Chapter 11-329: What Normal People Can Do (1/2)

We were rolling out the information harvested from the Winter Solstice display. Those rockets getting fired off were all for very specific purposes, and all of them had been retrieved from the waters of Lake Huron, if at all possible.

Lining up the number of experiments and the devices to send them up past the Shroud, to whatever was Out There.

I was watching out the eyes of Gillespie Grundelbrun, one of the Artificers who’d been earnestly serving with the Shroudzones, and working on all the puzzles and measurements in the downtime offered him by his Item Familiar Puzzles.

“Here is the complete display of height attained, divided by fuel types,” Johnny Cho, the presenter, started out with. I studied the graphs he was showing in the Holo, working out the math by eyeball, painting in the data displayed and listing it out in my own Visual File.

Things were not looking promising.

All of the chemical fuels that worked under the Shroud had exploded within seconds of clearing it. Furthermore, samples of gasoline and aviation fuel, among other things, had also gone spontaneous.

The only fuels which lasted to the end were alchemical in mixture and nature, which had naturally added another layer of cost in the form of Energized components.

It meant that when the Shroud went down, all the gasoline in the world was going to light off, as well as anything else chemically refined, like normal kerosene.

Someone who invented a cheap way to make usable oils and greases alchemically was going to be very rich. Someone who held onto those processes was going to end up dead, so this information was getting published and put Out There.

Far more worrisome was the data on oil.

The various grades in the oil had started reacting VERY unusually when they went through the Shroud, according to the divinations pulled out of the sampling cores. They were starting to Animate and coagulate weirdly, pulling in negative energy of various kinds and degrees.

One had survived re-entry, and proved to be energetically eager to consume organic material, forming a Black Pudding as it grew.

It meant every single oil field in existence could evolve into something, and the ancient dead materials that were part of it were extremely dangerous substances that we really, really did not want to deal with.

I Summoned up Elrii, and asked her about it. She confirmed that the Black Blood of the Land was one of the things most sought after by the Tomblords of the various dead worlds, powering many of their great projects and enhancing their servants.

The Alchemists of Heavenbound Hall were soon redirected into a new avenue of research under the direction of one of my thoughtstreams. It had to be quick, as we were now racing the Shroud.

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“The pathing of the various substances and the various forms of batteries included in the coring samples are displayed here. Let’s start with the standard copper...” the new presenter went on, her voice professionally calm, but her face was clearly worried.

I looked at the circuit boards and wiring of various kinds, with varying amperage and voltage tolerances.

None of the mundane materials could contain an electrical charge. Standard computer memory and circuitry leaving the Shroud had slagged nearly as fast as the volatile fuels had blown up.

Alchemically-treated materials of various kinds had fared better. I studied the tolerance levels closely. They had managed to cram dozens of different kinds of materials in various sizes into the test kits, but of course that was a mere tithe of what was available. Much, much more testing was going to be necessary before the Shroud came down to get a clearer picture.

From what I was deducing, it would be possible to keep a more primitive computer working in a White Zone of purified mana, and certainly within a Grey Zone of anti-magic. Out in the normal world, no.

No more Vaccines and hand-held electronics like that. I sent off that notification right to Gritworks and other major electronic firms post-haste. Gritworks started cycling down production and re-tooling within an hour, and the other firms reluctantly began to follow.

Data storage and calculating engines were going to have to be entirely reconfigured at a lower tech level, and optimally with Energized materials. The first ones were going to have to get into place quickly in order to start transferring essential data from the existing databases.

Wonderfully, radio waves seemed to work normally for communication, although portable radios were going to be bulky and alchemical to function properly.

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“Stress tolerances for vakker technology was not encouraging,” another engineer, thin-faced and with bags under his eyes, went on to the next stage. The whole tree of vakker-tech still worked, but only at larger sizes... unless you used alchemical materials with supernatural heat tolerances, as lightning got VERY ornery when harnessed.

It just doubled down on the fact that any kind of computer engine was going to be bigger and a lot more expensive than it used to be. The exact tolerances weren’t known; I would need to Open the Sky and more rockets were going to have to go up, the latter of which were already being devised and transported to White Sands in New Mexico, with lots of Artificers from across the planet working on devising tests and measures for the modules inside them.

Entire industries were simply going to vanish overnight in the face of this information. The oil industry had better stop drilling NOW... and it might not be soon enough. Existing oil had to be refined, made non-magical, and then burned as fast and hot as possible.

The amount of push-back on that was not small, as there was a LOT of money involved. However, finding out the ecologically-damaging practices of oil drilling was also threatening the life of everything on the planet, the Landbound were going to be all over this shit, as were the Druids.