Chương 88: 87: War Wizards and Alchemy

"Now, are you going to give me the other scrolls?" I asked.

"I thought you wanted to do Alchemy today." Rupert replied.

"Oh yeah," I said.

"We better do that first." He nodded.

"We could do the War Wizard scroll real fast. It'll be attuned to your Earth specialty. It only has a few perks and the two skills to choose from for now. You should choose the Defense subclass and the distance perk two, and probably just keep on adding to it. There are three options, but no one takes the middle one. It splits offense and defense up. Any Wizard you face will be able to outclass you unless you are way more powerful than they are. I went offense, but it fits my path better."

"Alright," I said, and picked up the scroll. Congratulations: You have activated the War Wizard Combat class! You are now Level 1. You have chosen the Earth Wizard specialty. Your perks and skills will be tied to Earth magic. You have been granted the following perks. Earth Magic Density - You are able to instill an additional 10% more earth magic into any offensive or defensive spell you cast, making it more potent. Distance - You can influence earth and stone in a 10% greater arc.

You may choose from the following perks, or increase the level of a perk you already possess. Despite technically having unlimited time to make my selection, I was mentally done, so I chose the Distance level 2 and got my earth magic influence range up to 20% farther. You have three subclasses to choose from. Defensive Specialist - Your defensive combat skills are 10% more powerful. Offensive Specialist - Your offensive combat skills are 10% more powerful.

Mixed Combat - Your offensive and defensive combat skills are each 5% more powerful. Honestly, I didn't see how 5% was that big of a deal, but I chose Defensive Specialist. It didn't really matter since I wasn't using this class on the regular. Congratulations: You are now a Defensive Specialist War Wizard! Please choose from the following skills. Magical Suppression - You can now channel mana to suppress other spells. (Note, You will only be able to suppress an amount equal to the mana you possess.) Magical Redirection - You are able to shunt mana of any type in another direction (Note, you will only be able to suppress an amount of equal to the mana you possess.) Magical redirection actually seemed like it could have a minor offensive ability, so I took it and popped back out of System time.

"Alright, let's head to the alchemy lab." I said to Rupert.

"Lead the way, oh fearless leader of the homestead!" he said in a dramatic fashion. We wandered out into the cool Chwefror air. It was still just shy of noon since none of my class selection stuff had taken any real-world time. Rupert's first question was, "What's for lunch today?" I looked over at him and chuckled.

"You know, I don't have any clue. I'm no longer involved in any food decisions. Probably a stew though, I smelled bread baking earlier." He rubbed his belly.

"I hope so, I do love stew when paired with a good crusty bread." We made the short walk to the alchemy lab, then I looked at the row of heavy barrels.

"What level are you?" I asked. He was eyeing the barrels dubiously, but he answered.

"35."

"Great!" I said, patting him on the shoulder.

"Help me lift these barrels, they weigh more than four hundred pounds apiece. We need to put a barrel in the commercial still to see what else we'll need. I've never refined oil before so I have zero idea what I need to do to make diesel in this still. It's way more game-like than anything else I've encountered." Despite some minor grumbling, Rupert and I managed to get the top off the barrel, and then lift it up into the top of the bin for the commercial alchemy lab.

The oil wasn't so viscous that it didn't easily flow, but it was thick enough that if we hadn't had two strong men, it would have been a pain to pour into the bin. I started off with one barrel, about forty gallons. When the oil had been emptied into the still, I walked up to the interface and activated it.

I looked through the menu and saw: [Items in bin - 40 gallons of crude oil] I clicked on the oil, then I saw the following screen: [Options for crude oil] Refine into fuel (Note: You will receive a mixture of products. Unavailable, needs further ingredients) Refine into Naptha (Unavailable, needs further ingredients) Refine into Synthetic Rubber (Unavailable, needs further ingredients) Refine into Hydraulic Oil (Unavailable, needs further ingredients) Refine into Motor Oil (Unavailable, needs further ingredients) (Note: A small percentage of all waste sludge will be usable as a lubrication product) Hydraulic oil! I didn't need it now, but it even being a possibility was amazing! Love what you're reading?

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For now, I clicked on the first option, and it brought up another menu: [Ingredients needed to make fuel]: Crude oil, Sulfuric Acid (or sulfur and lead), Fluorine, Iron powder, Lye (note, you can choose to change your fuel output between 40-60% light to heavy) I exited that menu and checked to see what I needed to make rubber [Ingredients needed to make Synthetic Rubber]: Crude Oil, Naphtha That made me laugh, so I clicked on Naptha [Ingredients needed to make Naptha] - Crude Oil, Pitch, Sulfur, Quicklime [Ingredients needed to make Hydraulic Oil] - Crude oil, Zinc, Whale Oil, and Silica Tincture [Ingredients needed to make Motor Oil] - Crude Oil, Zinc, Silica Tincture Once I'd looked at all five of the things I could make at this level, I got another notification about new quests, so I opened my quest tab: Buy an Alchemy Table (1/1) - +50XP Completed Refine Oil into Diesel/Gasoline/Naptha - 1XP per gallon Refine Oil into Hydraulic Oil - 1XP per gallon Refine Oil into Synthetic Rubber - 1XP per pound You now have 72/244XP needed to reach level 6.

By the System! I thought. That was going to be a lot of XP if I could continue with it moving forward. Out loud I said, "Sonofa, even with a magical still, we're gonna need a bunch of ingredients. The good news is that if I'm understanding the fuel output correctly, we can use a slider to get up to 60% diesel. I think that's what it means by heavy versus light fuel. With my 20% fluid volume increase I should get like 29 gallons of diesel per barrel. I don't know what we'll do with the gasoline for now.

Once we've put something in the bin, the option to do something with it pops up, not before."

