My notes initially began as a way of organizing my thoughts and observations as I arrived in this world, so that I would not forget them as I looked back on what happened. This is now served by the countless discussion minutes that I insist on recording and the various compiled observations, lab notes and written works that accompanies the university. Indeed, I have not touched my personal notes for over one and a half years now, lying forgotten in my cabinet. I hope they prove useful to some future unknown historian but that would probably be stroking my ego too much.

Guilds and Economy

I started with serious misgivings about the guild system in Inath and have come to realize that the guilds exist primarily as a method to enforce law and cooperation when the government does not. It is only in the most recent generation that the larger guilds have taken on criminal methods to enforce monopoly rights.

At a time when the government does not enforce contracts, at least when not between nobles, the average craftsman has little recourse if a business partner does not hold up the other end of a deal. While the knights do arbitrate disputes according to a vague notion of fairness, this costs money and often more than whatever can be regained through fines and restitution. Hiring knights to attack the offending party is apparently normal too, looked down on by the Order but tolerated as long as the dealings are kept private.

This has restricted dealings to the immediate present. No futures or commodities market is possible in such a legal environment, much less the more complex instruments like company shares. Debt is only available to those of stellar reputation or huge assets, like Kalny and the Ironworkers, the common craftsman owning their own shop simply cannot find anyone other than friends or family who will loan them money.

In this environment, guilds who manage their own internal affairs and have rules governing behaviour on pain of expulsion thus provide a substitute for contract law. They also allow the member to use their membership as a way of borrowing reputation, and indeed, some guilds like the Ironworkers have evolved far enough that they also function like a financial institution, underwriting their own members' debts and allowing debt transfers to settle accounts. At least for those members who are in good enough standing, whether it is by points or ranks is dependent on the guild's internal rules.

It is a poor substitute for contract law. The failings are obvious, the large and famous guilds like the Ironworkers and the Order of Knights and even Pastora have got that way by completely dominating their market. No one else sells medicine or iron in any large quantity or to the same expertise as they do, and their size allows them to even affect politics to a limited degree. Pastora in particular has been strategically arranging marriages with the nobility for generations and much of the upper leadership are both nobles as well as healers.

My hope is that with Minmay's taking on the enforcement of contract and property law, the abuse of power that comes with hiring strongmen and bandits will disappear. The guilds are almost certain to protest the first time one of them has to be punished for doing so but the Minmay Guards are indisputably the strongest force of arms in the region. With the proper establishment of laws and a level playing field, I hope the free market forces will then take care of the rest of the dismantling of the guilds.

Weather and Astronomy

I've arranged for the university to take weather readings in many different places over the year in the interest of understanding how the climate works in Inath.

To say that there are no seasons is incorrect. With careful measurements of the sun's position, I do detect a rise and drop in the arc the sun describes through the sky. Together with that, there are also small shifts in temperature and rainfall, only a few degrees and millimeters of rain between the months. I can't give any accurate numbers without more years to average over.

I thought that this indicated that the planet does have a very small axial tilt but it seems the truth is more amazing.

The astronomical measurements have gone well. After spending a hundred Rimes or so, I finally obtained a number of manually cut and polished lenses. Part of the fee went to paying the glassblower to learn how to perform such delicate and precise work. They still have imperfections that make the image not as sharp as it could be, but now I have a crude telescope.

The first thing to do was of course to look at Selna. Selna's size has made it large enough to vaguely perceive cloud like things on it and I have seen it through the telescope. Selna has an impenetrable atmosphere, with multiple thick red cloud layers that obscure any sight of the ground. Over a period of weeks and months, I have observed small storms and even the occasional flashes of lightning between the cloud decks. Such discharges must be absolutely enormous if they can be seen just with a telescope like mine. Together with the red colour, I doubt the atmosphere is breathable.

Next I tried to track the various minor moons that the Inath astronomers have been using to count the years. I first guessed that they were planets but their paths as described were far too fast to be such, often shifting in the sky in a matter of hours, after compensating for the planet's rotation. Speaking of which, the planetary rotation as calculated from the moons didn't match the approximately 24 and a half hours we see in the day and night cycle. It took me a few weeks to resolve the contradictions.

Selna is a gas giant and we are on a moon tidally locked to it!

