I run quickly to the stables from where I got the manure last time. The smell did not get any better in the meantime, on the contrary, it got more painful, sharp and fresh. The reason became soon apparent. The old heap was taken away, leaving behind a smaller new one.

  I forced myself and filled two sacks, then ran back. I went ahead and opened five of the clay sacks I had. Based on the size of the kiln and the wall inside compared to the forge I thought I need about this much. By adding two sacks of cracked bricks and all the dust I could gather from the carving of the cinder stone blocks, I obtained my refractory mixture.

  It was well into the night when I finally finished packing the inside of the kiln. In a few more minutes a fire was burning in it, a fire powered by coal. In the fire chamber me and Magnar had added a tray with big holes on which the coal would burn. I closed up the opening above the tray and dusted myself off.

  It was a long day… Under the moons silver light I could see the overgrown weeds tremble with the wind that just started to beat. A cold wind, not bitingly so, but enough to send shivers down my spine. Another promise of the winter ahead, or perhaps just a coincidence.

  I took a bath quickly and headed up to bed. I seated myself, with my back against the bed frame, and let my awareness sink. I felt the aether in my pool. The shards that just stayed still in it, yet didn’t seem to impede the flow, intrigued me.

  I focused on them and started to shift them. It was… hard, like trying to move your belly button to a side without laying on a side. But this was not right… Or couldn’t be right. These days I was using the shards without any hardships. What was it that changed?

  ‘I’m not moving the aether of the shards… I’m moving the focus points that naturally formed in my pool over time… It’s so hard cause I always avoided influencing them so that I could continue absorbing aether naturally to saturation…’

  With this theory set I was pleased. I started moving them some more. As soon as I was retracting my intent, they would stop moving. After some more experiments, I discovered that the shards had only one sense of flow. If I were to spin or alter their position, I could change the way aether flowed naturally in my pool without focusing on it.

  This discovery had a lot of potential, but for now I had nothing I could do with it. As it was getting late I climbed into bed and closed my eyes, awaiting with slow breaths the embrace of sleep.

  The second day, I went to classes. First on the list was weapon maintenance I was there early and waited for Magnar to appear. He came later this morning, along with all the other nobles we had class with.

  “Hey, what took you so long?”

  “The servants washed my uniform, but they can’t use aether, so it was still wet this morning. I had to ask for help from another student in the dorms since I didn’t dare try it with my body or use aether and risk burning it up…”

  “I guess that would be a problem…” I smiled wryly. It was my fault he encountered such an issue, he wouldn’t have needed a wash on all uniforms so soon if he didn’t help me.

  But I did not apologize. It was his wish to help, and he found my work interesting. I had no reason to be sorry since he found the entire thing worth it. However, I needed to see to getting some work clothes for him. I had my old village clothes made of leather.

  The door opened anew and the professor came in. The class trickled by as the teacher showed the kids how to polish and sharpen a blade, and how to clean it. He explained well the theory behind the way the blade would be held during the processes, but it was pointless to me who had learned all this from Master Fjorn a year before.

  Then came artifact theory, which was a bit more interesting. For now we mainly had to learn a list of artifacts, their effects and the way they got their functionality. On the list were both some weapons and some tools, including the tea brewer I had seen in Cassia’s carriage back then.

  General studies came right after. It was the most entertaining class as the professor had a lot of humor. The main focus of this entire class was to bring together most of the classes and especially mathematics, arrays, beastology and weapon maintenance.

  After classes were over I took Magnar to find Professor Vorna, the one that taught us beastology. It took a while and a lot of asking for directions but we found him before he entered his next class.

  “Professor Vorna!” I shouted to stop him from entering the class as I ran enhancing myself with aether and stopped right next to him after.

  He looked at me with a raised brow, bringing his hand to his hips.

  “What is it? What are you looking for me for?”

  I took a moment to catch my breath and answered.

  “I need, if you have, a long feather from a beast… As long as possible. It’s for a device I’m making, and it just seemed like the best option.”

  “Well, I obviously don’t have one on me. Wait for me to finish my class then we’ll see.” He answered thoughtfully. “But after your device is done I want to see it.”

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  “Alright.”

  Magnar caught up after Professor Vorna entered the class. We waited together and after an hour and a half, the door opened again, older students coming out. The professor came last and closed the door, then led us away.

  From the second floor we found him on, he took us to the ground floor. There close to the exit, he led us into a special room. It was freezing cold inside and various beast corpses were laid on the tables around us. He told us to wait at the entrance and he headed in.

  Soon after he was back out with a feather as long as my fore arm and palm extended.

  “This was the longest I could find, use it well.”

  “Thank you very much.” I answered with a bow. Then we left.

  With the kiln done but still burning, we spent the day forging. This time I made a sword. It took way longer, and I almost did not finish hammering it until Magnar had to leave. Luckily we faced no problems and managed to quench it that day.

  After Magnar left, I turned my attention to the device. There were still no news from Cassia related to the materials for the array, but if I succeeded, I could just set up the array using a bunch of tuning forks of different lengths. It would cost at most two silvers that way, even with failures along the way.