"How many things, and in what quantity?" Rupert asked. I realized I hadn't seen those numbers, so I got back into the screen and clicked on the fuel option. I saw that once I moved the slider, it showed me numbers. For every barrel of oil, I needed roughly ten pounds of each ingredient.

"Well, that's not great," Rupert said.

"But all of those things are available, well, the Sulfuric Acid is rare, but if you can use sulfur and lead as a substitute, then we can make it happen. I'll have to go see the mayor though. We're not making your oil today."

"Alrighty then," I said. I was disappointed, but now I knew that we could do this thanks to magic and alchemy. On Earth, this was a complicated process that wasn't as simple as throwing ingredients together and, poof, we had diesel. On Talamh, it was going to work. Rupert looked at me critically, then said, "Is this all going to be worth it? Is it enough fuel for you?" Any feelings of disappointment fell away as I did some quick mental math. I had just about seventy gallons of diesel left.

With my bonuses, a whopping sixty percent fuel burn reduction at the moment, I would burn around ten gallons an hour, just to plow. That would be between one hundred and eighty and two hundred gallons of diesel for all three hundred acres. I was just going to use the Salford moldboard plow on everything again this year. It wouldn't hurt anything, and it was more efficient than the ripper. I'd need to disc after that.

I could realistically disc forty acres per hour and keep my power output below seventy-five percent for that extra ten percent fuel bonus. Let's say ten gallons per hour for eight hours. Up to two hundred and eighty gallons of diesel there. Corrugating would be ten hours at as little as five gallons per hour, and planting would be no more than, say, fifteen hours for the full three hundred acres. Planting potatoes used more fuel than corn and wheat, but still say seven gallons an hour.

That would put us around four hundred and fifty gallons of diesel to get all the crops in the ground. With twenty barrels of oil, giving me 29 gallons of diesel per barrel, that was five hundred and eighty gallons with what I had. By the time I was done doing mental calculations, it was my turn to give Rupert an unhinged smile.

"How soon can you get the ingredients?" I asked.

"We need to get ground work done soon. I want to plant wheat in less than a month. If you can get me all the things we need, I'll have enough fuel to get all the work done, and still have enough left over to make the bishop happy." Rupert sighed dramatically and said, "I'll go tomorrow. Give me a farmhand, and a wagon. On one condition." Warily, I asked.

"What's the condition?" He gave me a wild grin and rubbed his stomach.

"I need you to make more of that blackberry ice cream, and I need a piece of pie. Probably some blackberry cordial too." I laughed. I could make that happen. Since we couldn't do any more alchemy, and it was midday, we went to lunch. It was indeed a stew. There were some potatoes, carrots, onions, and beef. There was plenty of salt and garlic, so even though it would be a lot better for dinner, or even tomorrow's lunch, it was still pretty good.

The bread I'd smelled that morning was piping hot, and there was plenty of butter to slather on the bread and dip it into the stew. I talked to Laeth about taking Rupert into town the next day, then I went out and checked on my magical seals on my tractor. Once I was confident they were in perfect shape, I went out to last year's cornfield to see why it wanted me to plant beans. I looked at the field and mentally focused until I felt how to activate my Wizard skill.

Once I understood what I needed to do, I saw a hot bar pop up in my vision. I was able to pull it to the bottom of my vision, then I mentally clicked on Nutrient Regulation, and I saw a greenish overlay on my vision that showed a spot a little over an acre wide. I lined it up with the outside corner of the field and clicked on the skill. I saw a screen showing an extensive chemical readout. The screen had a series of bars that looked like they'd show from bright green down to red.

Just like the readout on my tractor for my tier 2 class. It included three tabs: Key nutrients and conditions: Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium, PH Balance, Good Bacteria Health Secondary nutrients: Sulfur, Magnesium, Calcium Then, finally, micronutrients: Zinc, Iron, Manganese I could click on each bar to see how the nutrient saturation was. Everything but Nitrogen, and the PH Balance were firmly in the green. The nitrogen level was showing as yellow. So was the PH Balance. It showed that a PH level between 6-7.

5 was ideal. This section of the field was at 5. 8. Things weren't terrible, and my corn crop would have been just fine, but that's what I got for removing the corn stalks instead of either plowing them under or letting the cows eat them and spread their manure around. I wouldn't be bringing the guy back to bale up any cornstalks again this year. By the System! I never did ask what happened to that guy! I needed to find out if he was okay. Every action had consequences on a farm.

Feeling a renewed sense of guilt, I cast the spell for nine hundred mana, and everything was fully in the dark green again. I repeated the process a second time, and that section was fully green again as well. Only nine more days and the whole field would be fully recharged! I'd still plant beans, but if I wanted to, I could plant corn again. I also triggered two activations of my quest: 2X - Use your Nutrient Regulation Skill to regulate the nutrients in an acre of soil.

20XP You now have 20/100 XP needed for level 2. Leveling up Wizard wasn't going to be quick…

The War Wizard class is misunderstood by the uneducated masses. Most hear the term War Wizard and envision Wizards flinging fireballs or causing massive rents in the ground. Instead, the War Wizard class is a symbiotic class that empowers the spells and skills a Wizard already possesses. There are some general spell skills that can be picked up that are unaspected, but they must be created by a Tier 2 or higher Wizard, and they are rarely as effective as a spell or skill aspected towards a Wizard's natural element.

While it is possible to evolve the War Wizard class, it is almost unheard of. A Wizard must repeatedly use an unaspected spell as their primary spell during battle, and only a healing aspected Druid would even be tempted to do so. Excerpt from, Beyond an Intro to Wizards and their Elements, by The Archwizard Gwydion Harris. The 12th Dean of the Londinium Wizarding College. Note: This book is not available in the Angleland Guild Store.