There was a long pause as they all waited for Instructor Graysky to appear. People had begun to talk nervously, joking about what could be taking the old man so long, but soon that became genuine concern as nearly an hour passed, the sun sinking behind the windows.

Finally a flustered looking apprentice entered the room. “Ah-hem. Instructor Graysky has been… indisposed. Instructor Eastlight will be attending instead.”

Eastlight?

The name brought instant dread welling up from Rain’s memories. Graysky was a cruel and arrogant jackass who lorded over the students, but the worst things about him was his everpresence, looming over any function or duty he could shoulder his way into.

But Eastlight is like a hurricane.

A beautiful older woman emerged onto the balcony that overlooked the workstations and furnaces, her hair drawn back behind an elaborate golden pin, dressed in a flowing set of robes that had been adorned and embroidered with golden threads atop the alchemist’s green. A calabash gourd hung from her belt, alongside tasseled knots of red strings, and a small dagger sheathed at her hip.

She had a timeless face, the evidence of advancing years only slightly visible.

“Now…” Her voice swept through the room and there was an immediate chilling of all good mood or hope. There was just something about the way she pronounced that one word that sent an immediate shiver down the spine. “Usually, the Elders don’t appreciate my style of examination. That’s because I care very little for rote learning. If you can recite every herb under the sun, that doesn’t mean you can transform a single one of those lessons into practical knowledge. Most alchemists have surrendered the cultivation path to seek safety, comporting themselves as pompous round-belled kings, secure in their knowledge but forever at the mercy of actual men. Alchemists who cannot fight will forever be controlled by cultivators who know no alchemy – I would be failing you to allow a single one of you to pass without first proving you have the spine to defend our secrets…”

She paused, letting the implication sink in, then clarified, “But the Elders refuse to allow me to settle this my way. The test must be purely in terms of alchemy, they say.”

Booker wasn’t the only one who was visibly relieved to hear this wasn’t the wind-up to making them knife-fight.

Instead, she took a slender vial from her sleeves and, lifting it in two fingers, poured the colorless fluid into a bowl. “This is a poison. I will not share it’s name to you. Rather, let me make a wager. I intend to levy a truly punishing exam against you all, one you will almost certainly fail. But any of you can choose to exempt yourself by taking a much simpler test: drink the poison, identify, and neutralize it. Take your life in your own hands, and excel.”

I bet she was told she couldn’t make us drink the poison.

The seven of them were silent for a moment, people glancing left and right, taking measure of their brothers and sisters. Nobody wanted to be the first to drink. Some weren’t even considering it. But among those that were, all were waiting for somebody else to go first.

“I should clarify, alchemists. None of you will be allowed to aid another and each of you will have to drink a different poison. If one of you chooses to take this test, they will succeed or fail alone. Anyone who aids them will disqualify themselves and the one they help.”

“Ah…” A boy with one eye missing to a patch of ragged, raw-pink scar tissue rubbed the back of his neck. “If that’s the case, and nothing to be gained by waiting, brothers wish me luck.”

“Me too.” A young woman with a sun-burnt face and short-cropped hair, her nose visibly broken at least twice, held up a hand. “I need to become an alchemist, so whatever the hurdle I intend to cross.”

“Brothers, I’ll drink.” Booker said, and without another word, turned and walked down the row of workbenches towards the ingredients shelf. He didn’t say anything – but he walked before the rest of them could start, and instead of heading up the stairs to drink his poison, he took ingredients off the shelf and walked back to his workbench.

I just have to hope they’re thinking along the same lines, or realize when they see me do it…

But we can protect ourselves before drinking.

There was a particular way the Instructor Eastlight’s smile shifted that said she was on to him, but technically, he hadn’t volunteered a single thing. He’d simply brought back a large jar of oil and a small jar of charcoal, balancing one on the lip of the other.

Putting them down on his workbench, he ground the charcoal quickly in his mortar and pestle, but already his plan to aid unseen was falling apart. The boy was heading up the stairs, ignoring what Booker was doing entirely.

For a moment Booker considered spilling a bowl, but he really didn’t know how far he could push Instructor Eastlight. Instead he focused on his own trial: mixing the ground-up charcoal with powdered acid, he distributed the mixture with a whisk and placed it inside one of the ready ovens. As the two substances combined under the heat the acids would carve microscopic pits into the charcoal, opening up more new area and ‘activating’ the charcoal to bond to poisons in the stomach.

