The Air Conditioner Steals the Frost Mages' Jobs (1)
It was hot.
Sweat trickled down my body in rivulets, and I felt like I was melting into a puddle. The cicadas shrieked their relentless, maddening chorus until I could barely hold on to my own thoughts.
Summer was still in full swing.
"Are you listening to me?"
"I'm listening."
An untimely scolding had arrived. In all my life I could count on one hand the times Muriel had chewed me out, but if you added today to the tally, I wouldn't have enough fingers anymore.
"Sometimes I wonder if you go out of your way to make enemies, Owen. It was like that with the Paternity Test Kits, and it's going to be like that with this air conditioner you're building now."
Muriel was busy working herself into a lather, yet unlike me, wilting in the heat, not a single drop of sweat dotted her skin. In fact, if you poked her cheek with a fingertip, it felt as dry and smooth as a baby's bottom dusted with powder.
"Hold on. What do you think you're doing? I'm scolding you right now."
"Sometimes I envy that body of yours, Muriel. Doesn't get overheated, doesn't sweat. Meanwhile, I'm dying over here."
Her body was something special. It was as close to human as a body could be, and yet it wasn't a human body at all — it was a doll's. Because of that, she felt neither cold nor heat, and she had no need for physiological trifles like perspiration. Which meant Muriel had no idea what I was going through.
"Is it really that bad? Just wait a moment."
Muriel, who'd been in the middle of scolding me, rose from her chair, stepped outside, and came back with a large fan woven together from broad leaves, bound to a tree branch.
"Feeling any better now?"
She swished the fan — bigger than her own head — back and forth with both hands. The breeze wasn't cool so much as lukewarm, but it did help dry the sweat. And every so often, drifting in between the gusts, came the soft scent of her skin, which seemed to melt a little of my heat-induced stress.
"Yeah. I think I'll live now."
I flopped across the table and asked, "At this point, couldn't I just awaken frost magic? I thought it came from sheer desperation."
"There you go again, dodging the point."
Ah. Busted. I'd thought it was a pretty smooth transition, too.
"Well, if we're being strict about it, my desperation just isn't desperate enough. Magic carries real weight — enough that people say it mirrors a person's entire life."
Still, she answered my question. She really is too kind for her own good.
"If you'd spent your whole life suffering in heat like this, Owen, frost magic might well have manifested for you."
It sounded like a joke, but that really is the orthodox path to learning magic in this world. If there's a spell you want, you deprive yourself of the thing you crave and grind through extreme situations over and over, praying to the heavens for an awakening.
To give an example: to learn flight magic, you'd deliberately throw yourself off a high cliff — put yourself in a situation where you die if you can't fly.
Which is probably why people in this world treat mages like lunatics. Honestly, so many of them just aren't right in the head. A sane, normal person like me wouldn't dare imitate that nonsense.
Which means I'd better hurry up and finish that air conditioner. Otherwise the heat is going to kill me before anything else does.
The ammonia synthesis was simple.
N2 + 3H2 >> 2NH3
Apply high heat and high pressure over a metal catalyst, and ammonia synthesized as if by magic. It was the process commonly known as the Haber-Bosch method.
Reaching the synthesis conditions — two hundred atmospheres and temperatures past four hundred degrees — would have been a nightmare on my own. But who cares? I happen to have Muriel: a former Sage, current Witch, and grand mage with lifetimes of experience behind her.
"Waaah, Muriel dear. Do this for me, pretty please."
My secret technique: the plea. So, like a helpless patient clinging to his caretaker, I latched onto Muriel and begged.
And like one of those robot cats that never tires of granting wishes, she indulged me without complaint. The result:
"Oh. I think that's it?"
Done. The distinctive acrid stench of ammonia hung in the air. I waved a hand in front of my nose, took one sniff, and immediately sealed the lid shut.
"Truly the work of a mage who's lived at least a few centuries. The depth of skill is on another level. Just how many spells do you know?"
Muriel beamed a sweet smile and gestured for me to bow. I bent at the waist about sixty degrees, and — bonk! — her adorably clenched little fist rapped me on the head.
"Honestly, you. Don't go teasing a lady about her age. You'd better not do this to other women, either."
How on earth did she clock that I was teasing, every single time? Lately I've been thinking — this woman might actually be sharper than she looks.
"Anyway, the smell is awful. And it's slightly toxic, too."
She was right. Ammonia has plenty of strengths as a refrigerant, but for household use, the stench and the toxicity are genuine problems.
Then why did I choose ammonia anyway?
No profound reason. I just don't know any other refrigerants.
