Chapter 16-413: Chop and Shop (2/2)

Permanent Walls of Fire were also great heat sources for bigger Steam Engines, too. With my Caster Level, the only risk was anti-magic, and that was largely dealt with just by enclosing the thing.

Needless to say, me being willing to burn the goldweight to Cast such things gave my Allegiance a huge advantage in the re-tooling process, much to the dismay of the competition. This, in turn, led to other shenanigans which had to be addressed, and show our lack of appreciation for aggressive business tactics.

Saving the world was no excuse for costing wealthy people money, power, and influence, after all. If they wanted their own Permanent Walls of Fire, they could just pay the market rate, after all.

Wait, wait! Wasn’t it impossible to use Walls of Fire for a Heating System? The magical heat just evaporated twenty feet away from them, after all. It was all just magical energy.

That was precisely why steam power was a thing in magical worlds, because water interacted with magical hot and cold differently than most things.

Instantaneous magic had almost no lingering effects on physical objects. Fireball a stone, you could pick it up seconds later without harm. Walls of Fire didn’t really generate updrafts past twenty feet, as the air lost the heat, and basically just revolved around there getting hot, the same temperature as all the other affected air. A suit of armor under Chill Metal would collect a coat of rime, but an inch away from it, you could barely feel it was cold, despite the fact it could almost freeze your finger solid with a touch.

When those things hit water, well, as long as the water changed state, it could capture the heat exchange.

Fireball water, and you created steam... and that steam wouldn’t just collapse back into teardrops, it could still scald you. Icebolt the water, and you’d create a line of ice... and it would remain behind and melt totally naturally.

If it just stayed water, almost nothing would happen. The change of state was part of the capture process.

So, Walls of Fire, boil the water, heat exchange the steam, and you have a very clean heating system... or steam power. Walls of Icefire, do the same thing, cooling system... or mass refrigeration. No freon needed, tyvm.

Naturally enough, this added more stuff for me to do, and more spells for me to Cast. There was really nothing out there that could compete with a Permanent spell Cast at 50+, and Wall of Fire was one of a handful I could do that with.

Frying more goldweight every day, that was me. Those rods with my trademark silver-edged black flames (or black-edged silver icefire flames) suspended between them were soon some very high-in-demand items, and every major smelting company worldwide was willing to pay through the nose to get a set for themselves.

Or steal them, but that was generally a bad idea. I made those things VERY easy to track... So swallow the one (or two, or three) –time outlay and maybe keep your foundry going in the New Normal that was on the way.

Traveler was also a Captain of the Magitech Industry! Who’da thunk?

Naturally, such requests piling up were being sent to Heavenbound Hall, and my schedule was starting to look a mite crowded at times. Couple all that with expansion of business and recruitment of people for factories and the like, and yeah, I was helping Heavenbound Hall with some serious expansion plans.

The Church of Harse had always been big into banking, but without computers, electronic bidding, and the communication network that had driven international finance, that whole industry was starting to sputter and falter. Mechanical logic engines had to be put in place, leaning towards ever more precision engineering demand... there were all sorts of places to invest in and develop with great speed.

The more radical ‘leading edge’ financial firms were already going into free-fall as their business evaporated, as they lost fortunes in ‘stable industrial firms’ basically overnight and couldn’t unload their positions. My warnings to Heavenbound Hall had given them a big jump on getting out of vulnerable positions and moving money into more usable assets... or to start backing development of businesses themselves.

Job turmoil was going to be another thing driving conflict once the Shroud went down. My warnings gave nations and people time, and of course some weren’t going to make that adjustment, and then blame me and everyone else when it all came true, creating more chaos and discord with their own selfishness.

It would all settle out, because the demand for actual manual labor only increased in a magical world. Magic wasn’t made by tech, after all.

Hells, if all you did is craft-coin work, i.e., tripling the Value of raw precious materials, you had a steady job forever. It was one of the biggest training careers we were undertaking now.

There was a path of thought that magic items, once made, would stick around for a good long time, and gradually saturate society, meaning low magic would be available to everyone.

That was possible... but unlikely. Magic items could be Burned, the raw power removed and put into other items... which, generally, were more expensive items. That meant that opportunistic people would simply grab the low magic stuff and concentrate that power into fewer, more powerful possessions of their own.

So, the world would never be swimming in +1 magical Stuff. That +1 Stuff would be Burned to make +2 stuff, which would suffer the same fate for +3 stuff, and so on, and magic would always be expensive because of that.

It meant magical stuff would always be luxury goods. The only exceptions to this would be Permanent or very long-lasting spells, like Eternal Flames or Eternal Lights and the like.

And Energized rare materials.

Guess who was currently providing lots of those?...