  I changed the frame of the device. Instead of having the tuning fork horizontally I placed it vertically and connected the feather, cleaned of the hairs, leaving only the bony part, to it. The feather was elastic and would as such catch all vibrations as they would travel down to the tip sequentially.

  The only issue still standing with this design, was how to make it record. Using ink proved to be a bad idea, and due to connecting the feather with its base facing up, it would also be hard to have the ink flow properly and not leave blotches.

  After a bit of deliberation, I had Magnar carve out a stone to make a tray like shape. Then I scooped up in it some of the rancid oil. I made an open fire and started burning the oil. Not literally but like when you leave the frying pan with nothing in the oil over the fire and it starts smoking.

  After it burnt like that, I set it aside and continued sharpening the sword. I had Magnar blow some air into the kiln to raise its temperature in the meantime. Before it was too late, I had my sword polished and sharpened. The oil had cooled, and it hardened.

  It was perfect consistency, just a bit stinky still. Its smell still went down considerably, so I could afford to take it over to the array room. I took my roll of paper and installed it in the device again. I placed the tray with the oil right below the roll and raised it until the paper roll was just barely scraping it.

  I had Magnar help me carry it. We arrived at the array room where Professor Hargrave was having an experiment with an array. As we entered, he slammed a table. The rocks and conductors arranged on it jumped and scrambled.

  “The hell is wrong with it! All these rocks worked as replacements in other arrays!” He said not noticing us.

  “Uhm professor… Would you like to take a break and perhaps assist us?” I asked announcing our presence. It was not good to get too hung up in a project. Besides from what he said… The new array he was working on might not work because no two minerals have the same specific frequency, meaning if he just replaced them all the result would be too different from the expectations…

  “What is it!?” He turned around, his face red and his eyes popping. I could see the small veins in his eyes, it was scary.

  “Please calm down… sir… It’s no one’s fault that the array didn’t work…”

  “Haa… I see you brought that ridiculous thing again…” He said slumping back, resting against the table.

  “Yes, I have adjusted the design to obtain the desired effect…”

  “Oh? So, you think it will work now?”

  “I’m certain.”

  “Let’s see it then…”

  I had Magnar place down the assembly and coil the rock tied rope to its roller, while I connected the paper to the powered roller. Then I started the gathering formation and let the rock fall. The paper picked up fat, and the feather moved, whisking the vibration received by the tuning fork in the fat. It left behind a clear trail without the friction of the ink.

  I quickly observed an issue, the fat wasn’t getting distributed evenly on the paper so I quickly started circulating aether through the tray and through the oil, heating it up a bit, just enough so it would cling more neatly to the paper.

  Magnar and Hargrave were looking incredulously at the feather, that was trembling seemingly on its own. I kept an eye on the markings and when I saw they started repeating I stopped the mechanism.

  “Here, this is it… The way the formations work… Only one step away from being proven. Well at least I hope so…”

  “How did that move?” The professor yanked me and placed both his hands on my shoulders and pulled me in really close. I raised my hand and pushed his face away.

  “First, distance please… Second, that’s a tuning fork I forged. It’s a basic artifact, it reacts to vibrations in aether. I just used the feather as light lever arm to leverage the vibration it picked up, amplify it so we can actually read it.”

  “You’re telling me you created a recorder for the hum of aether?”

  “Wait… That thing had a name?”

  “It’s something you find out about with experience… I was going to teach you about it in class by the end of the year. It’s how we tell if an array works… It’s kind of an aether circulation technique for the ears, used to listen to the arrays…”

  “And you never thought that might be how the arrays controlled aether?”

  “No… Or rather no one found a way to reproduce it without arrays, it’s not like we could turn it to sound since in sensory input it felt different.”

  “Did anyone think about it?”

  “Yes but no one could prove it so it was ignored after a while… Wait… So you figured this out without having even heard about it… Do you have a way to reproduce the hum of the formation?”

  “Yes… But it’s through trial and error… Well, it’s just using aether against a nonconductor and trying to match the vibration… With the tuning fork reacting to sound or aether it shouldn’t be hard…”

  “You have no idea what you created!”

  “Oh I do, don’t underestimate me.”

  “Leave this here, I’m not letting this go until I match the vibration of the gathering formation.” His eyes were trembling and his hands shaking in a manic frenzy…

  I left with Magnar quickly.

  “Great… You barely passed a week of attendance and you drove a professor mad…” Magnar shook his head as he talked.

  “He was crazy before I did anything… I just brought it out…” ‘Don’t blame it on me… I was just curious.’

  We parted ways. Well the professor would prove my point for me… That meant less work for me. Besides… In order to actually use all that, mathematical formulas would need to be developed. I wasn’t so bored to scribble numbers for no reason… I understood how it worked and it was enough for me.

  Now I needed to see where this could be implemented, who knows? I might just speed up my cultivation of aether with this.

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  ?? Author's Question:

  Using a tuning fork, a beast feather, and smoked oil to record magic waves... Cato's "MacGyver" engineering is in full swing. What modern device do you hope he tries to reinvent next?