It was a few days of manic designing deep in his Tinker Twitch, but while his team were taking clean up operations and safety lessons, Perry was inventing a chemical mixture that could dissolve and reset cement, targeting the water that was bonded to it.

Perry called it concrete flux. Or just flux, for short. It had the property of dissolving cement and only cement, while undoing the hydration of the material.

Don’t stick your hand in there. The body’s got a lot of hydrogen.

Now simply being able to dissolve and reset cement wasn’t quite enough. Perry also needed a way to break the components down more quickly than otherwise without rendering them into dust.

For that, Perry turned to electrodynamic fragmentation, which was essentially using high frequency electric shocks to make the concrete crumble along the border between the cement and the aggregate.

Perfect for getting the concrete into a slurry, allowing Perry’s Proprietary Chemical to penetrate and whisk away the cement.

Perry’s design for the finished product would be set of a massive tanks that took up nearly an entire floor of the twelve-story building.

One tank would look almost like a giant blender, with a huge set of paddles covered in electrodes. There were filters of various grate sizes beneath to catch and separate aggregates, while the other was a plain tank with some scraping equipment on the bottom, but little else.

The plan was this: a dump truck full of concrete rubble unloads into the paddle tank. Then Perry’s chemical is pumped from the storage tank into the paddle tank, and begins to dissolve the cement.

The paddles turn on and begin stirring the mixture whilst shocking the shit out of it, causing the big chunks of concrete to fragment into a slurry that his cement resetting chemical can penetrate more rapidly.

Once all the cement has been dissolved, pump the chemical back to the storage container and sift out the aggregate via stacked slanted gratings for them to roll down.

Over the next couple hours, pure, unhydrated cement will precipitate out of the flux onto the bottom of the storage tank, and specialized collection scrapers will bring them to the surface before squeezing the last of the flux out of them. Once that’s done, BAM! Like-new cement.

Flux didn’t evaporate at room temperature, and it took a long time to lose its potency, so the expense per use was minor. It wasn’t a one-time investment, but it was close.

Perry invited Nat over, and the two of them had a great time fabricating the tanks. Mostly it was designing the paddle and grating system that was fun. Welding several hundred-thousand gallon vats was just tedious.

Nat even made a solution for rebar and other contaminants, Which Perry had spaced because he’d been hyperfocused on figuring out the cement problem.

A second paddle, suspended above the tank, would snatch rebar and other contaminants using the magnetic fields that she’d taken to using.

After a week of welding and fabricating, Perry and Nat stood over the massive vat of definitely not a specialized acid that definitely wouldn’t turn meat into carbon dust in a matter of minutes.

“This needs a safety railing.” Perry muttered to himself, as he stared down into the Olympic swimming pool full of ominous brown liquid.

“Hey, check this out!” Nat said, jumping into the vat, causing Perry’s heart to leapt into his throat as it was jump started by adrenaline.

Just as Perry’s knees were dropping out from under him to get him close enough to snatch her out of the air, Nat’s small form rebounded off of nothing, tumbling back onto the catwalk above the flux.

Perry frowned a moment before he glanced up at her ceiling-mounted paddles, which were giving off an audible hum.

“There already are safety railing! You just can’t see them!” Natalie said, giving him jazz-hands.

“Well, I almost peed myself,” Perry said matter-of-factly.

“I’m still gonna put up traditional railing and some warning signs,” Perry said, glancing around. “I don’t think OSHA standards include Tinker-tech.” This was easily some of the most dangerous stuff they had here at the scrapyard, and safety measure that worked regardless of power supply seemed wise.

Perry tested the pump system and moved the massive amount of flux from one tank to the other, leaving it in the storage tank for now.

Half an hour later, they were hauling in the first delivery of concrete rubble through the bulk elevator, which was conveniently placed in a position where they could dump the concrete straight into the separating vat.

Perry was pleased to note that an entire dumptruck of ten tons of concrete rubble barely covered the bottom of the vat.

They re-filled the paddle tank and flipped the switch

RRRRR!

Side note: Putting concrete in a giant zap-blender is not a quiet operation.

“Is it supposed to sound like that!?” Natalie asked, her hands clapped over her ears.

“Probably!” Perry shouted back, his ears similarly covered, mentally adding ‘hearing protection’ to the list of safety equipment he would have to acquire.

Once they were sure the setup wouldn’t explode, Perry and Nat got lunch, chatted for a while, and came back to check on the machine’s progress.

Perry felt like a proud father when he returned and saw the massive scraping and squishing gear collecting and wringing out enormous blocks of cement.

Investment:

Tank ingredients = $130,000

Flux ingredients = $50,000

Safety equipment = $10,000

Dump trucks = $12,000

Training & licensing including CDL and Haz-mat training = $25,000

Limitless battery = $15000

Total cost = $242000

“Hey Perry,” Nat said, pointing at the bubbles frothing out of the paddle tank. “Is that a pure hydrogen-oxygen mix?”

Perry blinked. “Shut everything down and back away slowly.”

Extra robust ventilation to avoid a Hindenburg = $20,000

Total cost = $262,000

Estimate Daily profit: 10~50k, depending on supply.

Given that about half of his profits were going to taxes, Perry could expect to make a return on investment in two months, assuming nothing expensive broke down.

Hah. Like that’s gonna happen. Thank you Garage Tinker.

