I currently sit inside a workshop that I bought for my project. I'm not an expert in any of this but I need to try. I open the seal vile from an alchemist I bought earlier and pour the contents onto a plate. I then wait for it to change colour. It will start out green and will change one shade for each bar of mana that is changed. It is set on four bars, which is about the highest you'll find in Ectasia with a few exceptions of higher or lower spots.
Within about twenty minutes the oily substance had gone completely black. I checked the piece of paper it came with, and it read at the bottom. 'If black, test has either failed and needs to be retaken or mana levels exceed measurement capabilities of twelve bars.'
I hypothesized that it might be because nothing here actually uses mana meaning it has just slowly built up over time. At least now I won't have to deal with any mana shortages. I then open the rune book and begin to inscribe a rune onto a two-inch square steel tile I bought. Once the complicated rune was done, I grabbed my testing kit and saw that the metal was now letting of about 0.039 of a watt in constant output. Usually, it would be stored in a second rune of a micro-array which was enchanted onto weapons so as to allow guards to apprehend someone without killing them.
At least that's what I thought. Must rune mages or smiths either ignored me or said that they just copied that specific set of runes since they lacked an understanding of how it worked. I agreed since it definitely wasn't from the lightning affinity since that one is more like arcs of plasma. Maybe from the storm affinity then. It's extremely rare and a rune smith who happened to have a storm affinity a long time ago made it.
Now for experimentation. I tried writing the rune on the other side with my scratcher and found that it actually reduced the charge somehow. I then tried superglued two together and found that for some reason that worked, and the voltage output actually decreased to 0.062 which meant the more I add the less effective they would be.
A few days later after ordering a bunch of little two-inch plates which this time were made of Steel with some zinc, magnesium, potassium, and graphite. It was the same thing used in batteries. I had ordered them from a guy with a metal CNC machine in the area and decided to just hire him and buy a new machine for him to use.
I wrote the rune into the alloy which was slightly softer this time. This time it came out at about 0.098. Which was a huge improvement. Now just came the time for some clever engineering. First, I needed to test something. Could I write runes without me actually being the one to write them. I started up the laser cutter and programed it to cut a rune which was much more efficient and accurate than mine.
It failed. For some reason, it just never started siphoning mana. I grabbed some mana liquid and after some effort aerosolized it. I totally didn't take my face off and needed to use the greater healing scroll. If a spray was added after having planted the rune it would allow it to actually activate. This was great since even if the world found out about runes which I might just say I found somewhere, only I will be able to make them since you can't get many stones in this world. At least I hope not. I shiver at the thought of unrestricted magical on technology synergy being achieved. If that happened every HFY fan's dream would become reality.
For the next few weeks my time is split between trading on the stock market, being at the dojo, and visiting Rachel. Talking with ariel, practicing wind magic, hunting fodder and copious amounts of failed prototypes. I eventually settled in making 4mm by 8mm rectangles made of steel alloy which are the perfect size to fit a rune. I built a machine which uses a magnet to make the metal go flat, then spray a tiny amount of mana onto the piece. Carve the rune with the laser, then toss them into a bucket. Then comes the tedious part. After 3D printing a rig which comes in about the size of an AA battery but a rectangle measuring about, 5mm by 10mm by 25mm. The plastic casing is checked for damage and a copper frame is inserted which connects all the power cells. After that each of the twenty cells are inserted like draws in a cabinet and the whole thing is glued shut. Coming out of it is both a positive and negative connection. The total output of the final product is 3.7 watts weighing about 27g. So, it's essentially a double aa battery but instead of lasting about an hour at that wattage output it will never end. So far, I haven't noticed any degradation in the cells but that will only be found with time.
I dub the power cell, Gimel which is just a Latin way of writing the name for that rune. I begin to calculate something. According to google, a tesla needs on average 340 watts to move. If I take that into account, then about a hundred cells would be enough for infinite range in a car with some power to spare weighing in at around 2.7kg. Yeah, that's scary. I've basically solved the world energy crisis and it only costs about a two hundred maybe if I create a production line.
What about other basic runes which don't require arrays to function and wouldn't work here and can't be shrank down. I could only use basic runes since any other need to be connected to others and have energy run between them causing an array to have to be certain size. That problem didn't exist with basic runes.
What about fire runes or ice runes for cooling and heating. Wind runes to decrease friction and earth to increase tensile strength. Don't mention ones like space and gravity ones. Gravity ones are the ones I want to research the most since the ability to manipulate gravity while having it be precise enough like a computer you could most likely create stuff like FTL.
The future is definitely going to be exciting.