Awakening at end of the world: Arrival in Ouamua

CRAFTING THE THUNDERBOLT

CRAFTING THE THUNDERBOLT

"Orion, there is something about my mission here that I would like to tell you", Cartelle said to me.

After we relieved the town's siege from the scorpions, Cartelle revealed to me that he was in the desert on a mission to recover certain magical or religious relics from a tomb, but his team was mostly killed by wild creatures in the desert.

After witnessing my abilities in combat, he hoped to invite me to join his team.

"I would offer to you a large reward when we returned to Magisandria after completion of the quest", he asked me to join his mission and offered me a huge compensation for my effort.

Having nothing more urgent in the calendar, I agreed to the quest but only if he would help me make a few magic items first.

My Dragonslayer was a pretty weapon for a Barbarian, but it was not good enough for me. I could have much better equipment.

While I was making the Ballistae for the town, I found a wide variety of goods and products on sale in the markets of Abiru brought here by traveling caravans and merchants.

So, I went around to spend the golds I just made.

Although at first, I thought this was a medieval world, to my surprise I found many interesting products or parts that were almost pre-industrial age such as springs, screws, metallic tubes, magnets, rubber and various other mechanical parts and I wondered what these Ouamuans needed these industrial parts for.

Perhaps there were scientists and engineers in this world after all which I was yet to meet.

While we were looking for useful things to purchase, I walked into a dirty camel stable, and Sara found quite a bit of crusty white crystals on the ground.

I quickly scooped them up for Sara to analyze and "Salt-peter" was what she said to me.

"What Salt-petre? I struck a gold mine," I asked Sara who quickly confirmed her analysis to me.

The cattle manure was mixed with urines from the camels which in time chemically reacted to form natural potassium nitrate.

To find the crystals here in the unkempt stable was fortunate and there were many of the crystals around.

"What are you doing here?" the stable keeper suddenly asked me when he saw me loitering in his barn.

"I'll pay you some gold coins if you scoop up all these white crystals for me", I told him.

"Are you serious? You are paying me to scoop up shyte which I have to clean anyway?" he asked me to which I nodded.

After the stable boy gave me a few buckets of the white crystals in the barn, I filtered them and combined them with other chemicals that I bought from the traveling merchants such as sulfur and charcoal I mixed them into a batch of chemical.

"This batch is the first chemical propellants in this world", I told Kay who didn't know what kind of alchemy I was performing.

The discovery of the chemical led me to build a new weapon as I asked Cartelle to cast his magic flame and wind helix again, to create molten steel.

But this time, the steel was fashioned by the ironsmiths into many rounded pipes.

I was amazed at the level of proficiency of these ironsmiths in fashioning the required parts so I must have underestimated their skills before.

Although the pipes were slightly larger and heavier than ideal, they were crafted uniformly and without flaws, and they would eventually be turned into barrels and together with custom wood-crafted gunstocks and other parts such as springs and screws from the merchants, I built the first firearm in Ouamua.