This explains why Selna never moves in the sky and even explains the day and night cycle, simply times when our planet isn't facing the sun in its orbit. It explains why Selna is so huge, because it is huge and not impossibly close. The planetary 'rotation' is really the orbit of our planet around Selna and the Little Night is the once daily solar eclipse caused by us passing into the shadow of Selna. The other moons orbit in increasing periodic resonance, being higher than us. The only one that isn't, bright and speedy Ecury, is a tiny lump, probably with an orbital period slightly longer than 12 hours. In addition, the moon system around Selna is almost perfectly aligned with the orbital plane, I think to less than a degree of tilt, which explains the lack of seasons.

Crude estimates of the gravitational constant with ball drops and timers have let me calculate our distance to Selna to somewhere between a hundred thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand kilometers. With the angular size measurement, that puts Selna at over twenty thousand kilometers across, I think that's small for a gas giant but I don't remember the numbers on Jupiter and Saturn.

Immediate use for these observations are not forthcoming. The usage of Selna to navigate is already known, having an unmoving astronomical object in the sky is simple enough to use, its position exactly reflects your latitude and longitude. But it satisfies my curiousity and puts the definitive final nail in the coffin that I'm not on Earth. Having a gas giant right in the middle of the habitable water zone does seem to indicate we're not in the Sol solar system.

Monsters

The zombies are tough. The few that we captured have all been destroyed by various methods, attempting to find different ways to attack them. To a large extent, powerful physical blows that sever body parts are the most damaging and the zombies are deanimated after two or three such blows. Unfortunately this also means that the most time efficient method to destroying them is melee, not something you wish to do against zombies, especially now that they have a laser-like weapon.

We are still unable to capture a specimen able to use the light beam attack. Such an attack seems to shed light in many directions, which normally wouldn't make sense for a beam of light. However, given the damage it does to walls and people it hits, easily burning off limbs and sometimes even causing minor explosions, I suspect the power of the beam is high enough that it is actually causing blooming effects in the air. I cannot say for sure but it does sound like the same sort of effect observed in the high powered lasers on Earth. In any case, the single flash of the beam is incredibly deadly and would be nearly impossible to stop if not for the faint glow that announces the attack. For now, the light diffusing Mist is our only defence, that and placing thick obstacles between us.

Zombie reanimation was tested and about a minimum of six zombies are required to reanimate another. Bodies of executed criminals were also provided for testing and I observed that the zombies do not cannibalize freshly dead bodies for parts. It takes some time in the presence of zombies before a body becomes valid for reanimation or cannibalization, time that increases the less zombies are present and the bodies never become zombies if there are less than six. I suspect the zombies do something to the body that requires six zombies worth of power at minimum.

The proof of zombies wielding magic has been confirmed by the magical sensor. Each zombie emits an aura of magic that overlaps with the others. This magic drops with distance but does not appear to have a defined limit, instead gradually getting more diffuse. The field is blocked by disruption magic barriers and none of the zombies' abilities, including detection and reanimation, work through one.

Behavioural testing the zombies show that they detect people at short range through the use of this field, the limit appears to be around twenty to thirty meters for single zombies, with larger groups of zombies having a further detection range. Zombies appear to prefer closer humans, without caring if there is a wall in the way. They will even path around a wall to attack people on the other side while ignoring the person across the room so long as their path doesn't bring them closer to the unobstructed person. In the absence of targets, zombies will attack magical signatures and animals, in that order. How they differentiate people from animals from plants is unknown but probably related to our lifeforce.

The longer range mechanism of detection is unknown. I did not dare to allow a sufficiently large group of zombies wander the countryside. We only know from tracking reports that the zombies do appear to be attracted to large groups of people even over the range of entire regions.

The most important discovery was the mechanism of their 'rest times'. Zombies stopping every ten or so hours has been a mystery ever since the behaviour was observed, one that has been ruthlessly exploited by every Knight commander fighting them in order to achieve surprise or secure retreat. On a hunch, I isolated a zombie in a huge magic proof room similar to a power box and kept watch through magical barrier glass windows too high to reach. Draining the room of magic, something known through experiments to stop magic power regeneration in people and animals, then caused the zombie to immediately enter 'rest' mode and it simply stopped moving until we let it out again, three days of motionlessness was sufficient to make the conclusion.

The zombies are powered by magic and their 'rest times' allow them to recover expended magic. When disturbed, the zombies begin resting much earlier as they never fully recharge. This conclusion suggests that a hit and run knight cavalry force could be used to keep suppressed a much larger force of zombies, an excellent stalling technique that Ranra could apply on the wide open Algami plains to the east. With multiple groups to take shifts, we might even drain zombie armies of enough magic to neutralize or at least reduce their light beam attacks.

