The Way Ahead

His first discovery had been made when mixing some black-singed magical fulgurite into his batch of glass for the day. He had a whole slew of different samples in the kiln simultaneously, the enchanted lightning-made glass mixed in an array of concentrations from 10% to .1%, the smallest Edwin could reliably go with how small each individual mix was. He also tried out a single 5% with having Infused the regular glass, just to see what would happen.

The result was immensely cool, if admittedly a bit underwhelming for the scales he was working at. The fulglass had, as far as Edwin could tell, a constant static electricity buildup across its entire surface, which scaled in intensity depending on how much fulgurite was mixed in. The mana-glass acted the same, but instead of evenly mixing into the glass like the mundane varieties had done, the fulgurite coalesced into veins that reminded Edwin of a plasma ball, black tendrils stretching from the center outward.

While Edwin was initially hyped about the possibility of infinite free electricity as he constantly felt a tingle from the held crystals, the voltage was… low. Numeracy didn’t give him any values, but he would have been surprised if even the 10% concentration was more than a single volt. Plus… Edwin wasn’t really sure how to harness that electricity, if he was being honest. His classes hadn’t really covered what you were supposed to do if you stumbled across an infinite electron generator, if that was truly what was going on. Maybe he could encase the marble in a copper shell and insulate it, then run wires from that shell… but what would function as ‘ground’? It would be like using a low-voltage Van de Graaf generator but without a grounding wire…

Well, that was a problem for future-Edwin to consider. He just wished he was able to make more now! Unfortunately, what he had used was the only sample of the stuff the lab had, and Cope wasn’t willing to seek out additional samples just to make ‘strange tingly’ glass. That was… fair enough, Edwin supposed. After all, it wasn’t like he was about to explain to the man the literal infinite potential they represented. At the moment, the alchemist simply took them as trinkets. Party tricks, like amber and fur had been on Earth.

Still, while he kept his notes on paper about the discovery sparse, Edwin gushed endlessly about the possibility the substance had in Almanac, which brought him into a whole divergence on electricity and subatomic particles.

It was a pity he didn’t have any way to concentrate the fulgurite once he had mixed it in with the glass, but such was life. It wasn’t like he’d had any indication beforehand that it would be interesting, as other than pinging his magic senses, the ‘pure’ black glass had no unusual properties. It wasn’t even the first magical substance he had tested, either, just the first with an actually noteworthy impact. He’d just have to figure out where he could get more of the stuff at some point, he supposed.

Once he realized his mistake in overdiluting the magical ingredient, though, Edwin was much more careful to not repeat his error in the future. That caution paid off a few days later when he tested ‘abysite,’ a dark blue gem found in seaside caves, and when Edwin made a mixture of fifty/fifty abysite powder and sand, the resulting product was… well, it was a liquid.

The glass had cooled as normal, and thile the liquid was runnier than usual, that was nothing too strange. It was only when it lost its glow and turned transparent… without ever solidifying. Instead, it became a sort of liquid crystal that looked faintly blue-green. It was denser and with a higher refractive index than water, but despite an absolutely insane amount of surface tension, flowed with very little viscosity across whatever surface it was on. It refused to pick up any contaminants, was just as dense as glass, and Edwin was sure he’d figure out more in time if not for Cope having scooped it up with a hearty congratulations on his finding.

He hadn’t even been able to properly study the full extent of its properties, sadly. He didn’t know how much he could dilute the substance while retaining its liquid nature, and given the fact he barely had more than a large marble’s worth of glass, would be quite valuable if he could go as low as 10% abysite or even lower before the properties began to fade.

He was only a little bitter about it, he told himself. It was totally fine, that he wasn’t able to study this awesome and weird amorphous not-solid…

Yeah, he wasn’t even fooling himself. But there wasn’t much he could do about it either, so he let it lie for the time being. He just knew where he’d be heading once he was done in Panastalis.

