An Unbound Soul

There were rather more than yesterday's three or four students in the classroom. A lot more. The room was packed with what must have been over fifty people, some seated at the school desks but a dense row of others standing and lining the back and side walls. I spotted Adele among the standing audience, and she gave me a happy wave. Apparently she wasn't some sort of ghost forever bound to the delvers' guild store after all, and could indeed leave it from time to time.

Eric was in the middle of the room, a couple of seats away from yesterday's runecrafting teacher. Bethany seemed to have found her way in, which wasn't a surprise given the impromptu calculus lesson I'd subjected her to, and was standing inconspicuously to one side. In the front row, the elf Vargalas was wearing his usual frown, seated next to another elf. The other side of him was, ridiculously, Lord Reid, and the sight of the town lord sitting at a school desk sized for children would have been enough to make me freeze up, had I not already frozen up completely at the sight of the packed room. The other side of Lord Reid was the guild master, who I noted had a bottle of amber liquid sitting on his desk, presumably in case I started saying something that he found upsetting or liable to cause him to have to do work. Next to him were a couple more dwarfs.

Of course there would be this many people. I'd already had this discussion with myself over the gold coin, yet for some reason I'd expected only a half dozen crafting types. In the midst of my panic, I cast [Minor Charisma]. More charisma would help with public speaking, right? Shame I'd only be able to keep it up for less than ten minutes.

ding

Skill [Minor Charisma] advanced to level 10

Slightly more than ten minutes. Better, but still not nearly enough. With a tad more System provided confidence, I took my place at the blackboard.

ding

Skill [Privacy] advanced to level 11

Skill [Privacy] advanced to level 12

Seriously? Who was that? Judging by the surprised faces of half of the audience, the answer was everyone with an appraisal skill. Well, fair enough; I'd have probably done the same thing. At least my audience were being polite and quiet.

The lesson plan I'd devised was to start with maths. After consultation with Bethany about what standards were like here, it turned out that Pythagoras' theorem was considered cutting edge, so today was going to pile on some other kiddie grade concepts, like trigonometry. That already posed a problem; I could remember a bunch of rules and relations, but when it came to actual numbers, I did it on Earth by hitting the relevant buttons on my calculator. How the hell were you supposed to do it manually? I knew there was some infinitely long formula, but I couldn't remember what it was. I was just going to have to use a lot of approximations, then wait for the more intelligent listeners to invent maths properly.

Fortunately, that sort of maths wasn't actually needed for day-to-day life, because skills would fill in the gaps. Need a truss to hold up a roof? A carpentry skill would tell you exactly where to cut the beams. It would only be trying to do stuff outside of the System for which it would be vital.

I'd chosen Newtonian mechanics for the next lesson because that would make intuitive sense to everyone. After that, things got murky. Thinking back to what would be considered basic science on Earth, one of the early things that was dealt with was light, and how darkness was its absence. Try telling that to a darkness crystal, which didn't produce some sort of light-eating cloud around itself but actually beamed out rays of darkness, casting inverted shadows. What the physical basis of that was, or if it had one at all, I had no idea. I held out some hope that lenses would work, but hadn't seen any around. Or any glass at all, actually; even the Lord's manor didn't have glass windows. I could only explain the concept and leave it up to craftsmen to experiment.

My efforts to build an electrical generator for demonstration purposes were scuppered because I couldn't find magnets available anywhere, or anyone who knew what a magnet was. That was logical, since iron came from dungeons instead of the ground, and didn't have a chance to be magnetised. Conversely, I couldn't produce magnets, at least via the methods I knew, because I had no electricity. To escape that dead end, I attempted to throw together a potato battery, but I had to use copper and iron for the electrodes, which I was pretty sure wasn't right. Wasn't one of them supposed to be zinc? My voltage would be lower as a result.

There was probably something better than a potato, too; it was just the one I remembered from TV. Maybe a salt solution of any sort? Or did it need to be acidic? In the absence of low-powered devices like LED lights, I couldn't even prove it was doing anything, at least until I put together a solenoid and finally got at least a tiny amount of magnetism. My creation would just about give a noticeable pull on a thin iron needle. Pathetic as it was, it proved non-magical electricity was a thing that existed, which was good enough to add it to the lesson plan. Later on, I'd have to spend some time with Joseph back in the village, or find myself some lightning crystals to play with.

After that was chemistry. Iron rusted and things burnt, not to mention I needed to breathe, which was a promising sign that chemistry existed. On the other hand, no-one made steel from iron; it always came from dungeons. That was actually true of all metals, as far as I knew; nothing was mined except for stone. There was also the way that skills like the merchant's coin splitting quite obviously had as much respect for chemistry as Cluma had for personal space. I could explain that things were probably made from atoms, and the periodic table, and then again leave it up to someone else to do the actual legwork. Most elements on the periodic table would be unknown, given the limited range of resources that dungeons produced, but hopefully that was because no-one had dug them up rather than because they didn't exist.

I'd fit in one lesson on biology, largely genetics and inheritance. The concept of selective breeding might be useful. Or with farming skills and magic, it might not; I already knew [Phylogenetic Mage] was an attainable class, and I didn't want to think about what spells that came with.