Night Cryer samples have also been sent to the university by knights hoping to get some additional bounty. Seeing the wisdom of that policy, I posted an open bounty limited in volume over time to our budget. Requiring bodies of monsters recovered except for zombies, the more complete the body is the more the university will pay, with the most going to live samples.

In any case, night cryers were simple enough to find weaknesses for. As flying animals, a bit like a huge black bird, their weak point are the wings. Since they do not appear to fly using magic, unlike Elkas, the night cryer wing is fragile and susceptible to damage. I suspect they can't fly at all if too much of it is broken. This allowed the mages at the university to develop some new spells aimed at shredding night cryer wings. While not as simple as a firebolt, the 'net' spell exerts force at the level of breaking bones along it's lines. Compared to the usual forcebolt able to rip people in half, the lower power allows the net to be deployed over a much larger area to improve its hit rate.

A much more complicated version of the spell retains a core of power that lashes out at anything that the web touches. A bit like a proximity fuse. This version takes far too long to cast so a spell cannon version able to cover large sections of sky was made and the first spell plates have been deployed to Fort Yang, the usual site of night cryer attacks. We shall see how well this works.

Magic Theory

The invention of magic circles seems to have begun a boom in the magic industry. Previously, alchemy was a tedious process, both to use and to learn. It required large amounts of practice and power training to get anything useful. And all that dedication is rewarded with no useful combat ability at all, since training speed and ability to ignore distractions is a waste of time for alchemists who are expected to stay at home and make magic items.

Magic circles turn that completely upside down. All that is needed now is the theory on how to make an enchantment. Even I can make magic items, given the threads needed to make circles and a supply of stored magic. With generic pattern imprinters, the circle can be combined with the standard magical enchantment creation spells enchanted into the threads for any spell function except for magical material creation, whose imprinter type is still clunky and difficult to use. Integrating these to make a truly generic enchanter is the current goal. In this sense, magic circles function like a 3D printer for magic item enchantments.

Because magic circles take much longer to set up than a single straight enchantment by an alchemist, with errors being hard to correct once the circle is set in motion, some alchemists have been skeptical of it. I suspect they are simply threatened by something they see as endangering their livelihood and are just looking for an excuse. So with suitable timing threads and enough scripting, I managed to enchant a block of iron with a ridiculously fine layered disruption and Resist shields. A piece useless other than for demonstrating that the circles are useful because it was essentially impossible to make otherwise.

Regardless, once a circle has been tested to work as intended and properly set up, enchantments can be done repeatedly with little variation and virtually without error until the thread enchantments burn out. Indeed, Landar and I have set up circle configurations solely meant to enchant threads as components needed to make more circles and circle configurations for enchanting more of every thread type has been published as a book.

I am not sure who started it, but spell plates are now being sold in the Order whose circuits aren't like Landar's original spell plates but actually just magic circles copied into a static enchantment on iron. Probably made by circle too, since it has unnecessary complexity. However, this is a good trend, it means that the process of making spell plates are now being adapted into a more abstract form, instead of building a single purpose circuit that only builds one spell, people are just configuring a generic spell casting circle into the spell they want and fixing that in place. That and the fact that someone not in the university has made a meta-circle, magic circles which make more magic circles.

All that is required now is a source of magic that isn't human-powered. Not to disparage the trade in magical crystal of course.

Regarding the density gradient theory of magic, I cannot help but feel something is missing. The theory neatly explains why we can drain magic in a box and the theory of tapping power by moving magic from high density to low density areas. Magic crystals degrading completely when exposed to lower than ambient magic density is the primary observation and we have optimized the power box design to work a bit better. A ten percent increase by wasting less power not draining the box internals completely of magic. Magic power sensors can also be divided into signature detectors and density detectors, which are closely related but not the same. I have been using density detectors while thinking they were signature detectors, only recently has Landar managed to actually make a signature detector that doesn't react to density.

However, there are observations not explained by this theory. Magic density in spells are too low to explain the power they can exert and the lowering of magic signature as spells expend magical power does not correlate with a decrease in density. Also, magic energy density does not appear to be correlated with magic signature, since the empty crystal mines do not radiate anything detectable. Another point, lifeforce has extraordinary density, far more than even magical materials like mana crystals. But lifeforce has almost no signature.

I have no idea how to explain any of that, save to say that magic density is not the end of the explanation of how magic works.