Project Overworld

The following day, Keith dedicated all of his free time working on his firearm.

In the meantime, he had to prepare more and more weapons for Amber and her guild. They were being a bit pushy and also asked for higher quality weapons.

Naturally, Keith did his best to hide the fact he had access to large quantity of iron and gunpowder.

He heard that the New Dawn was having troubles with some other groups, but Amber and her friends quickly got rid of them as they were superior in numbers and in weapon quality.

Amber was really thankful to him, she never expected to find someone this resourceful.

Their commercial relationship had improved a bit, and Keith had a little margin of error in the crafting of weapons for the guild, meaning they wouldn't get rid of him at the first occasion.

'Okay, now I need to carve here...'

Keith was now finalizing his rifle. It was a very old model, with manual reload like in the Middle-Age. But it was his first try and he did not have enough precise tools nor did he have the resources to make a more modern firearm.

Anyway, after putting some gunpowder in the barrel and an ammunition he just made, Keith went to the forest to try it out.

After a few minutes of wandering around, he aimed towards an animal passing by. It was around a hundred foot away and it was grazing peacefully.

Keith took a deep breath and released the trigger but as the weapon fired the bullet, he nearly fell to the ground and the animal quickly ran away. The knockback was really strong and as it seemed, the aim was a bit off. Nevertheless, it was a good test and it gave him hope for the future. He had to make some adjustments and the rifle would be fully operational.

In the meantime, Keith also worked on his engine and already created a big furnace destined to burn coal. The part that troubled him was the conception of an energy converter to produce electricity.

While disconnected, he was studying a lot to have a better understanding on how generators worked and on electricity in general.

Thus for the next several days, he worked hard on the steam generation and the cycle to produce electricity with heat. He will be using the river next to his base to pump water into the generator to cool down the steam created by the furnace.

Eventually, he could even use the strength of the current to produce electricity, but he didn't have any plan for that yet.

Unfortunately, he had to put an halt to his project because he didn't work on the cables that will lead electricity, nor did he create any machine that could utilize this power.

Things that he could really need right now was huge manufacturing machine such as sawmills and other cutters to refine materials faster.

Thus, his plans switched to constructing these sort of machine before completing the coal generator.

A few days later, Keith finished working on the manufacturing machines and stretched copper cables from his generator to them. He was really excited to finally test the fruits of his labor, and he only had a few details to finish concerning the generator itself first.

Thus, Keith spent the whole morning finishing the system generating electricity.

A water reservoir was placed right next to the furnace and would turn into steam because of the heat generated by it. The steam would then make the blades of a complex generator spin around and generate electricity. Keith also installed a pump in the river to make a cooling system transforming the exceeding steam back to water. The pump worked with a mechanical wheel that Keith needed to spin but eventually when the generator would start working the wheel would be activated automatically by electricity.

In fact, his generator would be self sufficient only needing a coal replenishment every now and then.

Once his generator finished, he ran a quick test with some charcoal to make sure everything was working properly.

Keith began a fire in the furnace using coal, and waited for it to heat up a bit.

He then went to the pump and started spinning the wheel.

After a few minutes, he heard the generator's blades buzzing out loud and Keith grinned happily.

It seemed like everything was working, aside from some details concerning the water pump and some loose cables. The noise coming from the generator itself sounded quite odd too, but nothing too concerning.

'Now that this is out of the way, let's see what I can do about that rifle of mine.'

'It's been quite a while since we got attacked by other players.' Amber thought.

She remembered the conversation she had with Alan the day before :

"We can't loosen our attention. I heard some of the bigger guilds were pretty advanced technology-wise and started making swords out of various metals." Alan said back then. "We must prepare and get a few steps ahead of them before it's too late." he finished before disconnecting for the night.

'Looks like things aren't settled yet, we'll need to be extra careful.'