The oil was a secondary precaution with the exact opposite effect. It would coat his throat and stomach to minimize the surface area that the poison could interact with there, while in a large enough quantity, also packing his stomach with a dense, water resistant material that would prevent the poison from being absorbed. Essentially the light poison would ‘float’ atop the heavy oil.

Using charcoal was an ancient alchemy technique, whereas the use of oils was more niche, needing to be done before the poison was ingested and, even then, only worked for poisons taken by mouth. Still, the green tome covered all forms of alchemy, and the oil trick was recorded in the book as a rare technique practiced by poisoners to assure their victims that tainted food was safe. Once the victim had eaten, the poisoner would retreat and throw up before their portion of the poison could be absorbed.

All the while he was watching the boy out of the corner of his eye: the young alchemist took the bowl, swirled it to test for viscosity, then dipped a finger in, waiting for the flesh to numb or discolor. After a moment he smelled the liquid, tasted it carefully off his finger, and finally lifted the bowl to drink.

“Wang An! You have the stomach of an old horse, you can beat any poison!” One of the apprentices who hadn’t chosen to step forward called, pumping their fist in the air and trying to start a cheer. It died with them, the noise dwindling against the silence of the other alchemists. Unfriendly gazes were aimed their way.

Waiting for the disruption to end, Instructor Eastlight gestured for Wang An to continue.

“At least half.” She instructed. “The rest you may keep to test and examine.”

He nodded, gulping twice and wiping his mouth as he put the bowl down. A moment later, his brave face gave way to gagging as something rebelled against his stomach, and the boy rushed down the stairs to empty his stomach into a wastebin.

The young woman had followed Booker’s suit, and one of the ones who hadn’t strictly said they’d drink had also started to prepare oil and charcoal. They were probably waiting on the one detail that the first round of contestants might give away – how difficult, overall, the poisons would be to identify. It was natural to simply let some others test the risk first.

Honestly, it’s snake behavior, but I can’t blame them. At this point, things are life and death, so you might as well take any advantage you can get. It’s not like they’re putting anyone else under the gun, they’re just not volunteering themselves for the first taste.

Wang An straightened up, wiped his mouth again and began to prepare some simple ingredients. It was too soon to tell what his symptoms were, but he could try to prepare broadly useful medicines to try and knock out common guesses.

In this case, it looked like he was guessing at something that would attack his nervous system, by chopping up the fresher side of a serpent-tongue root into a brown mince and bringing it up to temperature on a small runic burner, mixing in the shells of crushed cicada husks, and soaking long black strands of nyxic kelp in boiling water to draw out their properties. When combined…

The effects of any neurotoxin would be neutralized or greatly reduced, and in the event the medicine failed, neurotoxins would be ruled out entirely. That would narrow things to a handful of choices.

In the background, Booker prepared a bowl for cooling his charcoal by taking a trio of stones etched with simple cooling talismans and tossing them in, letting their finger-stinging cold sink into the metal.

He’s at least competent in his own right, even if he didn’t catch on before.

I just don’t know how difficult this test is supposed to be. Is she mostly looking for the courage to drink, or is the test more serious than that?

The basic principle of poison cures was to combine basic poison purging and neutralizing properties with a complement of ingredients that matched the active poison ingredients. In that particular way the alchemy of antidotes was exactly like normal alchemy: you wanted to activate positive properties and deactivate negative ones via matching, adding new links onto Reagent chains, and disrupting the balances of elements.

Unfortunately, it was much harder in other ways. For one thing, poison cures grew less effective with every second the poison was allowed to sink into the body. For another, poisons were naturally high in Toxicity, and that could make a high Toxicity cure cause more harm than good by compounding with the poison’s lingering pollution, leaving the patient alive but crippled.

Over the next few minutes Wang An prepared cures for other common poisons: the famous Pale Rose, the rotting Ghoul Kiss, simple cyanide and arsenic... But as he worked with his knife his fine movements seemed to be slipping more and more...

Soon he had begun to flex his fingers open and closed, squinting at them as if detecting something slight but wrong. A moment later he dropped the sandals off his feet and sat down, lifting up a foot to examine and manually bend his toes.

