Chapter 77: Tempered Glass Wall, New Door, and Lock System (1/2)
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The link is also in the synopsis.
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[The chapter is edited by my Editor: Alan_Loo/AlanL]
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Quinn started the first weekend of his fourth year at Hogwarts by visiting the Room of Requirements to begin the first motive of the year.
”Oh boy, it's been a while,” Quinn rubbed his hands together as he looked around the Room of Requirement with delight in his eyes. ”Haa~, now, let's start immediately.”
He took out a small glass pane from his robes and gently set it down on the floor before walking a few strides away from it. As soon as Quinn was at an appropriate distance away from the glass, the glass expanded till it was back to full size.
The glass pane lying on the floor was the glass wall from the A.I.D office. He had brought it to the Room of Requirements to make some changes to it.
One of the main objectives for his fourth year was to fortify the A.I.D workshop, and the first step to achieving that was to strengthen the glass wall that separated the office from the workshop.
”Okay, let's create tempered glass,” Quinn said as he squatted at the edge of the glass pane and looked at the surface and the thickness of the glass. ”First, I have to thicken the glass. This one is a bit thin, I think.”
Quinn took out a cloth pouch bag from his robes. He opened the string binding the bag and scattered shards of glass all over the glass pane, expanding the glass shards back to their original size.
Wisps of wavy magic flowed from Quinn to the glass, and the glass turned into a state of transformation and then a liquid. All the liquid glass mixed with each other to form a giant blob of liquid glass. Quinn applied transmutation magic to reform the glass into one uniform pane of glass and molded it to appropriate shapes and dimensions.
Tempered or toughened glass was a type of safety glass processed by controlled thermal or chemical treatments to increase its strength compared with traditional glass. Tempering sets the outer surfaces into compression and the interior into tension. Tempered glass was about four times stronger than conventional glass. The higher contraction of the inner layer during manufacturing induced compressive stresses in the glass's surface balanced by tensile stresses in the glass's body.
The result of tempering the glass was that it had four times the strength and durability of the previous one.
”I have to make cuts and mold the glass into shape,” Quinn said as a tape measure came out of his robes and started to measure the glass. A felt-tip pen also came out from his robes and made markings and shapes to help the cutting that would be done afterwards.
The tempered glass had to be cut to the appropriate size or pressed to shape prior to tempering. Besides, it couldn't be re-worked once tempered. Polishing the edges or drilling holes in the glass had to be carried out before the tempering process started. Due to the balanced stresses in the tempered glass, damage to any portion would eventually result in the glass shattering into thumbnail-sized pieces.
Of course, magic could overcome that problem, but Quinn wanted to do it the traditional way and prepare the shape and layout of the glass wall before tempering the glass. He hadn't done this before, so Quinn wanted to do the tried and tested way.
”Okay, let's do this,” Quinn put on his trusty leather gloves and levitated the glass that had been cut, polished, frosted, and molded in a uniform shape.
”First step of tempering a glass. Heat it to a temperature of six hundred and eighty-three degrees Celsius,” read Quinn from the small notepad in his hand.
Quinn's approach for tempering the glass was the thermal approach. He would heat the glass to compress it and form an interlayer of tension between two compressions.
The only good thing that had come out of the sin curse was the time Quinn had spent in the library. He spent hours every day voraciously reading books, and a topic of study that he had covered during his readings was fire, or more specifically, the concept of heat.
Taking a deep breath, Quinn channeled his magic into the glass and flooded the entire thick pane of glass. Closing his eyes, Quinn triggered a change in his magic and heated up the glass. Quinn needed a fast, uniform thermal temperature throughout the glass.
After the temperature reached six hundred and eighty-three degrees Celsius, Quinn opened his eyes and immediately changed the magic from hot to cold.
The glass immediately went from molten to frozen... but it promptly shattered.
Quinn didn't look discouraged and walked to the shattered glass, which was still levitating in the air, and observed what had happened. After a minute of studying the failed result, Quinn judged,
”I need to heat it faster. Again!”
The shattered glass returned to its unbroken state through transmutation, and the process repeated over again.
This time, Quinn raised the temperature of the glass faster. He channeled magic and used a different heating spell design to increase the heat more quickly and with higher efficiency for heating glass.
”Shifting to cold,” Quinn murmured. The heat switched off, and cold reigned supreme in the glass, quenching the glass uniformly.
*Crunch!!*
The glass cracked into rough shards, and countless glass pieces floated in the air.
”I can try to keep the same heat and cool it slower,” speculated Quinn and hypothesized, before saying, ”Again!”
There was a smile on Quinn's face the entire time as he heated the glass and cooled it down. The smile even remained when the glass deformed, shattered, or didn't come out tempered.
'Ah, this feels nice,' that thought encompassed Quinn's state of mind.
Doing magic that he found compelling felt nice to Quinn. It didn't have the exhilarating feeling of blasting objects with destructive magic that he felt last year.
This was different.
Watching how the wisps of flame danced on the glass's surface or when the ice relaxed down the glass and sizzled brought joy to Quinn. Changing the temperatures, heat, cold, the timing of heating and cooling, small changes that just made sense.
All of it was mesmerizing to Quinn.
It was fun, it was calm... It was magic.
After an hour and a half of shattering glass, making changes to the process, and trying dozens of times, Quinn finally produced a perfect pane of tempered glass.
”Done,” Quinn raised his hands and admired his new glass wall that would be in his office.
He shrunk the glass wall down to a pocket-sized version, put it inside his robes, and exited the Room of Requirements to have lunch before going to the A.I.D classroom and set up the wall.
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- (Scene Break) -
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A well-fed Quinn entered the empty A.I.D classroom with his suitcase in hand. He turned the key twice in the keyhole and opened the door.
The classroom was bare and empty. Not a sign of the room being ever occupied.
After last year, he had taken every single thing inside the office and the workshop. After losing control of his magic, Quinn wasn't in any shape to fortify his workshop, so he just packed up everything home with him.
Tables, workstations, desks, cupboards, cabinets, raw material, tools, and everything there was in the classroom went home with Quinn.
Quinn set down the suitcase on the floor, and opened it with a couple of clicks. The owner descended into the expanded suitcase and entered the room with all the stuff from the A.I.D classroom.
A powerful wave of magic slammed into every single object in the room, and the entire inventory shrunk down for Quinn to levitate and bring out of the suitcase. After thoroughly cleaning the room, Quinn set up everything where it belonged and got back to setting up the wall.
First, Quinn widened the wall to wall indent in the roof and floor to accommodate the increased thickness of the glass wall. He then pulled out the shrunken glass wall and expanded it slowly so he could line it into the indents that were on the top and at the bottom.