Summary
Sa-kemet is filled with sunlight, and a lot of it. Heat and light are the two most abundant things it has, followed by sand. For the people who dwelled there in ancient times, particularly the
nebusah, they had long desired to harness this sunlight. After all, from sunlight comes mana, if in minuscule amounts, so their thinking believed. While this eventually led to the creation of
the Black Pyramid, other technologies were not skipped over. The most famous of these would be the solar obelisks.
Arguably predating the Black Pyramid itself, the solar obelisk idea took on a new life once construction began. They needed more economical ways of harvesting mana, and the Black Pyramid was consuming all the black stone to be found. An enterprising engineer, playing around with magnifying glasses, was struck by 'divine inspiration'. By redirecting sunlight to a mana absorbing structure, could they not collect it then?
Producing the glass needed was far simpler than mining enormous amounts of stone, and so the first solar obelisk began taking form. By arraying reflective panels all around the central obelisk, it would be blasted by concentrated sunlight. Built to withstand the extreme heat this would generate, materials inside the obelisk would soak up the incoming mana. This then fed downward, pulled by gravity as the now liquid mana would flow naturally. The idea was improved upon rapidly, ultimately eliminating the filler materials as the obelisk itself could condense the mana.
For
Atenkhet alone it inspired a revolution; Sa-kemet followed in their wake. Solar obelisks and their arrays changed the paradigm by allowing passive mana collection over the course of a day. Placed in undesirable or inhospitable locations, they turned otherwise useless veltron into highly valuable building space.
While the collection itself is
slow, it is labor-free except maintaining the solar reflectors, which easily become covered in dust. These liquid mana barrels are then utilized for a huge array of possibilities, not the least of which is trade. Some villages live entirely by their barrel production, for it is a constantly in demand resource.
This is also how Sa-kemet managed to start introducing more varied mana aspects into common usage. Shifting it toward water aspected mana fueled the water creation magic that many have come to rely upon, namely. When surplus started, other types were put into usage as people could afford to.
As a result of their importance, they're one of the most common sights across Sa-kemet. Given the slowness of their mana collection process, they are often not directly targets of raiding or banditry. Rather they just stake out and wait for the collection teams, as a solar obelisk array only really produces a few barrels a month at best.
While other obelisk-like structures exist across
Veltrona, they only sometimes share a similar purpose in nature. Thus one cannot say if Atenkhet innovated on the idea originally, but they are the ones everyone knows to be mistresses of the technology. Actually copying the idea is pretty straight forward. Figuring out how to translate sunlight into mana is the tricky problem.
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