Chapter 873: Watchmaking

Looking at the number of wooden b.a.l.l.s in front of him, Eisen let his mana infuse the enchantments of two of them. They both rolled forward at the exact same speed, at least according to the speed measurement device that he improvised.

It was a simple item that looked at a specific area and could lock onto determined objects, measuring exactly how fast they moved, saving the specific speed at certain intervals. On top of that, it could measure the time it took for an object to reach a specific line; Eisen made this item specifically for this test. And from what he could see, the two b.a.l.l.s were moving almost exactly the same speed.

One of them was a wooden ball made from regular oak, and another was made from a dead oak treant"s wood. The one made from the treant"s oak reached the "destination" fractionally faster, but the top speed between the two objects seemed identical. The only difference was that the treant oak ball accelerated a tiny bit faster.

Eisen repeated the same thing a couple more times, always coming to the same conclusion for these small, one inch wooden b.a.l.l.s.

"So there really is a difference there. Treant wood is at the very least more receptive to these kinds of impulses," the old man muttered, running his fingers through his beard, "Or, at least with this method of enchantments."

Eisen glanced over at the other wooden b.a.l.l.s that he had made. He had used a few different approaches for enchantments with a pair of treant oak and regular oak; he wanted to see exactly what part the treant wood influenced, so having more reference points wasn"t a bad idea.

He swapped out the b.a.l.l.s with the simple force enchantment and then grabbed one that was enchanted with a magnetic repulsion approach. He tested these out a couple of times, and then swapped them out for another pair, doing this until he had tested out all of the different enchantments. And with each of them, the conclusion was simple.

The treant oak b.a.l.l.s were more responsive to the enchantments, but everything else was the same. And of course, because the treant wood was able to accelerate differently, if Eisen adjusted it, he would be able to get the same exact results, just using less mana, which was exactly what he was aiming for. However, he was still just curious about what exactly was going on with these treant oak b.a.l.l.s.

They accelerated quicker, as if the oak had less "drag". Every physical object had drag, as ma.s.s always wants to keep its state. When it"s static, it wants to stay static; when it"s moving, it wants to stay moving. The heavier the object, the more this was the case, hence why things like cars couldn"t just stop instantly and had a breaking range.

In reverse, it took a certain amount of force to get even small objects to move, even disregarding things like friction or air resistance, and with the treant wood, it simply seemed like that drag wasn"t as strong. At least, that was the case when making use of enchantments. Enjoy new tales from m-v l"-NovelFire

Just blowing on the wooden b.a.l.l.s and letting them roll down a slope, everything was the exact same no matter which wood it was.

However, Eisen still couldn"t be sure if this was the effect of the pa.s.sive infusion with the treant"s mana, or if it was the effect of the evolution, or a mixture of both. Eisen needed to figure out a way to test each individually, which shouldn"t be the hardest thing in the world.

He was currently infusing some regular oak with the treant"s mana to be able to see the effect without any interference of the evolution aspect, and once Jyuuk figured out how to breed treants, they should be able to push one to evolve at a high speed, not giving its body enough time to become properly infused with its mana to any noticable degree.

"Actually, maybe Xenia knows a way to reverse the infusion," Eisen muttered to himself. He hadn"t thought about that approach yet, but that was certainly also a possibility. While he didn"t know any method like that, it didn"t sound unreasonable for it to be possible. But for the time being, Eisen had to wait for the oak wood to finish being infused.

Eisen stretched lightly; there was something else that he wanted to work on, the thing that he was planning on using the treant wood for in the first place. Clocks.

He had made some watches and clocks in the past, but doing it here was still somewhat different. Of course, he could make self-winding watches, where hand-movement would cause an oscillator in the clock to move, using that energy to wind the watch up. However, Eisen didn"t want to just make any clock. He wanted to make the kind of thing that survived lifetimes.

The kind of watch you could forget about for a hundred years and find stored in a cupboard later; something that certainly happened to longer-lived races. Eisen was sure it happened to him plenty of times.

Even on earth, he had found objects he had completely forgotten about more than a decade after putting them away, and figuring out that these objects still worked fine was always a great feeling and made him appreciate them even more afterward.

The watches should be good enough to become heirlooms, and the larger clocks should be able to work without needing to be wound up in complicated ways. And for that, you would need some sort of energy source that wouldn"t run out. Obviously that in itself wasn"t possible, but it was possible for Eisen to make a power source that replenished itself.

If he could minimize the amount of mana that was needed for high-precision processes, he could make clocks that were run completely off ambient mana. Town clocktowers might need to be placed in locations that tended to have a higher flow of it, but a small watch might be able to survive off the faintest, barest amounts of mana. That was the goal that Eisen had for this.

Luckily, he only really needed a few small pieces to be powered by mana to make a clock work, so he could turn a single treant into literally tens of thousands of watches.

But until then, making the watches themselves and making the enchantments as efficient as possible was also important. Even the watch that Eisen was wearing right now wasn"t a regular, mechanical watch.

He had created an enchantment that would take care of everything, like the correct rotation speed for each of the six hands, three for earth"s time and three for this world"s time, and then attached the finished hands to it and called it a day. Since he had plenty of mana to spare, he didn"t have to worry about the efficiency and just threw it all together.

However, what he wanted to make now was a proper, decent timepiece with all the small gears and springs that a watch needed.

For this, Eisen was going to need to make a prototype, and the simplest way to do this was using mana crystals. He could just use trans.m.u.tation to properly shape the pieces and make sure that he had everything and that the watch worked in the end.

And then, he could use those pieces to make a mold to pour metal into so that he could make more watches, marking the pieces that would need to be swapped out for the treant wood parts once he figured that part of it all out.

Creating the prototype was really quite easy and didn"t take too long; Eisen"s precision with trans.m.u.tation was quite high, after all.

After creating all the individual cogs, plates and springs, trans.m.u.ting the springs to make sure they could actually store the energy that was needed properly, he began to work on the enchantment for the central cog that was going to affect everything else in the clock.

It was a very simple rotation enchantment, though he had to make it a bit more complex to make sure that it would run smoothly without any mistakes that might pop up by uneven mana flow or other outside interference.

He carefully placed all the pieces into the simple prototype casing that he made, attaching the hands and closing everything up in a way that nothing could happen to the sensitive mechanisms.

He turned the crystal watch around and started engraving an enchantment onto the underside, which would allow the watch to gather mana from outside sources, in this case, the individual that was wearing it.

And after Eisen turned the dial on the side to adjust the time properly, he placed it onto his wrist next to the watch he was already wearing, and then decided to wait. To make sure that he had created it properly, he was going to need to wait for a while, to see if he needed to adjust the size of any of the cogs or the tightness of the springs.

If the watch was off after a while, then he would need to readjust it, and if not, then he could proceed with this piece as a reference point.

But either way, he was already quite happy with this prototype timepiece that he had made; it didn"t actually drain that much mana from the user, though it was still a noticable amount that might have long-term effects on someone with little to no mana to begin with. If he could make this more efficient as he was hoping, then he could have it drain mana from the air instead of from people.

But for the time being, this was a pretty good start.