Part 1Improving Magical ACs in a Fantasy World

On the day I nearly died, I was twenty-eight floors up, fixing an AC unit on an outside wall.

My hand slipped as I was securing my safety line. All of a sudden, I had been pulled into a fantasy world.

When I opened my eyes again, I was in a cave that was more like an ice box. There was an old man in a white robe next to me, poking me in the face.

“Awake? Good. You’ll be one of the new students here at Icicle Mountain. You’ll get an allowance of two magic stones a month for sweeping up the cave.”

“Wait, where am I?”

“Icicle Mountain of Crylestia School.”

“Can I make a suggestion? Your cave system has a ventilation problem. The cold air can’t escape and just keeps on making the place colder. I’ll get joint pains if I stay here too long,” I said.

He looked at me like I was crazy.

* * *

My name was Wisteria Summers. Before being pulled into this fantasy world, I had been an air conditioning unit repairwoman with ten years of working experience.

Ever since starting that job, I had fixed nearly 1,000 air conditioning units. From split AC units to central ones, from home-use units to commercial ones, I had done it all.

I thought that my life as I knew it would be over. I did not expect fate to give me a whole new project in life: becoming the general contractor for HVAC systems in this fantasy world.

There were seven mountains in Crylestia School, and Icicle Mountain was the one people least wanted to go to.

The reason for that was very simple: It was simply too cold.

The interior of the mountain caves had a temperature of about -22 degrees Fahrenheit. If one simply stood there and breathed, one’s eyebrows would frost over.

It was supposedly the ideal place to train ice magic. However, to a new student doing chores, it was a workplace nightmare.

On my first day on the job, I was so cold that my nose was constantly running. I could not even hold a broom steady.

I looked at the snow and frost collected on the rock walls of the cave, and knowledge from my previous job as an AC repairman flooded into my mind. There simply was something wrong with the ventilation flow in this place.

What came in had to go out, forming a cycle. The way this cave system was set up locked the cold air inside, and cold air kept coming in without going out.

If one turned the AC on and set it to cool the room and then stopped up all the ways the cold air could escape, preventing air from going out, the air quality in the room would become so bad that one would suffocate.

The temperature inside would be uneven, too. The middle of the cave was -58 degrees Fahrenheit, but the edges were -14 degrees Fahrenheit.

This was not a setup for magical training. It was a death trap.

I knelt in the middle of the cave and sketched out a draft on the ground with a finger.

If one followed the layout of a ventilation system, the “locked-in” ventilation system of the cold air should be changed to a half-recycling one.

That way, one could maintain the coldness of the central training area but increase the ventilation and temperature of the living areas.

Simply put, there should be a central air conditioning unit installed.

I looked at the magical arrays on the walls. More simply put, the magical arrays of this world were like pipe systems.

Magical energy was a medium, and the arrays were pipes. The fulcrum of the array was the engine. The principles behind magic were exactly like the ones I had followed fixing AC units for a decade.

The only difference was that one dealt with air and the other with magical energy.

Also, whoever had designed these “pipes” was an idiot.

I spent three days erasing all the arrays in the cave. Then, I stole some magic ink from the store room and redid the arrays with changes in only three places.

In one, I added a “diverter valve” in the fulcrum of the array, allowing the flow of the cold air to split.

I added two “return air vents” in the corners of one of the living areas, giving warm air a chance to be cycled into the cave.

In the last spot, I added an “air curtain,” preventing the cold air from escaping but letting in fresh air.

After making these changes, I stood in the middle of the cave and enjoyed the fruits of my labor.

The central training area was -22 degrees Fahrenheit. That had not changed.

However, the living areas were now 47 degrees Fahrenheit, and the hallways were 38 degrees Fahrenheit.

Walking in from the entrance to the cave, the temperature went down in steps, and every zone had the right temperature for its purposes.

It felt so good!