Oddly, everyone knew full well what a brain was for and what the other major internal organs did. I was pretty sure no-one had actually worked it out; they were created already knowing in the seeding. Just like they were created knowing basic maths and language and why it was a bad idea to stuff random mushrooms in your mouth. The list of things people knew was weirdly inconsistent. Now we had a world with indoor toilets, restaurants and taverns, magical showers, Lord Reid's well-built stone manor, and yet no-one who could turn iron ore into iron or steel. I could throw in some information on cells and other microscopic level stuff, but people here already had better knowledge of macroscopic scale anatomy than I did.

The final lessons would be some practical applications. Gears, screws, pulleys, lenses, lightbulbs, motors, generators, windmills and waterwheels. How such things could be combined to make a music box, water pump, microscope, telescope, radio, bike or—if someone could get a lightning crystal powered motor going—horseless carriage. Of course, all of this was prefaced with a warning that this was how things worked in my old world, and applicability here was not guaranteed.

A warning which caused a significant chunk of the classroom to start muttering under their breath. This was really not a good time for people to start comprehending the fact that I was capable of not telling the truth... Vargalas was looking downright apoplectic, ready to explode at any second. And, in fact, he did.

"What the heck is this?! That's one hell of a convenient excuse. We were invited here with the promise of knowledge, and now it turns out it's just some kid making stuff up?"

Lord Reid responded by cranking my music box, the whole room peering over to see what was making the noise.

"No-one forced you to come, and no-one is forcing you to stay. If you feel you have more productive things to do with your time, feel free to do them. Speaking as someone who saw his status prior to him maxing out [Privacy], I can vouch that he holds a unique trait that strongly supports his story. I can also vouch that this music box is his design."

That was enough to quieten down the room. Apparently, while my statements were in doubt, that didn't apply to anyone else, even if they were only confirming what I'd already said. Thus I started my lesson, giving an hour's crash course in mathematical concepts while doing my best to highlight bits I couldn't remember or was unsure of. I think it went well; most of the original set of doubters were looking considerably more thoughtful by the end. There was a slight hiccup when my mana ran dry, causing my ratio of coherent words to nervous stutter to skew sharply towards the latter, but I managed to get a useful amount of stuff out.

Charisma increased by 1

So went the rest of the week of my abstract knowledge dump. I noted Vargalas had chosen to remain, albeit still wearing his trademark frown. In fact, after the first day, the class somehow gained a few additional people. The class remained quiet, with the only highlight being when I showed off my potato solenoid. That certainly caught some attention despite its low power, being enough to cause the guild master to reach for his bottle. My description of optics and lenses, conversely, did not go well at all; the reason I hadn't seen any glass turned out to be because there was no glass at all. That led to a short aside about glass manufacture. From what I remembered, you made it by melting sand and cooling it quickly, but surely there must be more to it than that? Was there anything else you needed to add? Again, I'd have to leave it to others to experiment. Lord Reid did confirm that Dawnhold had sandy beaches available on its eastern coast, so they had the materials.

The final couple of lessons on practical applications caused a great deal more feedback. It started along the lines of 'why would we need a lightbulb when we have light crystals', 'why would we need a water pump when we have water crystals', 'why would we need a telescope when scouts have [Farsight]' or 'why would we need a windmill when farmers have [Thresh]', to which I could only point out that my prior world had no magic or skills, and that anyone could use a telescope or a windmill without having to be a scout or farmer. When I got as far as microscopes, the gainsayers stopped. Apparently there was no skill or magic that would replicate that effect. When I explained how to build a bike, opinion went into full reverse and I could see the excitement building up in the audience. Surprisingly, they didn't seem to think much of the idea of adding a motor to make powered transport. Presumably the result would be sufficiently expensive or complex that it would have lost any advantage against space mages or portals, while with System-boosted strength, unpowered transport like bikes could be pushed far harder.

Hopefully that would be more than enough to kick-start some development, so I finished with some general advice about thinking for themselves and not assuming that something wasn't possible just because there wasn't a System skill for it, along with my half remembered description of the scientific method. Then I wrapped up with a couple of minutes describing things like computers, TVs, aeroplanes and other things I didn't have a clue how to build. With me done, Lord Reid took the stage.

"I hope that now everyone here can understand why I requested Peter to give this series of talks. I can see that many of you are bursting with inspiration, so I would like to take this opportunity to announce the creation of the Dawnhold research institute."

Huh? Research institute? That was the first I'd heard of it. I mean, Erryn did give me permission to share this stuff, but I wasn't expecting it to blow up this quickly... And again, why not? I kept underestimating just how valuable my knowledge was, even if it was just half-remembered scraps. Development had previously been suppressed by a lack of competition and the mindset that anything that wasn't done through the System wasn't worth doing at all. Now I'd just destroyed that mindset, and Lord Reid would be establishing research and development as an official job. Needless to say that despite the lack of competitiveness, everyone had a damn good work ethic. I felt a knot form in the pit of my stomach as I realised I had zero idea of the extent of the consequences of what I'd just done.

Lord Reid continued talking about his plans to make Dawnhold into a research town, dipping into technical details of funding and timescales. This obviously wasn't spur of the moment; this was something that had been carefully considered and planned beforehand. A long time beforehand; the elven and dwarven presence started making far more sense once he started talking about inviting collaborators from the neighbouring settlements.

I'd backed away from giving Erryn an answer on the whole Law thing at least partially because I had no idea of the consequences. If something wasn't broken, why change it if there was a high risk of making it worse? But now I'd done just that, accidentally. Oops.

Charisma increased by 1

Skill [Minor Charisma] advanced to level 11

Skill [Minor Charisma] advanced to level 12