Booker craned forward to see and confirm: They’re swollen. The poison definitely has an allergic reaction property.

But Wang An was hesitating. By the time he’d realized what it was and begun preparing the proper medicine for the furnace, Booker had already pulled his activated charcoal out, transferring it to the cooling bowl.

As Wang An went to place his weighted molds into the furnace, he caught a blast of scalding air, filling his lungs and starting a brutal cough. The sound was rough, and it continued until he was on his knees, choking, and the molds had tumbled from his hands to spill their contents on the floor.

Booker repressed the urge to step forward and offer help. Wang An was slowly recovering, massaging his throat and clambering up. Blood had spilled onto his lower lip in a froth of pink bubbles, suggesting something new was happening, somewhere between his lungs and throat.

Grabbing his knife, Wang An started again on a new batch of pills. But by now…

It was clear things were progressing faster than a pill could be finished. Wang An realized it too – he stumbled to the shelves and began to take raw ingredients back to his bench, mixing them with water and mashing roughly to make a simple paste. Clearly suffering now, he tried to swallow the salve, choking it down in tiny gulps. But it was no good – his throat had already closed – and soon he was bent over the wastebin again, coughing brutally.

Damn, his methods are too rough. No, he needed to prepare an injection, or at least distill the herbs into a tincture he could drink slowly. Better yet, he needed to have started a minute ago… His hesitation to diagnose the symptoms quickly is costing him.

Well I can’t wait any longer. He might die if I don’t start preparing now.

Taking a salt-packed pig adrenaline gland and dusting off the salt, he took it and separated away white layers of fat and red proteins to get the valuable extract within. That extract, he combined with a compounded ammonium, mixing the two together while floating them in a stew of acids pressed from centipede-fish craw. The result was a rapidly crystallizing Adrenaline 25% (-) compound, which Booker mixed into water and prepared for injection.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Wang An had managed to choke down the paste, but he was in a bad position, slumped down and only holding himself up with one hand across the surface of the worktable.

Instructor Eastlight was watching intently. Booker didn’t look up, but he faintly sensed an edge to the air that was similar to martial intent.

You know I care less about this test than I do saving Wang An, if it comes to that…

Preparing the adrenaline shot was a dead giveaway.

But she’s not acting to stop me… I’m within the bounds of what she wants for this test. Just because she's threatened us all, doesn't mean that the reaction she's looking for is fear. No, if her method is trial by fire...

She wants people who refuse to bend under pressure.

He starteed to step forward, but Wang An threw up a hand, refusing help. “Get away from me!” The boy shouted. Although his voice was ragged and almost impossible to understand, he lurched away from the workbench, trying to keep away from Booker. “I can do this!”

“I’m surprised you can talk.” Booker said coldly. He wasn’t about to let foolhardy ambition bring Wang An's death, not even if the boy insisted on it. Fourteen was too young to know what you wanted to die for.

“No, no, I'm fine... The paste helped.” Wang An groaned, barely keeping on his feet. “My throat… my throat is okay… just my feet are killing me…”

Booker almost rolled his eyes. “Very well, I'll stay my hand for now, but I need you to keep on your feet. If you fall down again, I’ll give you the medicine whether or not you want it.”

Wang An nodded, agreeing to that much. “The pills... They're almost done…”

Who am to judge his pride? Booker thought. I've done worse.

They gazed into the furnace together, tasting the fragrance of the medicine building on their tongue as the flames engulfed the weighted stone molds. The sound of Wang An breathing got tighter and tighter with every passing second.

Wang An struggled to get a wooden paddle, his fingers no longer properly closing as he carefully levered out one of the molds. They winced together as he knocked it open with a hammer and only dark ash spilled out. The process of getting another mold out was even more painful, but this time, cracking it open yielded a bright-green pill, perfectly glossed and round.

At this point, Wang An struggled just to lift the pill – still hot, probably burning – and force it down his throat with swollen fingers. He gagged violently, but swallowed down water and worked the lot down painfully. By the end he was leaning against his workbench, his face lying on the flat surface tilted to one side, barely breathing…

But Booker held back, giving him a count of three...

Two...

One...

A ragged whine emerged from Wang An's throat, a first tiny whistle of air that expanded slowly into a full breath, until the boy gasped out and coughed a spew of saliva that had been caught in his constricted throat.

