WeTried Translations

Translator: [IncomeElastic]

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ I Became a Genius Engineer That Mega Corporations Are Obsessed With ◈

Chapter 007

──────

The External Mana Battery

A headache hit the moment my eyes opened.

Twisting a wrist brought up the hologram clock.

[ Current Time: 10:18 AM ]

"That's a lot of sleep."

Maybe the body just needed that much rest, being on the weak side. The instant I dragged my heavy frame upright, my stomach let out a loud, familiar growl.

This [Starvation Constitution] body was already demanding food.

First came the nutrient tube and water the old man had left behind yesterday. With those, the hunger settled enough to get moving.

It was the first day, so there was a lot to do.

Top of the list was checking the junk and parts scattered through the building.

Gordon's homework, making something that could turn a profit, was urgent, but one more prerequisite had to be dealt with before that.

This body, which threw up a mana overflow at the slightest pull on its mana.

In the game, it was one of the first problems to solve when going the magitech engineer route.

The simplest, easiest fix was to build an external mana battery.

And for that, materials came first.

"Hope there's something usable in here. It'd be great if I could build it from what's lying around."

With [Spellbreaker's Magic Eye] running, the rummaging through the junk piles began. Telekinesis made the work a little easier.

'Looks like the old man used to run some kind of garage in this district.'

Most of what was in here turned out to be parts for low-grade gear. As if to prove the theory, a fallen neon sign turned up in a corner.

「Titan Garage」

Before becoming Gordon's safehouse, this place had probably been a garage, not a storage building. And the stuff in here was leftover parts from it.

Some time into digging through the scrap heap, something usable turned up in another corner.

An electric battery for a prosthetic, the kind that goes into cyber gear.

Mages who can hold mana inside their bodies, or body arts users, don't need them. But for anyone else running high-output cyber gear, a battery sometimes had to be installed for power.

And what people who couldn't use mana relied on most was the electric rechargeable prosthetic. This was the battery for exactly that kind.

The outside had rusted from neglect, but the inside only needed a few damaged circuits patched to be usable.

'This should do for the time being.'

Truth was, this was something only an engineer would know. The engineering structure of an electric battery for cyber gear and a mana battery for the mana drive in a heart or dantian was nearly identical. The only difference was whether electricity or mana went in.

Strip out the remaining electrical circuits and the cutoff chip, engrave only the fine circuits that trap mana, and it could be converted into an external mana battery.

A box got torn open, and the blueprint went onto it first.

The battery couldn't just be hacked apart blindly.

Even if the two were 99% identical in structure, the remaining 1% was what separated an explosion from a finished product.

First, remove all the existing electrode plates and chemical impurities.

Second, engrave a triple-spiral mana storage circuit into the battery's inner wall alloy to hold the mana captive.

Third, overlay a guidance control circuit that could withstand the mana pressure generated while charging.

"Good. The design's perfect."

The moment the blueprint was done, a [Mana Thread] shot out from a fingertip.

The thread, given the <Heat> and <Cut> properties, melted the impurities, electrode plates and mana-blocking chip inside the electric battery, and precision telekinesis pulled the slag out.

Next, using the thread, the mana integrated circuit that would compress and trap mana was carved into the empty alloy wall.

The moment the circuit lines meant to hold mana were etched in and the final full stop was placed.

Zzing.

Mana seeped into the battery, and it glowed faintly for a moment.

"One down. Next is the charger, huh?"

Normally, mana worked like this: every time a user inhaled, the mana outside came in with the breath, was refined through the lungs, and charged the heart or the dantian.

But thanks to [Heart Mana Deficiency], mana was leaking out of this heart by the bucketful.

There was always the option of buying mana stones and using those, but there was no money for that.

So the plan was to build a mana charger.

Once again, the blueprint came first.

There were about four essential parts.

First, an intake motor to draw in air.

Second, a mana coil to absorb the mana particles drifting faintly through the air like mist.

Third, a filter to screen out everything in the air besides mana.

Fourth, a compressor to compress the mana particles.

With three of the parts laid out on the drawing, the next thing to work out was the mana circuit that would link them tightly together.

Before long, the design for a mana charger that could collect mana from the air and charge the battery was finished.

"Let's see. It used to be a garage, so there should be materials at this level."

[Spellbreaker's Magic Eye] went to work through the garbage in the garage's storage, and three key parts turned up.

A big fan motor pulled out of a ventilation fan, the filter from an old air purifier, and a compressor salvaged from an air compressor.

Unfortunately, there was nothing like a mana coil anywhere in the building.

"Can't be helped. I'll have to make one."

The metal most responsive to mana is mythril, and the next best is silver. Precious metals that expensive had no business being in a place like this.

But even here, there was a metal that could stand in for them.

Copper.

Copper had faint mana responsiveness and conductivity too, so it was perfectly usable as the coil's main material.

Though to use copper with its low conductivity, a fairly precise mana focusing circuit would be needed.

Carving mana circuits was the most important part of the game. If it was off by even a little, the gear being repaired or built broke down in an instant.

After dying over 300 times and raising one character for more than 100 years, I'd found carving mana circuits second nature.

Several strands of thin copper wire rose into the air on [Precision Telekinesis], then were carefully shaped into a coil.

'Feels like I'm already getting hungry again.'

Next, a mana thread drawn from a fingertip began carving a mana circuit onto the surface of the copper coil.

"Better not carve it too fine."

Considering the mana flow that had hit yesterday, caution was needed today. For now, only a simple circuit would go on this mana coil, and once the battery was fully charged, a new coil would probably have to be made.

To head off a mana overflow, the work went on with the heart's condition checked and breaks taken here and there.

