Chapter 139: Interlude Karl

Chapter 139: Interlude Karl

“Don’t you ever feel it’s weird, handling stuff this expensive?” Weinbaum, another engineer, asked Karl as he withdrew a carefully measured amount of Demon Lord Blood from his storage space.

“Sure, it’s as weird as everything else.” Karl said through clenched teeth as he concentrated on carefully pouring the substance into a prepared metal vessel, then added a few different chemicals “Just as weird as me being able to do this.”

As he spoke, the metal vessel’s top closed shut on its own accord, sealing itself with no seam or sign that it had ever been anything other than a featureless metal cylinder. It seemed to be an odd way to conduct an industrial chemical reaction, or rather, an alchemical reaction, but this was an exceedingly odd substance. If this reaction wasn’t conducted in a perfectly sealed container, and not just any container, but one far stronger than anything normally used in chemistry, it would blow up quite violently.

Or at least this kind of mixture would. Professor Chandler had created a dozen different processes to refine the Demon Lord’s Blood and each was vastly different from the last.

Sometimes, this stuff was distilled down using traditional methods, with the apparatus all the while being reinforced by the half dozen strongest [Engineers] on campus to prevent it from tearing itself to pieces. The resulting syrupy liquid had been more uniform than the initial substance and less likely to react volitively as the part actively being burnt switched from extremely slow to react to highly reactive. However, even though it burned evenly, it also burned far hotter than any device Karl and his fellow [Engineers] constructed could utilize or even survive.

Meanwhile, the current method used a few alchemically enhanced fire-suppressing chemicals to slightly reduce the volatility and ‘chemical’ energy contained within, reducing the potential yield but making it actually possible to use.

... the entire process also made precisely zero sense to Karl. As an engineer with a Master’s degree, he should have been fairly knowledgeable about how this stuff worked and he also had a decent grounding in chemistry. Yet all that was telling him was that none of this should work.

Fire suppressing chemicals reducing the chemical energy in flammable materials that were not currently on fire, all without creating an appreciable amount of heat or pressure, yet explode if there was a way for the energy to escape? Impossible!

In fact, it was almost as if there was something malevolent left in the blood, trying to ensure that no one could adequately use it. Sure, Isaac had reassured them that this wasn’t the case and that the substance was merely supremely volatile, but Karl was painfully aware of the fact that there were hard limits to Isaac’s knowledge. By his own admission, the returnee had not been a researcher in the other timeline and as such lacked the kind of knowledge that would have been truly useful in everyone’s research efforts.

If there had really been some kind of issue with using Demon Lord Blood, would he even have known about it?

But at the end of the day, there was nothing else to do, nothing except to continue experimenting until either this stuff finally submitted or an accident got past their myriad safeguard [Skills] and this entire lab got shut down.The roots of this story extend from novell bìn origin.

“Careful, careful, we don’t have much of that stuff.” Weinbaum warned Karl, but he merely rolled his eyes. Whenever Karl was handling this precious substance, Weinbaum started acting like a helicopter parent whose child had gone to school for the first time.

Not only were they peers, but they actually had far more of this stuff than one might assume because Isaac had given them a lot of it. Sure, he’d pawned off some to many different organizations and institutions, but those had been tiny portions, creating an illusion of scarcity, and all the recipients had been incredibly grateful.

“I won’t juggle it, if that’s what you’re worried about.” Karl grumbled, stepping up to their latest engine prototype. Once he’d judged the reaction in the metal vessel had come to a stop, so he peeled open the top and placed it in the intended receptacle.

Then, he skipped out of the room, shut the door behind himself and took up his position behind the massive, armored window that allowed them to view the process within.

“Ready?” Weinbaum asked.

“Ready.” Karl nodded, flipping open the laptop next to him “[Automatic Transcription], [Sense Structure].”

In other words, anything that happened in that room and was picked up by their senses or [Skills] would now automatically be taken down, and that range would now be vastly expanded.

“Really, Professor Chandler?” Jäger sighed “That seemed like an obvious result.”

“But now we know it’s the result.” Chandler replied.

“Was it worth it, though? An irreplaceable substance burned to ash, [Accident Simulation] on cooldown, and the room is more scorched than I’ve ever seen.”

“It was.” Chandler said with the infectious enthusiasm of a six year old let loose in a chocolate factory.

Karl just sighed and moved on to properly repairing the machine, his [Aura] sinking into the whole affair, each bit clicking into place and sticking there like a puzzle piece, foreign, burning mana being pushed out of the material to prevent it from interfering with the repair process.

Once more into the breach, he supposed.

***

“And this is the part where it explodes, right?” Amy asked, looking over the machine carefully reinforced by bands of telekinetic force.

“It’s not supposed to.” Karl muttered under his breath.

But nothing happened, the machine happily chugging along, growing faster and faster andfasterandfaster and ...

[Accident Simulation] activated, Professor Jäger came running, and Karl handed over some mana potions.

“This is new.” The Professor observed, looking over the melted mass on the table “What happened?”

“Everything worked perfectly, the machine was going faster and faster ... and then it turned out that the Blood can make the engine work at speeds well beyond what we built it for. We can harness the fuel, now it’s on us to provide it an engine that can take advantage of that power.”

“Alright, carry on.”

***

Engine number seven-hundred-and-nineteen chugged away happily, seemingly fully functional.

Karl stood in the room with it, proudly gazing out through the safety glass window ... where a bunch of his colleagues were standing, looking extremely apprehensive and like they were ready to fling themselves behind cover at a moment’s notice.

And the worst part was, he couldn’t entirely blame them.