15. Controlling and Heating Water

Controlling and Heating Water

As I slowly sank into the wonderful, pine-scented, bubble-filled warmth of the pool, I let stress, worry, and tangled emotions wash away, and relaxed completely.

Xia Xinglan had been right. This survivor base, much closer to the city center, did not have hot showers.

But they had Cheng Rui’s aunt, and her strange, vague, enormously practical household-magic powers.

It took the old woman only a few seconds to provide water and natural herbal shampoo for everyone who wanted to wash after their “adventures” on the streets above.

The baths were actually three child-sized pools made from seamless brickwork, positioned near the survivors’ sleeping area. Their pipes connected directly to a nearby main water line, giving them “enough water for tired veterans or irritable high school girls,” in her words.

For some reason, Grandma Lin’s ability did not provide hot water. That was where Chi Li and her flame magic came in.

I did not know how long I stayed there, soaking and relaxing and throwing all my problems at my future self.

Doing nothing felt magnificent.

No fighting because monsters wanted to eat me, or worse.

No running or flying somewhere before some vague time limit ran out.

No talking to people to convince them of something vitally important.

No arguing against dangerous decisions.

I lost track of time until the water slowly cooled, the bubbles thinned, and my bath was finally coming to an end…

Or maybe not?

Lazily, I lifted my palm above the water and stared at the little pool caught in my hand, trying to remember what I had learned about heat.

Molecular vibration, right?

Water was a liquid, which meant… its molecules moved freely and randomly within the same volume, bumping into each other and into the surroundings? More or less. I did not need to get it perfectly right. I was not building a machine here.

So to make water hotter, the molecules needed to move faster?

No.

That would not work.

Using Near-Object Manipulation to grab molecules and push them into faster motion was impossible.

Imagining that many moving particles was too difficult. But… maybe if I approached it differently…

Just grabbing water was not easy either.

The little bit of water in my palm was technically an object, and I was touching it, but I had to remain in contact with it. When I tried to vibrate it to heat it, the moment it separated from my skin by even a hair’s breadth, the effect vanished and the water splashed onto the ceiling.

I cupped more water into my palm and tried spinning it.

At first that worked better. The liquid spun faster and faster, forming a sphere.

Then, as keeping the shape became harder, it began to wobble, flattened into a disk, and finally exploded in front of me like a grenade.

Seeing the thin cracks it left on the nearest brick wall, I stopped pursuing that line of experimentation.

Maybe…

Maybe if I tried to accelerate the molecular motion indirectly.

Strength Modulation lv3:
Selectively adjust force and force-like effects originating from you or from objects you touch by up to eightfold. Activates automatically when you are facing harm.

Force Field Creation lv1:
Apply the force effects you can personally exert to a volume of space no larger than one cubic yard, at reduced effectiveness. You may apply it to only one simple geometric shape at a time.

Molecules collided because of the random motion caused by heat.

What if the force of those collisions became stronger than normal?

Using Near-Object Manipulation, I shaped a little bathwater in my palm into a one-inch-wide sphere.

When a handful of water could become a respectable grenade, I had no intention of experimenting on anything close to a cubic yard.

Better to start slowly, just in case.

Say… adjust the force of the collisions by one percent?

At first, the sphere barely changed.

But as the seconds passed, it grew brighter and brighter inside my Force Sense, and it required more and more force to keep it spherical.

I maintained its shape with Near-Object Manipulation. Tiny bubbles began forming, then multiplying, until it boiled faster and faster and finally turned entirely to steam.

Not only had it become hot—it kept heating faster and faster even after I stopped increasing the force effect. A few seconds later, all the water had boiled away.

I giggled and tried again, this time with an even smaller Strength Modulation effect—one so tiny it was almost impossible to notice.

This attempt took longer and warmed more slowly, but in less than a minute the new sphere was boiling merrily.

Soon I understood why.

The collisions were not, overall, faster than normal. Each collision was faster. Every molecule experienced countless collisions very quickly, and each collision was stronger than the last. Energy increased in a chain reaction until the whole thing went poof into steam.

Time for some simple calculations.

With Near-Object Manipulation, I flattened a sheet of water into the shape of a napkin and wrote on it with an imaginary pencil.

One cubic yard of water…

Heating to boiling…

Heat capacity…

Enthalpy of vaporization…

Carry the digits…

In the end, I was very glad I had put points into Intelligence and Perception.

I was fairly sure I would not have remembered any of that otherwise, even though I had crammed for a chemistry exam less than a month ago.

Also, around two gigajoules of energy?

I was fairly sure that was a lot.

Like, maybe enough to blow up a tank?

Very carefully, I reheated my bathwater.

Then I stopped experimenting before I blew up anything important.

Cheng Rui’s laboratory was far less high-tech than I had imagined.

There were no robotic assembly lines, no holographic panels for designing gorgeous armor, no tangled networks of crackling cables pregnant with barely controlled electrical power, and no mysterious liquids merrily bubbling or ominously hissing in glass bottles.

There was not even a 3D printer nearby. The only computer looked like an old machine from the previous century, complete with a cathode-ray tube monitor.

Most of the laboratory was occupied by junk.

Rusty old pipes. Heavy sheets of metal. Ancient, battered car-engine parts. Tupperware containers and aluminum cans. Broken beer bottles in every color. Coils of old cable. Entire tables buried beneath old tools, screws, nails, nuts, and bolts.

Only one table stood out.

Its sturdy steel frame sagged beneath the weight of hundreds of metal rods: polished steel rods, dull gray aluminum rods, yellow bronze rods, dark red copper rods, and even brown-black or blue-purple rods made from metals I did not recognize.

As I watched, Cheng Rui stood pale and sweating, head lowered over several brown-black metal rods.

They were slowly melting and reshaping themselves into a curved metal plate about an inch thick.

The moment the transformation finished, the still-recovering boy picked up the slab—which must have weighed fifty or sixty pounds—grunted with effort, and carried it to a three-meter-tall, two-meter-wide recess in the wall.

Inside stood a half-finished robot.