R290? I vaguely remember something like that being used, but I have no idea how that gas is even produced. If I don't understand it, I can't build it — not through physics, not through my magic.
Regardless, one more step remained.
"Could you take care of this part too, Muriel?"
"You know, sometimes I worry what on earth you'd do without me, Owen."
"Then I suppose you'll just have to stay by my side forever, won't you?"
"Oh, you."
Muriel giggled and wove her magic. What remained in the vessel afterward was a refrigerant — colorless, odorless, non-toxic, and perfectly harmless.
"With this done, we're nearly finished."
Once you've made the most important component of an air conditioner — the refrigerant — the rest is practically a formality. The condenser, the compressor, and the other mechanical bits were things I'd already cobbled together in my spare moments. So now, with the refrigerant synthesized, all that was left was to assemble the pieces.
"There we go."
It took shape roughly resembling the air conditioners I remembered. I mounted the outdoor unit to vent the hot air outside, and slotted in a mana stone to serve as the power source in place of electricity.
Vreeeeee—
With a faint hum, the air conditioner whirred to life.
"Ooooh."
It was coming. Cool air.
The breeze brushed across my cheeks, and the corners of my mouth climbed all the way up to my ears. The fiendish heat had been vanquished!
Ah, Willis Carrier. You magnificent man. What are you, even?
"I bow before you, O GOAT…."
A man capable of such a monumental invention deserves to be worshipped a hundred times over and more.
And in any case — thanks to his legacy, I would now steal the jobs of the frost mages. The vermin who worked one season and feasted for a full year off the proceeds. It was my turn to stand in that place now. I would inherit the mantle of the vermin themselves.
"You really do rush ahead without thinking things through, Owen."
I couldn't argue with that. It was a blunder — a fatal one, so obvious that not seeing it coming was the real surprise.
What was the point of finishing the air conditioner if I'd been an utter fool and never lined up anywhere to sell it?
Opening my own shop and selling directly, no middleman, would have been ideal — fewer cuts taken from the price, room to sell cheap, the best possible combination of profit and competitiveness. But that was only true if I actually had a shop. Since I didn't, the fallback was to sell through a middleman, and I hadn't considered that for even a second.
So this is why the world has STEM kids and business kids, huh. STEM builds the thing; business sells the thing. I'd spent my whole life looking down on the business types — and only now, with none of them around, did I finally feel the hole they left behind.
"Haah. Nothing for it, then. I suppose I'd better go find somewhere to sell, even this late in the game."
"Shall we pay a visit to some merchant guilds, then?"
"Let's do that."
And so Muriel and I wandered the town, calling on one merchant guild after another. But —
"An air conditioner? Why on earth would anyone need such a thing? If you ask a frost mage, they'll cool your home for you, no trouble at all."
"And doesn't frost magic carry a steep labor cost? This air conditioner's upkeep comes down to nothing more than recharging a mana stone with mana. It's practically free."
"Hmm, I really couldn't say…."
A fork? A spoon? You have hands — why would you need those? There were people spouting nonsense exactly that dense.
"The air conditioner is a revolutionary artifact that will sweep away the sweltering heat of summer. And if you contract with me, I'll offer you exclusive sales rights as a special favor."
"So you're admitting it, then — you mean to steal work from the mages?"
"I suppose that's how it'll turn out. This air conditioner will work out cheaper than hiring frost magic, after all."
"Th-then I'll pass! You're talking about inviting disaster!"
And that was the pattern. Most of the guild heads, terrified of retaliation from the mages who held this market in a chokehold, showed zero interest in selling.
So the lower classes watching the establishment's mood — I guess that's the same in every world. Come to think of it, that first man might have been pretending to be an idiot on purpose just to turn me down. Maybe the slow development of this whole world is partly the mages' fault, too.
Good grief. I'd hit a wall in a place I never expected one.
"You'll regret passing on this."
"Whether it's an air conditioner or what have you, the one doing the regretting will be you."
Rejections +1. Damn it all. Merchants were cowards, every last one of them. And one of these days, they'd all regret it. Ah, I should have invested back then…
Just like me, after ignoring a friend's suggestion to put money into crypto and then staring, not long after, at coin prices soaring past the clouds, drowning in regret.
By the time we'd trawled guild after guild, the sun was already slinking down behind the horizon. I resolved to make one last pitch — this place, and if it failed, I'd go home. With that, I stepped through the doors of the Morne Merchant Guild.
And there, at long last, I met them.
"Very well. Let's take a look."
Someone with a discerning eye — and the guts to cross the mages.