Charging Up

Now that James knew he needed to absorb the fire element from sources of fire he went to collect the materials he had made for a test a while ago. He was stuck with a massive amount of sawdust from his carpenters and when he was wondering what to do with it had been around the time he was sorting a charcoal supplier, putting two and two together James decided the easiest thing to do was to make charcoal bricks.

He made them using coal dust, sawdust, and shredded straw, after mixing all of these into a powder it would then be wet to form a slurry shaped into a brick then left to air dry. They would burn for a long time and were an excellent way to use the sawdust he had as the charcoal bricks could be used for the blacksmiths as well or even just general fires. His first batch should be long dry by now, production of them had been going on for a while now, and it was one of the products he planned to sell in his shop.

When he arrived at the warehouse, he found that his workers had been able to make hundreds of bricks that were currently drying. There was even a large amount of them that had finished drying already. James took ten of them and headed back to his home where he went to his back garden and dug a pit in the ground and lined it with stones. It would function as a rudimentary firepit for now.

James threw the charcoal bricks into the hole he had lined with straw and lit the straw, soon enough all of the blocks had taken alight and were generating a large amount of heat. He saw a small stream of fire element flowing towards him, although James felt it still wasn't enough, so he decided to try something like a little test.

He took his spirit metal wire and bent it back and forth until a small section snapped off, he then ground it with a rock to make a fine powder which he mixed with some rust he had scraped off of a piece of iron he found sitting in the garden. Just with these two powders, he had made thermite, although it wasn't a tremendous amount it would be enough for a test. He placed the mixture of powders on a piece of dry bark and set it in the fire, after waiting for a while the dust finally lit, and James saw a large number of red lights fly towards him, he suddenly felt a large amount of power spread through his body.

Sitting beside the fire that was still burning James began to try circulating the fire element from his energy pool around his body, after working for what felt like hours, he was able to sense the fire element moving around his body. The next thing he wanted to try was guiding the energy to flow out the end of his finger to form a small fire on the tip of it. After trying to feel some sort of channel to move the power through James decided he would try visualization training to 'feel' the channels and after working with that for a while he finally had some small successes, he could feel the energy pooling at the tip of his index finger, it just couldn't escape his body.

James focused his mind and began visualising the flame as a small needle that was spinning to try drill its way out of his finger, instantly he felt something change and saw a long narrow beam of fire come shooting out of the end of his finger. He started to try and make the fire beam smaller worried that he would burn down his house or his garden, he began by stopping trying to get the fire to spin and the range was bought to within half a metre of his body, he could feel the fire element pouring out of his body through his finger.

Eventually, he was able to get the fire under control and had it down to a stable flame much like a lighter would have, he was able to speed up the movement of the particles as well while controlling the range of the flame, this would create a jet flame effect from the end of his finger.

With some trial and error, he was soon able to get the flame to come out of each one of his fingers independently or all of them at once, he couldn't get it to come out anything other than the end of his fingers yet but he would surely be able to do it with more practice. He next tried to imagine reversing the flow of the energy particles to create an area of low pressure; he hoped this would attract the element particles from the fire quicker than his natural absorption.

This proved to be successful, and the fire began to climb towards him, when it reached him he found that it weirdly wasn't hot as long as he was continually absorbing the energy, if he stopped then it would feel scorching. One problem he did have was that the particles from the fire almost felt like they were less potent than the ones he had gotten from the crystal, thinking of this he wondered if the crystal had some purification property to it that made the element more refined. James tried to force fire element back into the crystal but was unsuccessful.

The next thing he tried was to inject the element through the spirit wire and back into the crystal, he had some limited success with this and was able to force the energy back in if he tried hard enough. Seeing that the crystal could accept the element back into it from him, he began to wonder about recharging crystals; he couldn't always sit around collecting energy after all.