NOVEL NEXT Chapter 119
The day after the group left the creepy town behind Argul started working on the fridge and, despite it practically being a completely different enchantment, she was much faster at enchanting this time because many of the things she learned seemed universally applicable.
The enchantment itself had to be able to cool down a volume contrary to her hotplates. This was easily done by converting any heat energy above a certain threshold, in this case 4°C, into mana, which had the side benefit of filling the enchantment’s mana storage.
There were a few caveats that Argul had to keep in mind however. For one, even though it sounded like the best solution at first, the enchantment couldn’t instantly convert any heat that entered into mana or nobody would be able to safely put their hand into the fridge. The human body was decidedly not made to be 4°C cold. As such it was better and safer if the energy was gradually converted.
Argul added two additional safety measures to this after some thought. Firstly, the enchantment would only work if the fridge was closed and, to prevent someone from accidentally leaving the door open, would start repeatedly flashing a white light if the door was kept open for longer than two minutes.
And secondly, to prevent the enchantment from leaching energy directly out of a person, the energy conversion would only be applied to gasses and not solids or liquids, much like a pre mana fridge functioned.
Another thing Argul added were channels that expelled any excess mana. The enchantment itself didn’t use a lot of mana and would actually produce more than it needed once it was done. She hadn’t noticed any adverse effects if there was more mana in the enchantment than it could hold in her previous experiments. Usually the mana simply left the enchantment once there was too much of it. She wasn’t sure if there were any damages so miniscule that even she couldn’t sense them though, but didn’t want to chance it and so tabled the problem for future experiments.
Aside from all those things and a lot of mana storage there wasn’t much else to the enchantment. The fridge didn’t need an interface, 4°C was perfectly fine if a little on the colder side. It also didn’t need a coordinate grid and although it was a little tricky to get the connection from fridge door to fridge body to work right, it safed space this way. The only downside was that there was a bit of mana leakage at the connection point.
Argul added a second light enchantment that activated when the door opened after she was done with the rest the first time when she saw how dark it was inside of the fridge.
Once she had the whole enchantment ready, it took her a single night of testing before it worked as she wanted. Argul could try to optimize the enchantment further, but she was starting to run out of time before her daughter's birthday and felt pressured to continue with her next project.
Her next kitchen appliance to enchant was a small freezer that stood right next to the fridge. It was a white cuboid about a meter in width and length and half a meter in height, like a good old chest.
The enchantment for the freezer was nearly identical with the one on the fridge. The freezer had to be much colder of course and Argul adjusted the temperature down to about -25°C, not really knowing how low freezers usually went. She added a small extra enchantment to the outside of the freezer door that, when manually activated by injecting some mana, would banish all water inside of the freezer, This should help a lot when too much ice accumulated and conveniently made it so that Argul didn’t have to create an on and off switch. Of course the freezer should still be emptied of everything else before using this enchantment, but that wasn’t anything new and so she didn’t worry too much.
After Argul finished with the freezer and started working on the oven the group began to visit villages along their way that they usually avoided to trade for food. They weren’t all that successful the first few times, lacking anything of interest for the villagers. That Argul didn’t change out of her fox form probably didn’t help either.
To remedy this, Argul and Arthur got together in their spare time and started to create little wooden animal figurines that would send a sphere of yellow light a meter above their heads when injected with mana. This was, unsurprisingly, a big hit to the point that some people started fighting each other to get them. It did leave a very noticeable trail behind as they traveled however, as they needed to sell quite a few of them because Argul refused to be an ass and rob people of their belongings in exchange for something that requires relatively little effort to create. Scarcity and capitalism be damned.
The fresh food they received in return did a lot to improve the quality of the group's measles and with that their general mood. They decided to visit at least one settlement a day because of that. It also helped that it was quite interesting to see how people lived and to meet said people, making the journey overall more enjoyable, though Argul regretted avoiding them in hindsight. It had felt right at the time, but looking back she could tell that was the instinct trained during her depression speaking combined with the desire of not wanting to be pestered by the church.
While the group traveled around, Argul continued working on the oven enchantment at night and made good progress. Of the four enchantments she had set out to create, it was the most complex as it combined many of the first three’s functions. At its most basic it was a reverse fridge, but Argul didn’t do simple and made it much more complex.
The oven, much like the hotplates on the stove, needed an interface and so, Argul copied the majority of what she had already done a few days ago, designating the control knob that was previously used to adjust the temperature of the oven as the on button. Using the scale from the control knob, Argul adjusted the interface to mirror that, enabling a person to choose between 0°C and 300°C in 10°C steps.
Before she could start on the rest of the enchantment, Argul increased the size of the interface and included a second display that would allow the choosing of different functions.
Modern ovens had a lot of functions, many of which Argul had never seen in use and or didn’t know how to use. She didn’t even know what some of the symbols on the oven in their camper meant.
That didn’t stop her from taking the 5 functions that she had used during her first life however, namely heat from below, heat from above, heat from above and below, equal heat everywhere in the oven and a simple light that was usually always on but included to give an option where the oven didn’t heat anything. The direction from which the heat came was symbolized by a straight line inside of a square, the equal heat by a fan and the light by a light bulb.
With the interface completed Argul faced the difficult part of the enchantment. To satisfy all the options she wanted to be available, she needed to create four part enchantments. One on the top and bottom of the stove each that would work like her hotplates, one similar to her fridge just for heating and a simple light enchantment. Doing these was comparably easy since she already had examples that worked, but connecting them to the interface was a bit of a nightmare of magical circuitry.
The addition of a second variable, the different functions, increased the amount of signals that had to be sent and mana channels that needed to be able to open and close, practically doubling the complexity of her work. The only reason it didn’t escalate too much was that the two different displays could be kept mostly separate from each other. Only the light bulb symbol necessitated a connection to the temperature control.
Thankfully she had a lot of space to work with inside the walls of the oven and though she would like to use most of that for mana storage, making sure that the enchantment worked was more important. Once she had that done she could optimize if necessary.
When all was said and done the oven could operate for four and a half hours at full power. The whole thing had taken Argul 6 days to finish and, excluding 2 days for a break, that meant she had 13 days left until her daughter's birthday.
Compared to Argul though, Luna was much more ecstatic about the oven and enthusiastically started baking a relatively simple cake after Argul told her she was done, torturing the rest of the group for the whole morning with delightful scents.