He lifted himself and shook his head, wheezing again and coughing up a splatter of blood thickened with bile. “Hhhaaa… Hhhhahaaa…”

“Survival.” Noted the Instructor. “Although barely.”

Booker nodded his head. “Sorry to have worried unnecessarily and injured elder brother’s pride. Congratulations.”

“No, no, I’m glad you tried… I was braver for having you there.” Wang An groaned.

“Admitting he helped you under my nose is rather bold, no? I should fail you just for that.” Eastlight sniffed. “And you–”

Her gaze fixed on Booker with a certain sour disdain. “A cripple, but trying to take care of those on the cultivation path? The arrogance astounds me. There’s always a do-gooder in the lot, and they always get the reward they deserve.”

“Apologies, I overstepped myself in my enthusiasm to see my brothers succeed.”

“I doubt you have learned your lesson thoroughly enough.”

Booker weathered her gaze, lowered his head, and said no more in response.

"I'm next." The sunburnt girl said, taking her reserve of oil and swallowing three heavy gulps. Lowering the bowl, she added, “Well... I hope you don’t have to help me, but if you do… I’ll pity you a drink or two, brother cripple.”

Booker nodded. He was glad that the other apprentices, at least, weren’t dismissive of him like Instructor Eastlight.

The girl ascended the stairs, downed her poison and returned to her work station, where she had already prepared half-a-dozen ingredients to quickly mix as the symptoms started to manifest. Pausing to empty her stomach into the wastebin, she grimaced as she rose, grabbing charcoal fragments to swallow and putting two fingers to her neck, checking her own pulse. “Poison is setting in quickly. Already clammy to the touch. Pulse slightly slow...”

She paused, wedging her tongue between her teeth, before concluding...

“Likely to be paralytic agent, acting on the heart. ” Grabbing her ingredients she began to mash together a quick solution.

But half-way through the mixture she sagged suddenly, knees buckling... She barely caught herself and recovered, letting out a shaky gasp. All the blood had drained from her face.

Sitting down, she said, “I think this one is pretty straightforward... My lips are numbing, I smell gravedirt, and there’s a chill sensation on my tongue. It could only be Ghoul Kiss Fragrance...” But even knowing exactly what she needed to do was no guarantee, and there was a shakiness in her voice... It was a painfully long pause, sitting there and shivering, before she was ready to stand up on shaking legs and assemble the cure.

Taking the pill molds directly to the fire she pushed them in with her bare hands.

Evenlight simply said, “You had better be sure. I don’t hear certainty in your voice.”

Ghoul Kiss… a mix of paralytic and necrotizing poisons that rot the tongue right out of your mouth... before eating away the rest of the soft matter in and around the skull. How incredibly vile do you have to be to use that on a student?

But worse, if it’s not Ghoul Kiss…

Well, the negative properties of Ghoul Kiss are both (-). That means the medicine is more poison, and a wrong guess will mean killing the patient twice-over.

But as the seconds passed, the poison was acting much slower on her than it did in its first appearance... Booker supposed that meant an initial dose had gotten in through the soft tissues of her mouth, but was now being isolated by the oil in her stomach. Thanks to protecting her stomach, she was enduring much better than Wang An, even against a stronger poison.

Soon the molds were out of the furnace, and she chiseled them open one-by-one until she found a successful pill. Tilting her head back, she gulped it down.

And in moments she was unconscious.

“Shit!” Booker saw her drop to the ground so quickly that he couldn’t even react, going from standing under her own weight again to simply sagging and crumpling within a single breath. Wang An dodged forward to catch her without even thinking–

And winced as he caught her, blurting out, “Does this count as helping?! Instructor Eastlight, I didn’t mean too–”

Eastlight did not respond, looking on with cold indifference.

Goddamn Eastlight faked her out. Not even Ghoul Kiss, but some evil compound that resembles it enough to trap you into poisoning yourself. That’s…

No that’s too much.

“Brother Wang, don’t worry.” Booker said as he stepped past the two, climbing up the stairs. “I’m going to test a theory.”

There was a peculiar smile on Eastlight's face as she poured the poison into a bowl – and in her eyes as she met his gaze. Booker smelled the bowl, dipped his finger in, and swirled it about… It had no viscosity, no numbing effect on his finger, and no odor. He tasted his finger and and found no taste at all. Lifting the bowl to his lips and drinking he still detected no flavor stronger than a faint mineral sourness.

