After taking a shower I felt like an entirely new person. The creature comforts of civilized life are hard to shake, and I hadn’t had much time over the past few days to even think about it. Fortunately, the pump had filled up the tanks enough to handle running a shower for the two of us within the time I was working on the foundations and apartments.

I got dressed and walked out of the house, looking around to see if I could find Tom anywhere. I didn’t see him right off the bat, so I figured I would let him be and get started on the electrical system for the apartments.

Since these buildings were going to be expanded in the future, I didn’t want to install solar panels on their roofs now and have to remove them in the future. I decided to make use of the walls by placing them on the interior edge running the full length of the walls. This should provide me with enough space to place roughly two hundred panels at roughly five feet in length each. With two hundred panels per wall, I could generate a peak of a hundred thousand watts in power with optimal positioning and solar radiance. However, this would only last for a few hours each day.

Before the reset, the average household would use around nine hundred kWh of power each month. This comes to roughly nineteen 500-watt panels each when receiving five hours of optimal sunshine, for a total of 684 panels just to power the apartment buildings. Obviously, this was quickly taking up a lot of our wall space without even accounting for expansion in the future. So, I needed to come up with a better panel design to use.

I pulled up the database capability of the system and started comparing patents with the True Knowledge compiled with the system. It looks like current designs were only able to get an efficiency of around twenty-two percent. This seemed awfully low, so I started looking into ways to improve the efficiency of the cells within the panels.

After researching and comparing information for an hour and a half, I had finally come up with some improvements that would allow me to squeeze out an efficiency of right under seventy-five percent per cell. It seems the atmosphere was causing a lot of power loss for companies previously, as they had targeted the use of a specific frequency range of light and solar radiation. After I modified the range of the cells to absorb a broader spectrum of light and radiation from the sun, I was able to bump up the power for each panel to two thousand watts each.

This was a huge innovation in the field, and if it had been before the reset, I would be getting a major science prize. Instead, I was just going to start installing the systems myself, and hopefully, I could share my discovery with the world in the future.

Since this was using research and developments of my own, I must have gotten a discount on the mana consumption from the system. I tried to create the first panel and it took considerably less mana than my first attempt at creating a solar panel. I should be able to make three panels at a time before I would need to let my mana refill now. This saved me a considerable amount of time and wall space, bringing it to just 171 panels to handle the power needs of the current apartments. It would still take me around 19 hours of constant work to create the panels though. So, I decided to take advantage of the time dilation within the Library World to queue up the creation of all the panels and then move them out for installation after they were finished. Since I didn’t need to be actively involved in the creation of the panels once they were queued up, I only needed to supply the mana, I decided to catch up on a few books I hadn’t expected to have the opportunity to read any time soon.

I thought I heard a voice bringing me out of my immersion “Hey Robert! Your panels are finished now!”

“Huh? Oh, Ava. Hey, I didn’t hear you, sorry. How long were you trying to get my attention?”

“Longer than I would like.” She harrumphed, turning a slight tinge of orange from her normal deep blue color.

“Is something wrong?”

“Ohhh, now you care.”

Well, seems like something I was doing really bothered the little orb.

“You’ve been in here for almost an entire day, and you haven’t even bothered to try and speak with me one time. I understood that you were busy over the past few days, so I haven’t wanted to interrupt you while you worked, but you had plenty of time to engage with me in the past twenty hours.”

Oh. Now that she mentioned it, to have such a close connection with the little orb, I hadn’t been treating her like anything special since we met. She had shown me nothing more than concern and support since we met, and I continued to treat her like some virtual assistant whenever I needed something.

“Hey Ava, I’m sorry. I hadn’t thought about it until now, and I apologize for ignoring you. I promise the next chance I have to spend some time here; we’ll do something fun together. Sound good?”

“Hmmph, you better mean it. I get lonely in here just watching you do things on the outside. I might just be a construct created by the system, but I have all the feelings and emotions of any normal person you’ve ever met. I never expected to be anything more than an assistant until you gave me a name. That gave me hope that I could be more than some construct.”

“I mean it, the next time I need to queue up some projects like this, we’ll play some games together. You wanna give Duopoly a try, we could play the version with a virtual banker to handle all the transactions?”

The little orb turned a bright blue and approached me quickly. “Yes! I want to give that one a try! I’ve seen it in your memories and it looks like a quite fun representation of capitalism.”

“Ok, sounds like a plan! I’ll create one first thing the next time I’m here for a project. You should look forward to losing though because I’m a Duopoly master!”

“You’re on! I’ll even cut off my access to your mind temporarily while we play.”

I chuckled out loud. “Alright, I’m gonna head out and get to work on installing the power for the apartments. I’ll see you soon, Ava.”

“See you soon, Robert.”

I left the Library World, wheeling out my new panels on the pallet jack. I dropped them off and went back to get more until I had wheeled them all out into the area next to the wall behind the apartments. Closing the door for the Library World, I went to go find Tom. He had 2 hours since I was last here to look around, and I didn’t particularly want to install all of these by myself now that I had his help. He wouldn’t know how to wire everything up without being taught, but I could have him assist me with the mounting of the panels.

I found him wandering around on top of the walls looking at the turret systems, and enlisted his help before he could slink off into hiding once he saw what I wanted. Even with his assistance, it still took the rest of the day before we were finished with the mounting. I decided to go ahead and rest in the Library World for a few hours before running the rest of the wiring. I didn’t forget to go ahead and queue up some solar panels for creation while I slept, no sense in wasting the mana while I was sleeping.

I woke up to a large supply of new solar panels waiting for me where I started creation in the Library World. I went to get up and noticed a new blinking notification in my view.

Host took advantage of skills while sleeping. What a workaholic! +25 Mana

Wow, twenty-five additional mana was a considerable amount added to my pool. I might even be able to create four panels at once now.

I took the new panels out with me and installed them on my own. Tom still needed to rest and it wouldn’t take me long to get enough panels up to fill one wall. I wired everything up and ran the wiring through the walls to the hollow space in between them. I went in through a side entrance and found where I had tapped the wiring inside.

From my research, current lithium batteries would be plenty good enough to handle our power storage needs temporarily. I created a set of batteries capable of storing three days of power and connected them through a series of large charge controllers. Once I had the panels connected to the charge controllers, I could convert the 48-volt current to 120/240-volt current for the home systems to use.

I ran my final wiring to the breaker boxes in the apartment buildings and flipped the power on. At last! Glorious electricity for all thirty-six households had been achieved!

Status page for those interested.