The Way Ahead

Alchemy, that most wondrous and sacred art, was first pioneered by the alleged First Brewer of Life, Death, Earth and Sky, the legendary Old GoddessSalverria. It was her efforts which are widely regarded to have formalized the common practice of potion-brewing and unified it under the broader scope of ‘Alchymie,’ dividing it into four primary branches in accordance with the Three Attribute theory of the body. First and foremost among the disciplines there was Alchymie Vitae, corresponding to Health, and concerned itself with the creation and manipulation of True Life. Second was Alchymie Essentia, concerned with the matters of Mana, and in the extraction and manipulation of the true ‘essence’ of an object. Thirdly is Alchymie Practicum, associated with fundamental Stamina and is accordingly associated with enhancements upon other substances.

Salverria herself was legendarily an Alchymist Vital, and it is said that she was responsible for the creation of the Manticores, Chimeras, and even the noble Griffon, among others. More information, along with speculation for the required rituals and methods needed can be found in Section 5: Impact of Alchemy. According to Salverian tradition, she was also responsible for the creation of vortithal, salverweed, talsanenris, shoriven, watergrass, and even wheat. However, as she has faded somewhat into the role as a creator deity for said peoples, the tales they tell of her prolific creations may be mythological. Still, these creations, if truly hers, would fall into the purview of Vitae as well. It is the view of this author that Salverria most likely was a real person, however with recent….

Though drier than even his history textbooks, Edwin found the Grimoire endlessly fascinating. Sure, he was pretty liberally skimming it, but it was fantasy science! It was the coolest thing ever! He was learning so much! Also, he didn’t have to memorize it for a reading quiz at 8 AM! Ah, tests. He was so glad to never have to deal with those ever again.

Vital Alchemy, or Alchemy Vitae, was the biology of Alchemy, as it dealt with everything pertaining to life. Herbology, animal crossbreeding, and some medicines (though there was overlap there with Practical Alchemy), but above all the goal of creating life itself, which was allegedly even possible, and not even hard for simpler forms of life. It required successfully bringing anything more complicated than a slime to life to unlock the Vital Alchemist Path, as apparently a slime wasn’t hard enough to warrant it!

The Path itself was really cool, as there were all kinds of Skills which could result from it. When combined with Alchemy, it would give the rather uninventive Alchemy Vitae, but its effects, focused as they were on the creation of life, were nothing to argue with. Eat your heart out, Miller and Urey. Turns out all you need to make life is to give a beaker full of organic chemicals a good shake with Alchemy Vitae.

Combining the Path with the Medicine skill gave Vivificant, which let you… transfer life from one creature to another? Sheesh. If the description were even close to accurate, wait, how did that... A combination with an Eating evolution gave Vitachemical Infusion, which allowed you to directly absorb substances through your skin to take on their properties. Alchemist’s Physique yielded Vital Alchemist’s Mastery, which let you give yourself the traits of ‘absorbed creatures’ at will- claws, scales, quills, feathers, muscles, and more besides.

All in all, it was an absolutely bonkers branch of alchemy, and yet it was somehow the one which Edwin was least interested in or excited about.

Essential Alchemy enabled you to take the properties of one object and apply them to another. The book listed examples of making steel as transparent as water, or liquid water the solidity and structure of steel. Also removing the melting point of ice to perpetually freeze it, or giving lead the weight of air, or the strength of mithril to cloth, or the temperature of fire to a rock, or… well, there were a lot of possibilities, suffice to say. It seemed like Zosiman didn’t have much experience in that field, though, as the chapter on it was disappointingly slim.

Practical Alchemy concerned itself about two types of creations, namely Elixirs and Concoctions, both ‘enhancements’ to either organic or inorganic matter. Elixirs were proper fantasy potions, pretty much just magic in a bottle, including everything from invisibility, flight, super-strength, magical healing, and those were just the examples from the introductory page! Concoctions were more what Edwin had experimented with, explosions and objects with inherently abnormal properties, like liquids which ran uphill or metals which exploded on contact with water (Edwin was pretty sure the latter was just an alkali metal, but that just brought up the question of what a Mana-Infused version of that would look like. Terrifying.).

There was even a section on ‘Alchymie Ascendia,’ towards the end, which talked about solidifying abstract concepts, like spinning moonlight into thread (for invisibility cloaks and potions), bottling sunlight (for fighting vampires), or forging the tranquility of a forest glen into an actual shield. Edwin’s brain just wasn’t able to wrap around how that was supposed to work, but he supposed that’s why it was magic, and not science… yet.

