[D'sP] Swirl Rune - Chapter 382

Ally’s suggested project was dead simple. It really did match the old potato powered light experiment for kids. All Doyle had to do was carve one of a number of light bases runes onto a rock plate and then draw a swirl coming off it.

The swirl technically being the most complicated part as it acted like a receiver coil used pre-system to wirelessly charge stuff. Except, of course, that there was enough world energy in the dungeon that you didn’t need a transmitter coil to send it power. Going off of the potato experiment, the air itself was the potato.

Though for all the supposed complexity, the swirl was exactly that and the better you carve it, the better it could pick up power. Now, outside of a dungeon, there will be limits based on how much world energy is just hanging around and how active it was. Doyle didn’t have to worry about this and so the moment he had carved a small section of the swirl, the light rune began to glow.

He still finished his planned swirl, which did increase the lumens up to a point. Though the light rune met diminishing returns quickly and then completely stopped. Doyle was enthralled, why did it act like that? There were so many variables to test!

First Doyle settled on the swirl. While the theory behind it was complex, the reality of it allowed many simple experiments. Though first he kept reducing the swirl size until it had just enough length to fully power the light rune. That ended up making about a palm sized spiral. Big, but not too big and not optimized.

So what about a tighter and a looser swirl? The first was spaced so that the uncarved area was of equal width to the carved area, being about the width of a finger. To test a tighter and looser swirl, he made one with half the distance between the carved areas and another half again the distance.

Then, despite expectations, both did worse. Doyle didn’t want to assume he stumbled upon the perfect swirl from the start and so made many more test plates making finer and finer adjustments. In the end though, equal amounts of carved and uncarved turned out to be the most efficient within his dungeon. Ally clearly had a clue about why this was, but Doyle wanted to figure it out on his own and she respected that.

So, while still testing that, Doyle had to figure out another variable he can tweak. It was only when he placed one plate in an out of the way place of an active floor that he found a clue. Despite the one-to-one swirl having exactly enough space to fully power the rune, it began to flicker like a candle or the pulse of a heart.

With that in mind, Doyle placed all his other test plates next to it and observed. This was when some things began to click for him. The looser swirls showed even greater range of flickering, while the tighter swirls stabilized things. As for what was causing this? The very thing that made it so he was not able to do stuff on an active floor, the disruption caused by people.

That gave Doyle an idea, and so he set up an area with stagnant world energy. Well, pseudo-stagnant world energy. Cruft weighed the proper stuff down, but when Doyle tried to set that up, well, it just felt too tasty? Which was odd since normally there wasn’t a “taste” involved with his consumption of cruft. Anyway, he couldn’t help but eat the cruft before it was even close to stagnant.

Anyway, by pushing his will onto the world energy and faking it, he found that technically the wider spacing on the swirl was more effective. It was only “technically” because all plates were less effective as a whole. The wider spacing simply lost effectiveness slower.

Doyle wasn’t sure what the mechanics behind this was, but it seemed that spacing determined how active the world energy the swirl rune was able to effectively absorb. That led to the next question, does the width of the carvings matter? The answer to this one was an unequivocal yes.

Width of the groove affects draw distance and draw power inversely to each other. The bigger the groove, the further away it draws from, but the finer the groove is, the stronger the draw. And once again, the finger width groove proved to be the best middle ground, though thankfully how energetic the world energy was did not seem to affect this.

Though it was during this experiment that Doyle found the use for higher quality materials. If he made the groove too fine, the air itself would begin to snap and crackle, with the world energy no longer being able to flow. This solution was to filling the groove with copper. Except going finer would cause even the copper to begin to melt.

Of course, this was all just testing a swirl with a length equal to exactly what the light needed at what was apparently the optimal settings of a finger width for spacing and grooves. The next test showed that the size of the spiral acted strange. There seemed to be plateaus of effectiveness.

He could find no minimum or maximum with his current abilities. Though Doyle would certainly come back to this later as he wasn’t even certain the size had a specific modification it caused. Sure, going smaller than the size of a human palm seemed to mostly just make it less effective as a whole.

However, past a certain size, it seemed to start to mess with various values at random. Though Doyle did make note of a few sizes that seemed purposeful. If you made it big enough for a regular human to sit on it, the absorption stopped radiating outward evenly, instead being focused upward in a cylinder that faded after a couple meters. This one was clearly meant for human powered rituals.

Then there was the “natural” ritual size. Where if it was within a size range to surround a small valley, a few strange things happened. The direction of flow can go either way and the center could be “hollow” to allow for other runes to be placed inside the swirl. Also, it seemed to moderate the draw and hide itself as background movement as well as being more forgiving of flaws. If the last was for humans to power something, this one was to power naturally formed formations.