The licensing and training would be a yearly expense, along with replacing the flux every now and then, and maintenance on the perpetual energy machine, as well as the vats.

Still. The amount that the entire facility should have costed was in the tens of millions, and the upkeep costs should’ve been substantially higher without Perry’s perk keeping everything strong and corrosion-free. The kilowatt hours alone would’ve cut deep into profits, had Perry not set up some of his home-made perpetual energy contraptions on the floor above.

The profit margin for cement should’ve been razor thin, but for Perry it was thicc.

I’m not sorry for making that joke. In the confines of his own mind, Perry could have as poor taste as he wanted.

Having minimized the initial investment, energy costs, and maintenance, Perry was looking at a huge profit.

Possibly double his current earnings per diem.

To which Locust would say ‘Those are still rookie numbers, you gotta pump up those numbers.’

Would Perry have to be making millions per day before Locust was satisfied, or would she only be happy when he bested her in combat? The supervillain rules were kinda convoluted.

None of this addressed the fact that his supplies of steel and glass were beginning to swell with every clean-up crew’s delivery.

And insurance paid Perry’s company to remove the rubble. It was some complicated setup where building owners were required to get super insurance by Nexus, and the insurance was required by Nexus to pay for cleanup and repair.

The insurance companies would then sell cleanup jobs to the lowest bidder, who often turned out to be the government workers anyway.

It was like taxes with extra steps, but it did give an entrepreneur like Perry an opportunity to step in and bid lower than Nexus.

The amount they took was a pittance, but that alone would pay for maintenance and energy costs.

For now, Perry would resell the glass and iron as scrap, making just a bit extra on top of everything else, but eventually he would get his refiners up and ready to make new glass windows, new rebar, new copper pipes and electrical wires.

He could get started on those tasks immediately, but there was a more pressing matter at hand: getting soul measurements.

In the evenings, Perry frantically studied the reference materials in the fever of the Tinker Twitch, doing his damnedest to not only memorize everything but understand how it related to everything else.

Creation of new spells, and even participating in the Super game had all been set by the wayside, causing Perry’s rookie ranking to slip dramatically on the fan websites.

Not that Perry cared he was ranked lower on the rookie list than Chemestro, Heather, Warcry, and even Plagius, who couldn’t think tactically if his life depended on it. It didn’t grate on him at all.

Nope, now that he had absorbed the reference documents, he was ready to Paradox-ize the method to measure and modify souls, and he needed every spare minute to draft a proposition to show Grandma and build his prototype.

Perry flipped back to the spell.

Gadrevan’s Soul Structure (master difficulty)

Ingredients: lens of death crystal, phase-beast fur, Takevan’s Candle, restraints (for subject). Nagazar’s Compression, Spirit Leech ichor, (sub materials)

Cut a death crystal into a perfect lens, taking careful note of the focal point.

Use Takevan’s Candle to send light through smoke of phase-beast fur.

CAUTION: once light saturated with phase-beast essence travels through the lens, any parts of the soul that make contact with the focal point will be erased to make room for the soul infrastructure. The operator of the candle must be a master of reading the soul and steady of hand, or unwanted parts of the subject’s self will be lost.

Once a space has been hollowed out for the structure, use Nagazar’s Compression to saturate the subject’s soul with spirit leech ichor, infused with the desired sub materials. Spirit leech ichor takes on the properties of whatever it is infused with and transfers it to the spiritual.

I have seen great success with carving a small box in my soul, and filling it with a wooden box. Naturally the hinges and such had to be added piecemeal, and the interior had to be carved out afterward. All I had to do was erase my memories of my misspent youth swimming in the river behind my parent’s home. I have written them down in my personal diary so that I will never forget what I gave up to push the boundaries of magic.

Using Gadrevan’s Soul Shifting, I was able to shift a pure essence into the box in my soul, keeping it contained for no less than eighteen days before it gradually disspated. I suspect that with iterative improvements to technique, leakage will be less of a problem.

Next, I will create a second box, targeting the area of my soul with my penchant for hiding under the blankets when not strictly neccessary, and place it beside the first. I will create a third mechanism between the two of them that will allow me to combine the stored essence at will. If successful, I will be the first wizard on Manitia to store magic inside himself and use it by mere force of will.

I’m not sure what part of my soul I should hollow out to make room. Perhaps my enjoyment of beans?

Perry flipped to the next page, as he always did.

Nothing.

Gadrevan’s research ground to a halt not long after that, and the man became a listless invalid. The history books didn’t say why, but Perry surmised it was in large part due to soul damage that he didn’t take the time to heal.

In theory, he could have gotten his taste for beans, swimming and warm blankets back, allowing himself to rediscover them and heal. Like anyone could heal after an operation.

But the man was being financially pressured by Pecholard and desperate to prove his method was better.

Perry pursed his lips sourly, thinking back to the occasional comments he’d heard from his parents and grandmother about how close he’d come to death. The Soul Symbiote was every inch as invasive and dangerous as Gadrevan’s method, but ‘oh, so convenient’.

And now Perry intended to add to the damage.

All in pursuit of magic.

The foreign parts of his soul were ideal candidates to begin test phases on, as they weren’t deeply rooted in his psyche, but they wouldn’t be around forever, either.

When the time comes, what parts of myself will I be willing to give up? Perry thought, tracing the last paragraph with his finger.