Actually, that was a lie. There were lots of places that he heard about, lots of alchemical substances that he tried adding to glass to no avail. Everice from the north which stayed solid even in the ridiculously hot kiln, wyvern and hydra blood from the mainland jungles with strengthening and replenishing properties respectively, powdered dragonscale, manticore venom (Edwin was warned it was incurable and so to be careful with it), magefruit juice, blazeflower blossoms, honeyvine honey, glass falcon feathers, glowstone, and more besides. All of them were amazing and Edwin sorely wished he was able to properly experiment with all of them. His Alchemy skill practically buzzed with possibilities, but he restrained himself.

In total, he had a whole laundry list of places to visit and plants and animals to stock up on as he did so. There were hundreds of alchemical ingredients he could use, and hundreds of places where they were found.

In fact, the primary alchemical ingredient to be gotten around Panastalis was sap from the massive tree itself. It was used in an absolutely stunning amount of potions, where it served in every part of potions, from base to primary to secondary to aspect to tuner to… How did this all work exactly?

“No, no,” Thoril insisted, “The base is just what you have as the fundamental aspect of the potion. It’s not… your solver or whatever.”

“But it’s what you mix everything else in, right?” Edwin clarified, “Like… water, for a lot of potions, or I suppose glass for most of what we do here.”

“Yeah. That’s the base.”

“Right. With my alchemy tradition, we call that the solvent. Then you have your solute, that’s what’s mixed in, and that makes your solution.”

“Yeah, well it’s different. It’s not your solvent.”

“How so? That’s what I don’t get,” he pushed, “And that’s why I’m asking.”

“So, the base is what you put in the cauldron first. That could be blood, or water, or sap, or whatever you want, so long as it’s a liquid. Unless you’re making a dry potion, of course.

“If you stop right there, your potion is just whatever your base was. Then, you add your primary to give your potion whatever action it’s supposed to have.”

“I think we’re talking about the same thing, Thoril. I genuinely don’t see how it’s different. Like, take water. If you dissolve salt in it, it’s still water, but it also gets some properties of the salt, and some unique aspects to their mix. If you want to oversimplify things, anyway.”

“It’s… it’s different.”

“How, though?”

“It just is!”

Edwin rubbed his temples, “Okay, fine. Let’s say they’re different. So the… base has the biggest impact on what the potion is. Water has no particular leaning-”

“Unless you want something that’s refreshing or healing or-”

“Except a whole bunch of exceptions, yes. Water is normal, and doesn’t strongly impact the rest, though it can magnify certain traits. Blood makes… elixirs, or just things that only target living creatures. Glass, of course, makes items rather than potions. Oil is optimized for topological applications?” Thoril looked at him in incomprehension, “It’s best used when you put it on top of something else,” he sighed.

The alchemist nodded.

“Okay, great. And then that whole book talks about all the different bases, and their noted traits?” Edwin asked, pointing at the ‘Tome of the Foundation.’

Nod.

“Okay. So then the primary is whatever is the second-most abundant ingredient?”

“No! Not always! It could also be-”

“Could also just be the first thing you add, right.”

“Or it’s what has the greatest weight in the potion!”

“How is that determined?”

“Well, whatever is the primary is the greatest weight.”

“Yeah. So how do you determine that.”

“Well, importance, obviously.”

Edwin’s hands returned to his head, “And how do you designate importance?”

“By making sure that what you use has the greatest weight. Some stuff will always be the weightiest. Pretty much anything with dragons will be the primary weight.”

“So it’s an intrinsic property of the addition?” Edwin clarified.

“Sometimes.”

“You do not make this easy, you know that?”

“It’s a hard job. If you can’t handle it, then maybe you shouldn’t have been an alchemist.”

Edwin closed his eyes and breathed out. He wasn’t going to punch Thoril in his smug face, no matter how much everyone in the room would enjoy it. Fissath would certainly find it hilarious.

“You have,” Edwin calmly replied, “No idea about how much work I’ve put in for this. And no,” he forestalled the inevitable question, “I’m not going to elaborate.