Scritch, scritch.

When the last circuit line connected, the whole orange copper coil took in the mana and began to hum faintly.

With neither good material nor a perfect circuit, the output wouldn't be strong, but it wasn't bad for a starting point.

If decent material ever turned up, an upgrade would be nice.

The salvaged parts got laid out on the workbench, and the real conversion work began.

Alternating the <Cut> and <Heat> properties on the thread, an abandoned steel plate was cut and welded into an outer case to match the blueprint. Inside went the motor, the filter, the compressor and the coil, each in its exact position.

What remained was the mana circuit to be drawn with the thread. It was the hardest part, but not that hard for me.

Countless runs of it had been drawn while playing the game.

An arithmetic circuit that made intake air pass through the filter to be purified, run through the compressor and the coil, and flow into the charging terminal as processed pure mana.

An electric cable went onto the finished mana charger, and the power switch flipped on.

Whirrr!

With a pleasant sound, the charger was confirmed to be running normally.

"Success."

Left alone like this for a few hours, the prosthetic battery should be fully charged.

Honestly, once a mana user reached a higher level, the mana in the air alone couldn't keep up with how much they used, so they normally bought mana stones and the like to charge. But for now, at this level, a mana battery like this was plenty.

After the work, a check on the body's condition.

There was a slight stiffness around the heart, but thanks to the breaks, no overflow had happened for now.

[ Current Time: 03:18 PM ]

'A lot of time has passed already.'

While the battery charged, the necessary things needed buying.

First, a look at yesterday's earnings.

Repair fees from customers including Jack the mercenary came to 15,000 credits, and the apology money the Black Dog scrap left behind was 20,000 credits, for a grand total of about 35,000 credits. That was the entire fortune.

It wasn't much, but it had to be split up to get what was needed.

'Tools and parts are out of the question. Daily necessities and cleaning supplies will have to do for now.'

Pushing the building's door open, out into the open air.

* * *

By day, Ground Zero left an impression of dimness, with smog hanging in the air blocking the sunlight, so daytime felt even murkier than night. Compared to that, the night, with neon signs glowing in the dark, felt far sharper.

That didn't mean there was nothing to see.

The holograms floating everywhere drove home the fact that this was a completely different world from where I'd been before.

Maybe because it was brighter than at night, a lot of far more ordinary-looking people were walking around. Store after store, the daily necessities needed right now got bought.

Clean underwear, a few clothes that could pass for casual wear and work clothes. Hygiene and cleaning supplies.

The hardest part was buying food and water.

Decent food and bottled water cost way more than expected. With no choice, it came down to the same high-calorie nutrient tubes eaten last night, plus water purification tablets. The taste would be awful, but for scraping by right now, this was the best option.

'Maybe it's tolerable if I think of it like eating nothing but chicken breast back when I was grinding at the gym.'

Items on the store's counter, bills handed over, and then the store's speaker started playing music with an unfamiliar feel.

[ "You Ground Zero rats! Welcome, all you lucky bastards who woke up again without dying last night! This is Stan from 'Radio Zero'!" ]

Crackle... crackle...

The speaker must have been broken, because static cut in here and there, but the host had good projection, so the content came through clearly.

[ "This week's death toll is 152! Double last week! Probably thanks to the gunfight between gangs that broke out near the District 3 drain pipes last night! The Mantis Crew ambushed a Black Dog drug transport and cleaned it out completely." ]

The shopkeeper clicked their tongue like they'd heard it all before and bagged the goods, while the broadcast got an attentive ear.

It was all about Ground Zero itself, so it was worth listening to.

[ "With the drugs in that vehicle all gone, Black Dog is foaming at the mouth and having a fit. Which means those two gangs' bastards are going to be shooting at each other with murder in their eyes, so every bastard living in Ground Zero should forget about wandering around at night for a few days and hide quietly at home if you value your health!" ]

'If I'd slept on the street yesterday, I'd have gotten caught up in that gang fight and ended up as bullet fodder.'

A pretty useful broadcast. The shopkeeper was still packing up the goods when I asked.

"How do I listen to this broadcast?"

The shopkeeper glanced over with a prosthetic eye gone cloudy from damage.

"What? You live in Ground Zero and you don't know DJ Stan's show?"

Tch. Is that any way to talk to a customer? Not a fan. Next time, shopping somewhere else.

With that thought, the reply came.

"No. None of the broadcasts I used to listen to had anything like this."

It wasn't a lie, just the truth. Seol Gye-hyeon, who grew up in a facility, had never heard it.

"It doesn't run on the official corporate network. Turn on your network scanner, enter the ST-NET-09 string, and tune in the channel. If you just got here, you'd better make a habit of catching Stan's show. It lowers your odds of dying in the street."

Saying that, the shopkeeper dropped a nutrient jelly into the bag with the goods.

"Um, I didn't buy this."

"The nutrient tube you bought is good value for filling your stomach, but if you keep shoveling down that greasy garbage, your organs will melt and you'll be found dead within a month."

The shopkeeper jerked their chin, casual.

"The jelly I put in is cheap stuff, but it's got organ protectant and vitamins. Eat it alongside the tubes, and if it works out, come buy more."

That earlier thought, that this was no way to treat a customer, got retracted. With this much decency, a bit of attitude was easy to put up with.

"...Thanks. I'll make sure to shop here next time too."

"Yeah. That's why I'm giving it to you. It's not free. It's an investment. Don't die, and come back."

If the shopkeeper turned out to be a decent person after a bit more watching, maybe the prosthetic eye and the speaker could get fixed. For a price, of course.

With that thought, out the door.

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried