There were plenty of things to take care of while I waited the twenty days for the next fluorite crystal to grow for testing. I took a few days overseeing the work that a construction team was doing on the air liquefaction facility. They began the process of wrapping the various devices in the honeycomb vacuum insulation I designed, and I wanted to make sure everything was working as intended. An unfortunate, but important thing that has to be done to maintain the vacuum effectively is to use acid washed lightstone. The lightstone produced in this way is pure enough and sturdy enough to withstand the pressures caused by being under vacuum while also having a much lower incidence rate of air leaks.

The good news is that we've been running the facility for making lightstone for a while as part of our initiative to produce salt for the war effort, so we do have plenty of it to use. That might change in the near future though, since lightstone is also a lot less dense than other stone, we might end up utilizing it for a lot of the prefabricated items that we want to ship to the next island for construction purposes. I spent the majority of my remaining waiting time starting the process of scouting the next island for the most suitable location for settlement.

We'd done quite a bit of scouting during our recent battle with the invading demons, but most of that was done through the lens of combat, meaning the records we kept weren't quite as detailed for the purposes of settlement as we'd have liked. While the simple thing would be to just settle where we'd constructed the fort, it is unlikely that will be the best long term location. When we made the fort location, it was designed with the idea of travelling in long canoes and barges between the islands.

Instead, what I've done is laid out an exploration plan and presented it to the ministers of the navy and army. The plan isn't strictly laid out just for the next island either. I've merely described all the different sorts of information that should be gathered about an island, alongside best practices for gathering certain data. For example, we'd like to know of natural harbors and waterline features between high and low tide.

The list is quite long, actually, for all the data that I'd like to have collected, because a lot of things go into selecting the best location to build a city. I told them that there isn't a rush to gather this information, and I'd rather ensure it's done meticulously. Further, I wanted them to coordinate with some of the other ministers to get a better idea of what specific things the other ministers might be interested in.

We won't be rushing to build out this fledgling city for two reasons. The first reason is straightforward. Even if we aren't combatants on land, we're actively participating in a war. Diverting resources to starting up a second city would be a drain on expanding our economy for the time being. The payback period on building a new city is too long to justify at the current time.

The second reason is that I'm not certain that adding another large crystal won't cause us to become leviathan isolated again for a period of months or years. I don't think it will, but I'm not certain. As such, there would be a chance we'd just suddenly abandon our agreements with the mainland as a consequence of trying to establish a second city, which would put us in hot water. For now we'll just focus on utilizing our idle army and the occasionally idle navy to begin data gathering.

The tests related to using multiple fine wires as heat sinks went well, but not as well as I'd hoped. While they did effectively transfer heat out of the crystal without causing mana leakage into the core, they also resulted in a very brittle fluorite crystal. In essence, to transfer as much heat out as I wanted, I had to put a lot of wires into the fluorite, and they ended up being too close together. That resulted in hairline cracks forming over time when jostled, which ultimately meant the fluorite didn't convert mana to heat at the same rate, leading to the whole thing failing.

I did get valuable data on how closely together those holes could really be spaced before mechanical failure became a concern. With that, I think that the next crystal test should result in a viable engine piece. I've devised an approximate formula based on the data I've gathered for effective heat transfer and stability of the overall crystal. I've also put in error values for each of my presumed constants, since our instruments for measurement of data aren't that precise.

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If they were more precise, I'd be more confident that the next design will work well. Instead, I'm forced to do another set of tests based on different potential configurations determined by different error values. These tests should help me to not only narrow down the error values, but also determine what design we should use going forward.

While I waited the 28 days for the next fluorite crystal to be grown, I was brought in for a ministers meeting to discuss new information from the mainland. After Elora had been dropped off in Ostark, Kao had elected not to have anyone sent to our island as a diplomat for the time being. That was about a month ago. After the next ship cycle, we've gotten even more information.

Our ships have been sinking an increasing number of demon vessels over time. The majority of them are dinghies and canoes. The amount of ammo getting used up over time is resulting in a slow depletion of our lead reserves. We're essentially losing tons of the stuff every month. The brass casings are at least recovered, so we aren't having any issues on that front. It'd take quite a while for our lead reserves to run out at this rate, but it does pose an interesting problem if the war drags on or our involvement increases.

The detour into the number of vessels we were sinking was only a precursor to the real topic of the discussion. Kao estimates, and others from the mainland agree, that based on the increased activity from the demons they have a little over a year before they're overwhelmed, and the dwarven continent is lost. Some of the humans have already began preparing for that possibility, and have slowed down their support, and there are quite a few questions as to whether the elves will join at all, even with the reduced number of demons making it to their shores.

Kao himself has started to form contingency plans for that mark as well. He's sent Shasta here to negotiate on his behalf, though she isn't at the ministers meeting, for obvious reasons. Zaka laid out for us what the main things Kao would like are, and we began our discussion based on that.

Ideally, Kao hopes we have some kind of ace in the hole to turn the war around. Should the dwarves still need to abandon their homeland, the humans and elves have already taken in a lot of refugees, and so that same request is made to us, if we could support it. Zaka reminded us as well of the fact that if the dwarves are wiped out, our previous payment agreement would be hard to enforce in any way.

After a short while, the discussion ended up being heavily reliant on me for information, since I was the one who negotiated with them previously, and had seen Ostark and the mainland firsthand. The minister of the navy had also seen some of the situation, and was able to provide context where needed.

I shouldn't have been very surprised about how the discussion actually went, since we added so many ministers. Essentially, there were three camps among us. The military ministers were more than willing to fight a war directly, with the naval minister being the more optimistic one. Since he's seen firsthand what our ships can do to pretty much any competing naval vessel, to him it was basically a question of how many targets they get to enjoy shooting at.

For a few of our domestic ministers though, the prospect of war and refugees was not something they wanted to deal with. Between the administrative and resource burdens that it would cause, they were staunchly in an isolationist mindset of simply defend our own islands and keep others out.

There were some in the middle as well. Surprisingly, the aquatic resources minister was among those more than happy to maintain current status quo of providing resource support. I'd expected them to be among those who would prefer to remain isolationist, but from what I gathered from the talking points, war has been good for business.

We talked in circles for a while before Zaka quieted us, as we were at a stalemate. Rather than continue the discussion in terms of hypotheticals, he told us to each to go and take five days alone each to plan out what our idea of what we should do would look like in detail over both the next year and five years.

I thought that was a pretty clever way to reframe the question, so I went to do just that. Rather than talking in generalities and then deciding on a plan, why not argue over plans, and let that determine our general course?

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