I had time to think during the trip back about what sort of tasks I'd want to do while I wait for my mana to recharge when I'm harvesting fluorite from the blasted portions of the mine. What I decided I should do is take a short amount of time before I work on the fluorite to build a small building outside of the mine entrance to have a comfortable place where I can work on other projects while I wait. The project I have in mind is to start putting a bunch of what knowledge I can remember down onto paper. Things like the portions of the periodic table I can remember.

  One of the main hopes that I have is that by trying to reproduce certain facts from memory might help jog other portions of my memory that I'm having trouble with. Perhaps if I see a hole in the periodic table that I can't remember easily, the context of the rest of it will help me remember. Basically, any sort of visual tool to help explain certain processes, I feel like I should get put down on paper. At the very least, should I die prematurely, those works will hopefully help spur technological advancement much faster than might otherwise occur.

  I also considered the option to start designing some new facilities, but we've got a bit of a backlog of construction projects from both the civilian and the military construction teams. Anything I design now might end up getting postponed due to changing circumstances in the war anyway, so I think it's probably better to try to preserve what knowledge I remember.

  We made it back yesterday, and considering we weren't gone that long, it wasn't surprising that nothing had really changed since we left. The next ship is a few weeks from launching still, and the first two of the points of interest in the mining tunnel ended up just being bulges of a different layer that intermingled with the rock layer above it.

  With a little help from a construction team and some of the workshops in town I was able to get my small shed built and furnished in three days. Considering my ability to work around the clock, having a building here also lets me store some preserved food, limiting the number of trips I have to make back to town, which lets me work for longer stretches of time.

  The minecart I requested was already present here when I arrived, so it fell on me to start building a cart track into the mine. I mostly used stone shaping to do so, which, when combined with the need to use thermal regulation deeper in, meant it took some time to build out. Ultimately, the track was completed after an additional eight days of work.

  While I was waiting on mana to build the track, I started reproducing various visual aids from memory, and then pondering on them for some time to fill in my gaps in memory. I had to draft the periodic table a few times in order to get it roughly correct, though there are dozens of elements missing. There are a lot of information pieces that really only come back to you when you're working on something like this.

  For example, recalling how many new elements appear in every second row. It's an interesting pattern, directly tied to how many new electrons can fit in each orbital. Something I haven't thought about in a long time. In any case, the numbers follow a nice pattern of adding four to the increase amount every two rows, so we start with 2 in a row, then add 6, then 10, then 14 elements. Knowing that though just meant that I had a good idea of how many elements were missing from my memory. With the aid though, I was able to recall certain elements that I otherwise probably wouldn't have been able to, like Vanadium.

  I also made a diagram for the light spectra that included various notes about what might be happening with zinc doped fluorite. I also wrote down notes with some minor diagrams related to both newton's laws of motion and gravity. As I worked on these sorts of lists and representations, I'd remember random other theories and factoids that I've started adding to a growing written list that I'll try to get written down. With theories ranging from evolution to plate tectonics to branches of mathematics, the list grows much faster than it shrinks.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  With the minecart operational, I was able to clear out about 10 tons of rock and fluorite a day from the mine, meaning about 1 ton of fluorite would be recovered a day. That equates to about 10 cubic feet of raw heat fluorite once it's properly sorted, which is the equivalent of a little more than two of the 3-foot artificial fluorite crystals we grow. The rate I made progress at meant that I had cleared all the rubble after nine days, meaning we'd either need to blast more rock, or I'd need to try to mine normally. The heat in the mine isn't that much cooler than it was previously, though it is noticeable if I watch my mana draining with thermal regulation.

  In the nine days that I was clearing out fluorite and rock rubble, I wrote down a handful of theories from the list I'd made, though the list still grows faster than it shrinks. As I started to write down things about plate tectonics, that led me to add on vulcanism and mineralization onto the list of things to write down. After the list got long enough, I took half of a day just reorganizing it into lower and higher priorities, since it was getting so long, and some of the items were quite esoteric and probably don't need to be written down until more important things are taken care of, like topologic genuses.

  With the fluorite mine needing to have extra work done, and our second ship being ready to launch soon, I put a wrap on my work here for the time being. I made secondary copies of all the works and lists, and took the copies back with me to the city. I've requested more copies be made in city hall, and that a copy of each be engraved on stone tablets for a more stable form of storage long term. I was quite careful to only let two employees in city hall know about this work, since the last thing I need is the elves catching wind of all these scientific theories. We'll keep them stored away safely until the time comes to utilize them.

  I'm hoping that after we launch the next ship, we'll have stockpiled enough cryogenic fluid again to be able to blast out the fluorite mine a second time. It might also be time to consider trying to blast some of the less dangerous leviathans that are still lurking around the island. They'll require depth charges and some engineering to make it work though. Thankfully, it's been a few months since anyone has spotted any fish or crab leviathans, so we think we managed to deal with all of them. No barges have baited in enemies either, so we might be in the clear.

  Considering everything we learned from building and operating the first ship, I was surprised at how many things we still had to fix on the second ship. They were all minor fixes and leaks, but there were still a lot of them. I waited three days for construction to complete, then it took another twelve to get the ship fully operational. Upon fixing the problems on the second ship, we took another five days going back over the first ship to check all the problem we found in the second ship.

  Sure enough, a little over half of them might have ended up becoming problems at some point in the future. In short, we're finding various weak points in construction that, due to slight variation in the incoming components and assembly, end up presenting more or less prevalently in different assemblies. The good news is that with each ship we build and launch, more of these will become known to us, increasing the robustness and reliability of the other ships in the fleet.

  We've also noticed a minor issue that can't easily be resolved currently. The issue being that when both ships are parked in the expanded dockyard, both ship's boiler systems compete for mana. On our island, it's not that big of a problem, but if they were travelling close to each other, or parked on a foreign dock, it'd probably be noticeable. Two ships probably wouldn't have a problem, except at the low mana zone surrounding our island, but as the number of ships increases, the problem could get bad enough that the ships might end up stranded if we aren't careful.

  In practice, that means these ships can't operate in a tight formation with each other. There is an interesting solution to that problem in the form of a flagship, should we need to make more powerful navies. The idea would be that a flagship could carry a 12 foot mana crystal, attracting the necessary mana into the area to power the rest of the surrounding fleet. That's just a hypothetical though as currently we have no need for such a design. A single one of our ships, especially once retrofitted with the faster firing cannons, could easily take on a fleet of any size of existing ships in other navies. Building a gigantic flagship would be complete overkill.

  Speaking of the faster cannons, I have a few dozen samples of stone to look over as potential candidates for the casing bottoms, so I'll work on that again for a short while until we're ready to blast more fluorite. We still need about a month's worth of cryogenic fluid before we have enough for a second blast.