Any magic distinguishable from technology is insufficiently advanced. Edwin couldn’t help but grin at the thought.

All of the Ascendia was incredibly challenging, and the book even advised the alchemist to wait until their alchemy level was in the hundreds before attempting it because of how badly it could backfire if you didn’t succeed on your first attempt. Scary. Unfortunately, while Zosiman was a fastidious historian and excellent chronicler (the herbology chapter was quite detailed and comprehensive, so far as Edwin could tell), his experience as an actual alchemist was… limited. There were loads of details about alchemy-related Paths and Skills, as well as tips on how to apply Skills to alchemy in non-obvious ways. Some of the tips, like how Knives helped with chopping ingredients, were obvious. Others, like using Breathing as a filter for gases, were less so (and in that instance, kind of reckless).

That’s not to say that the book had no tips on how to actually perform alchemy, just that the ‘Formula for Salve of Aided Recovery’ listed off a half-dozen ingredients with no indication how they were supposed to actually combine.

Niall had experience, though, which was why…

“Kay, kay. Carefully, jus’ prick your finger with the silver needle an’ let the drop fall into the bowl….”

Proximity to the Verdant meant that most of the components needed grew locally, as the life energy that made plants grow so well similarly meant that it was one of the places where the talsanenris… tal-san-en-ris, yep he got it right, berry would grow in appreciable numbers. Storing them was tricky, as the white berries (about the size and shape of a really big blueberry) were so full of life magic that they had a tendency to spontaneously sprout into a new talsanenris bush if the white berries were ever simultaneously exposed to light and water. But, if they were crushed, the life mana would begin to seep out of their flesh. It was a tricky balance, but Niall had a handful of them, enough for one batch of salve, half a ‘cupful’ (some terms were multiversal, it seemed), or about a hundred milliliters if Edwin’s estimations were accurate and assuming a cup was roughly the same size as back on Earth, which seemed to be about the case.

Once the berries were mashed in a mortar and pestle (granite mortar, but a pestle made of bone, that was important apparently), a few sprigs of something that smelled like mint but were shaped more like a cup and reminded Edwin of a miniature venus flytrap were added, mustard seeds, some budding red flowers of something called wolf’s tongue, and the spores from a forked stalk, were added in one by one to very vague yet apparently precise measurements (they were all in pinches! Or by count! What kind of alchemist would let that stand?), boiled in a copper pot until the mixture turned clear. Then, using a recently cleaned, formerly tarnished silver needle (because that helped draw out impurities apparently), prick a finger and let a drop of blood fall into the mixture.

“An’ that’s good! See how it’s all turning red? Now stir it that way five more times, then stir backwards six times, before going forward seven more! Keep at that nice, steady pace, you’ll know when it’s done when it starts glowing! Oh, Infuse a bit more into the pot while you’re doing that, it’ll help keep the magic inside!” Niall was thrilled for Edwin to have managed what he had so far, and over the past two days had covered a lot of topics which Edwin was sure were really fascinating and cool, but he couldn’t understand for the life of him. A lot about the body, for sure, though admittedly a fair amount of it didn’t match up with Edwin’s understanding of medicine, but he couldn’t tell what was right or what was wrong at the moment thanks to how arcane it was all phrased. The occasional appearance of his accent did not help, either.

“So what does the blood do again?”

“The blood triggers the Nystaril reaction, an’ draws out the lasitansaesrain from talsenenris, which activates the thorovillis inhibitors from the snaketongue spores an’ that-”

Edwin cut off the alchemist before his eyes could glaze over, “Please… I know you’re excited, but just… keep it simple? Give me the overview.”

Niall looked sheepishly off to the side, “Right, sorry. Anyway, the blood primes the solution so it knows essentially what it should be helping. If it’s unprimed it’ll jus’ do whatever, and can be… chaotic. Sometimes it heals the cut, sometimes it does nothing, sometimes it looks like it does nothing and then makes the person drop dead of a fever two days later… better to prime it, even if it does limit what you can use it on to humans, and focus the effects on yourself. More advanced potions want you to render down specific parts of the body for best results. Like a finger to regrow a hand, or… an eye to cure blindness, for a couple of examples. The more you render down, the more the potion can restore on its own without starving the drinker.”

Huh. That was kind of sad. It made sense that magic potions would still have limitations and its own restrictions (some sort of attunement? That was… interesting), but it was still sad that his dream of a video-game magical potion that could just drink to instantly return from the brink of death, or hand off to someone else if they needed it, wasn’t quite possible.