“So you have the base, which determines properties of the potion. The primary, which influences what the potion does. And then the secondary… is like the primary, but lesser?”

“Welllll… yeah.” He sounded so defeated. It was great.

“Same with the tertiary, quaternary, and so on? Each has less and less of an effect? They involve the ‘weight’ thing as well, right?”

Thoril seemed almost annoyed at the fact Edwin was catching on, which Edwin probably shouldn’t have been enjoying as much as he was.

“But there’s a difference between using saltwater as a base, and using water as a base and salt as a tertiary ingredient or whatever?”

Nod.

Edwin held back a groan. Why couldn’t magic follow basic chemical principles? That wasn’t how solutions worked. Well, most of the time anyway. Sometimes.

“And then you have… aspecters and tuners. Aspecters change how something is accomplished, and tuners are… okay, I don’t understand that one. How is that not just an aspecter?”

“A tuning component is utterly different from an aspecting one. An aspecter is one that aspects the potion, meaning it has different methodologies of reaction, whereas a tuner tunes a potion so its reaction methodologies are distinct.”

Edwin blinked at the man.

“Are you just messing with me now?”

“No! A tuner tunes, an aspecter aspects. They’re completely different!”

“That’s not… that… oh, forget it,” he took a deep breath, “I don’t suppose there’s a book that explains this? Perhaps with examples?”

Edwin was at least half sure whatever potion-making methodology they used was utter nonsense. Even reading through three different books on the subject, somehow left him even more confused than when he started. His best guess at the moment was that tuners and aspecters were mostly interchangeable terms that alchemists liked to insist were different. Between the three books, he found no less than four definitions of what each of them were, and none of them agreed with each other. Even the three he had found in Alchemie Primera couldn’t agree.

It all seemed… artificial at first, which had cast further skepticism on the entire concept. The System? Sure, that was one thing. But this potion making seemed almost… gamelike, especially at first. What had helped him was seeing the sheer variety of combinations that didn’t produce a viable result. It made it seem more like a matter of notation than some strange minigame. After all, they absolutely got results, and helped convince Edwin that did know, at least to some minor extent, what they were doing.

The best thing Edwin could liken it to was cooking. The base was what sort of meal you were making, be it a soup, a sauce, a sandwich, or a salad. Even if you used almost all the same ingredients, the resulting meal would be very different. The primary ingredient was then whatever contributed the ‘most’ to the actual recipe. It didn’t matter how many other things were in your salad, if it included chicken, it was a chicken salad. Secondary and futher ingredients were then what defined the rest of the dish. Then tuners and aspecters were comparatively minor parts of the recipe, but with an outsized effect on the rest of the food. Even a tiny amount of ghost pepper sauce would make an entire meal spicy, after all.

Once he’d figured that out, even if the details still didn’t make sense to him, the overall shape started to unfold.

I swear, level 50 Research is useless. Utterly useless.

Now, his primary objection was with what their potion ingredients were. Midnight Smoke had a base of sand, a primary of octopus ink, a secondary of ground lavender flowers, an aspecter of the beak of a rooster beat into a powder, and a tuner of alderwood bark smoke, held in an iron skillet for the smoking process.

Oh yeah. Apparently the container the potion was made in could affect things. Because why not? To say nothing of the fact they were making a sleeping potion out of sand. That wasn’t how biology, chemistry, or physics worked!

In any case, the result was a dark, dark purple crumbly powder that when blown into the air would billow beyond its apparent volume and create the midnight blue smoke so resistant to spreading out that had knocked out most of the lab back when he’d first arrived.

Even Alchemist’s Analysis didn’t show the substance as being made of sand once it was done, but instead wholly un-Almanaced ingredients. Clearly, something was going on, even if he couldn’t figure out what exactly it was yet.