Beyond that, there was a ton of minutia around how you carve the rune and the materials, but those things seemed to be more general instead of specific to the swirl rune. However, Doyle did have one last piece of information on it. The minimum length of the rune was a circle and a half. Though saying minimum length is a little misleading as the limit has nothing to do with the length or even size. Rather, there had to be a spiral for it to be a spiral rune and one and a half full turns seemed to be the chosen limit on that.

When asked about all the coincidences, Ally shrugged, ‘They aren’t coincidences, so much as outgrowths of what you started. This is a runic system developed from your world’s myths and people. Of course, it is going to be fitted to human standards. Though runes are still magic. So, like the size variance, don’t expect it to ever fully make sense as long as you aren’t a True Immortal.’

Doyle couldn’t really say anything to that and so turned back to his tests. All kinds of tests, whether it was using all the light runes he can think of, not all of which worked. Replacing the light rune with others. That was mostly with obvious outcomes. And of course, playing with all kinds of variables when it came to carving.

These tests went pretty quick before he switched to something else. After all, the skill wasn’t just for such simple tasks. Rituals, formations, and just about anything else that uses runes should be possible with it. Well, technically, you don’t even need a skill to do those things, but it removed some of the major barriers to entry.

Doyle didn’t jump off the deep end, though. He settled for trying to copy the concept behind one appliance a team had brought back from the quest. A simple magic powered refrigerator. It seemed to work at the edge of magic and science, taking advantage of Peltier cooling boosted by a magic circle.

Not that runes they used were any Doyle recognized, but he could get the general gist of it. The Peltier effect is simple enough. You have two dissimilar semiconductors up against each other and run a charge through them. This results in a solid state heat pump. Before magic, it was useful in a few areas, partly for how controlled it was and the fact it was a solid state system that doesn’t use coolant.

With magic added, it becomes all the more useful because you can start to cheat with some rules of physics. Maybe not as a whole, but just to change a thin sheet of metal? That is totally doable. And so the magitech fridge had quite the efficient cooler that isn’t going to break down any time soon.

Doyle is going to cheat even harder. For the fridge, the magic circle is carved on the two sides of the Peltier unit, basically two metal plates magically welded together. Instead, Doyle placed the circle on the inside. Not only did this hide the runes if that was something you worried about. But more important, they were now using the other metal to conduct the magic through the runes instead of air. Wherever a groove was, the matching section is raised on the other plate.

While not massively more effective, by having only one rune that uses metal instead of air, it was more efficient by a decent margin. Though it took Doyle a bit to figure out one of his own runes that can use electricity for power. Sure, he could use the swirl to power the circle, but that doesn’t provide the control he wants. Besides, at some point, the people outside would get back on their feet and part of that will likely involve an electrical grid of some capacity.

Until then, the solution is simple enough. On one side, he places a magic circle that produces a small charge from ambient world energy. Then, on the other side, another circle that converts any charge into Mana.

Doyle had set out to directly turn it back into world energy, but it seems to be pretty hard to make world energy. Dungeons can do it because they start with Quintessences, which you can break down into any other power. Not that you can’t make world energy with runes.

The problem comes from the fact that technically, world energy isn’t a distinct power like Mana, Qi, or even Quintessences is. Rather, world energy is a mix of all other lower order powers. The reason it is called world energy turns out to be because most of the time, all those powers are like water and oil. They don’t want to mix.

However, through natural processes that happen on worlds with a biosphere, they come together and won’t separate without outside influence. Thus, “world energy”, the energy that will only naturally form on worlds. So, Doyle could only shrug and have the machine output any excess charge as Mana.

Though changing it to any other mystical power he had a rune for wouldn’t be too hard. In fact, the biggest reason he chose Mana was because enchantments can use it directly with more efficiency than if they only had world energy to absorb. That way, any preservation enchantments in the fridge would work better and you could put in more of them without causing problems.

The only problem was in fine tuning how cold and hot the plate would get. After all, it is a heat pump and not zapping away heat. Though presumably that is possible, it just wasn’t the goal with this test.

Anyway, temp control ended up being handled with a small sliding blocker in the swirl of the hot side’s circle. That allows you to control how much world energy is being absorbed and turned into electricity. And when it comes to the hot side getting too hot? Well, at least with the version Doyle had figured out, that wouldn’t be a problem. The plate couldn’t move heat fast enough. The hot side was not able to get boiling hot as long as it is open to air flow at least a little bit. Though that did mean it would take a while for the plate to cool down a fridge.

He Won't - Chapter 381

It's Not Complete - Chapter 383