellbreaker Juggernaut level 43
Class skills:
Stamina: 505/530
Juggernaut's Wrath
Antimagic Momentum
Raging Thrill
Juggernaut's Inertia
Unarmored Resilience
Utility skills:
High-tier Focused Mind 1
Mid-tier Earnestness 2
Mid-tier Sprinting 2
Mid-tier Spellsense 2
Mid-tier Notice 2
Low-tier Identify 8
Low-tier Dodging Footwork 8
Mid-tier Enhanced Memory 6
Low-tier Lecturing 4
Low-tier Tumbling 2}