The problem was that when Edwin tried to make a relatively simple potion- an oil-based potion of fire resistance, made with oil as a base, fire elemental ember-ash as a primary, and giant spider’s blood as an aspecter, it did nothing. Actually nothing. Well, the oil made the stick that it was tested on burn a bit faster, but the potion itself had no effect.

He had no clue what had caused that. He’d been giving it a good-faith effort, too, so there shouldn’t have been some magical observer effect at play, where thinking it wouldn’t work would mean it couldn’t. Other attempts at other potions had no effect either.

He could watch people make potions no problem. Most of the others did at least a few side-projects in addition to the porcelain problem from time to time, and there was some really impressive stuff being made! Healing potions made from troll blood, fertilizers made from the sap of the giant tree Panastalis was built around, strength potions made from bear blood and bear claws.

Yet every time he tried his hand at things, it failed. What made things even stranger, if it weren’t bad enough already, was that if he followed the personal directions of someone overseeing his attempt, the potion would turn out fine. But if he read from a book, or tried to make a potion from memory? No luck.

He was starting to reconsider his certainty that it wasn’t some kind of observer effect, but he had managed to make potions before. They’d just been from the Zosiman Grimoire, a book conspicuously absent from the limited libraries he had eventually been granted access to.

Making some vague, circumspect inquiries about the book only resulted in him finding out that it was apparently total nonsense and everything it said was wrong. He wasn’t able to get any more information about it for whatever reason, but it seemed somewhat suspicious to him if nothing else. His personal experience told him that the Grimoire worked- he’d made two different kinds of potion- healing salve and dehydration oil- straight from its pages and they had both worked out great. Plus, its herbology sections had been accurate insofar as Edwin had been able to tell… but he quietly went though and marked all his Almanac pages with information from the Grimoire as possibly suspect.

He was so, so glad that he figured out he could just edit pages about midway through his project, instead of having to wholly rewrite them. The discovery even got him another level in the Skill, which was massive these days, particularly given his leveling of it just a few weeks prior. Even still, he was happier about discovering the edit functionality than the level.

Cope kept wanting Edwin to keep working on the porcelain problem, though. He kept thinking that it was just a matter of some combination of glasses of different colors, heated different times with additional additives each time, and he’d eventually get his porcelain.

Of course, Edwin still couldn’t explain why it was a fool’s errand, that his approach was fundamentally incorrect, and that Othniel was the one with the right idea. It wouldn’t go over well, that much was certain.

Most importantly, though, it would mean that Edwin would be pressured about how he knew that porcelain was a form of pottery, not glassmaking, to which he had no answer. A month of using Memory had let him remember there was something about a glaze with porcelain, but that the glaze was done at the same time as curing the pottery… he had never really known details, so Memory was of limited use there.

His ’man of mystery’ excuse would only go so far. He genuinely didn’t know what each of his coworkers thought his history was, but he was pretty sure that revealing a secret jealously guarded by a city so powerful it could resist the Empire would result in them demanding answers, and he wasn’t ready to leave quite yet.

Soon, perhaps. But not yet.

“Maxlin,” Cope approached him one day while he was setting up his next trial- white-stained iron filings, “I’ve arranged for a medical license course for you. It starts tomorrow, I’ll cover the cost.”

Well. That was a pleasant surprise.

Level Up!

Skill Points 581→661 (Average level: 39)

Outsider’s Almanac Level 131→132

Flight Level 32→37

Ritual Intuition Level 20→25

Longstrider Level 29→30

Fresh Air Level 14→31

Alchemical Analysis Level 15→26

Alchemy Level 84→86

Skillful Assessment Level 32→33

Watchful Rest Level 18→26

Prototyping Level 16→22

Basic Thermokinesis Level 17→20

Arcadian Elixir Level 17→19

Memory Level 60→61

Numeracy Level 32→35

Mana Infusion Level 86→87

Polyglot Level 60→65

Improbable Arsenal Level 23→26

Alchemical Dismantling Level 6→18

Sapper’s Apparatus Level 40→43