They fell into silence as Edwin stirred the elixir, the mixture staying equally liquid for quite some time. Then, all at once, it thickened into a glowing red paste, which brought Edwin to hastily cut the heat from the pot and remove it before it was overcooked. As he carefully scraped it out with a device more or less resembling a spatula, he reviewed the process in his mind. It was pretty simple, especially by material science standards, yet there were so many places for improvement. He’d need to track down more talsanenris berries and see if he couldn’t make a better elixir. Selling those would probably give him some funds once his current money pouch ran low, and set him on track to financial security.

Well, he could theoretically try to leverage his knowledge of mortar and concrete to make some money that way, but the required infrastructure to make enough to be commercially viable… Hah. Nah, he’d let… Aefra? Aerfa? Aeraf? Aefra take care of making concrete a viable commodity. He wanted no part in that whole process. He should try to make up some more lime, though. He was perilously short on defensive options beyond his stick, and missed having good old-fashioned explosions. Nothing beat blowing problems to smithereens.

Though healing potions were a close second, especially to help others with their problems. Which was his current task, actually. ‘Minfour’ had survived being set on fire, apparently, and had eventually crawled back to the tower at some point last night, covered in burns. It was really that as much as anything which prompted Niall and Edwin to make up a batch of healing salve for the Brutish Minion. Edwin felt he deserved it, yes, but that didn’t mean he’d leave the guy to suffer when there was a simple, and viable alternative. Though actually…

“Wait, if this is for Minfour, why did we prime it with my blood, and not his… skin, or whatever?”

“Ah, I’ve got a potion for the bulk of his skin, this was more just to teach you! Don’ you feel enlightened?”

“I mean I guess, but it seems like a lot to go through if you already had the potion. Also, doesn’t that mean that the salve is optimized for me? And it’s less useful for you in general?”

Niall waved a hand, “Don’ worry about it! It’s my thanks to you for being a good student, an’ to start you on a path of Medical Alchemy!”

“Well… thanks, I guess.” Edwin awkwardly accepted the tub of salve, putting it in his belt before digging it out a second later so he could actually test it. Fortunately, Niall was digging around a disorganized chest filled with all sorts of vials, so he didn’t notice Edwin’s actions.

It only took a minute for Niall to find what he was looking for, and red phial in hand, the alchemist duo descended two floors, to where the dormitories were. While normally Niall had the nicest room claimed for himself and the other three were home to his five minions, Edwin had been given one of the nicer rooms for his own use. It wasn’t there that they were headed, though, instead visiting the former living room, now communal sleeping room which took up half the floor. Minfour (yes, the man had a real name, but Edwin didn’t know what it was) was sprawled out on a pad off to the side, clutching more than a few nasty blisters and third degree burns.

At Niall’s prompting, Edwin tried rubbing a bit of salve onto the back of Minfour’s hand, and watched as the blister sank away and the redness slowly faded to reveal unburned, uninjured skin. It took a while and a few applications, but that was apparently just the inefficiency at work. On Edwin it would theoretically fix the same injury with a mere drop of salve, and in seconds no less. Magic! Gotta love it.

What was really impressive, though, was the potion which Niall had his minion drink. Over the course of mere seconds, starting from his throat and upper torso, a wave of pink flesh spread across the man’s entire body, a faint trickle of blood being forced out of the skin as layer upon layer of skin was pushed up from below, replacing where it had been burned away and making blisters wither away in moments. Now that was a proper magic potion! Instant skin graft for the entire body, with no rejection! It had to have been a dedicated skin potion for that level of speed on a non-primed individual. Heck, that was practically at the level of a regeneration potion, which regrew the tissue wholesale.

…And regeneration potions needed a sample of the body part being targeted.

...Oh great.

Man, Edwin had such high hopes for Niall. They were getting along so well, too! He really hoped he wouldn’t have to put pretty much the entire tower to the torch. Okay, well, maybe there was a completely reasonable answer to this dilemma. Maybe Niall was just harvesting his own skin and using regen potions to get it back, with large enough batch sizes to make it a net positive? Would that even work? No need for his ‘backup supplies’ to be random people wandering down the road, right?

“So, ah, Niall, where did you get the ingredients for that potion? Seemed like you’d need a lot of human skin for that quick of a regrow.” Edwin asked, with a fair bit of dread, Please don’t be a serial killer, please don’t be a serial killer….

“Ah, some passing resupply,” Niall waved his hand, studying the fresh layer of skin on Minfour. He got too close and sneezed suddenly, interrupting his statement. He recovered quickly enough, though, and continued his inspection, “A courier or whatnot. Nothing particularly noteworthy, just a good source of materials.”

Edwin closed his eyes and breathed out slowly and carefully. Great.