No taste at all.

The book flipped open, revealing its diagnosis.

Heretical Innards-Twisting Bile (Earth)

42% Potency // 25% Toxicity

Effect:

Causes the innards to invert violently over a matter of minutes.

Ingredients:

Grandfather-Faced Maggot

Ash-Water Lily

The book as always knew exactly what the solution was, and began to flicker forward through the pages towards a diagnosis, but Booker recalled it back to the original page, noting how strange a few small details looked. How the writing was in a different hand than it should have been...

As he put the bowl down, Instructor Eastlight asked him, “Have you identified the poison?”

He opened his mouth and felt his innards suddenly jolt in their foundations, like they were trying to claw their way up his throat. Clutching his belly, he swallowed hard, and gave his diagnosis.

“The only taste is faintly mineral, there is no odor, and there is no viscosity.” Booker said. “This is the Sect’s well water.”

There was a distinct pause…

But in that pause Booker realized the pain in his innards was gone entirely.

“That is correct. Although I added a small illusion.” Eastlight said with a smile. “You have tasted, identified, and neutralized the poison. Therefore, you are the only pass. The rest of you – what kind of piss poor alchemist can’t recognize water? You let the moment get the better of you and ignored your senses. You are not qualified to continue – do not return to this examination for a year.”

Wang An and the young woman were left sputtering in outrage. The young woman had recovered entirely already – the illusion was simply broken.

What a way to teach a lesson…

But if any of the apprentices who hadn’t stepped forward were snickering at the drama, they were soon silenced. “As for the rest of you…” Eastlight said. “You will not be well rewarded for being too cowardly to drink a little water. Senseless risk is the worst thing, but lack of ambition will never yield anything worth growing. I do not expect any of you will pass the written exam…”

Booker bowed, and departed. The moment he was out in the hall he took a long pause to breathe and rub his eyes, recovering from how briefly and brutally intense that had been…

Here I was hoping for a cakewalk taught by an apprentice with Instructor Graysky gone…

I suppose I learned that the book isn't infallible. An illusion can prevent me from seeing what it truly says.

And there are worse ways to learn that, I guess?

Eastlight. What a maniac.

— — —

Booker intended to sleep that night. The pills were making him too…

Too caught up in the moment. He’d probably blown his cover with Wei Qi, at least until he could find some way to throw him off track again. Maybe make a face-changing pill and take off the mask in front of Wei Qi… Such things aren’t impossible…

Yeah…

Booker opened the door to his apartment and stepped inside, shaving and washing himself with the basin. Taking a small bowl, he broke up a healing and a cultivation pill, adding water then mixing them into a slurry with a whisk. He put it down on the windowsill, letting Snips, Froggie, and Zhi-Zhi descend and feast on their well-earned meal.

Of course, they mostly fed themselves but… he really ought to be providing them with cultivation resources. Zhi-Zhi’s hunger for them was funny, but giving his companions some of the materials he couldn’t otherwise make use of was a win-win.

But gods, he was looking forward to sleeping.

Settling down, Booker curled his arms behind his head and closed his eyes, ready for sleep to descend like a hammer. He let all thought drift away, and just sank down into the comforting knowledge he had absolutely nothing to do for the next eight hours.

But it was strange.

Just when he was in the deep of a dream about walking through a wild and moss-clad green forest… He looked up and saw the moon… It was beyond brilliant. Silver-bright in a way that seemed like it was too intense for the muted colors of a dream. It actually hurt his eyes, and as he gazed squinting into the light, a scalding bridge of light descending from the sky.

Incredible.

As he blinked and tried to make reason of the situation, Booker seemed to be phasing between his apartment and the dream. With each blink he went from looking at the moon through the shutters of his window, to looking up through the branches of the dreaming forest. In both worlds, the bridge remained.

He felt an urge to cross it, to walk up and see what waited in the heights.

It was as if the bridge was calling to him, saying it had the power he wanted, the respect he deserved, everything he was denied. All of it was waiting for him in the heights at the end of the bridge.

Booker almost took a step forward… the allure was so sweet…

This isn’t right.

He stepped back.

And then a third image faded into the back-and-forth: his room, the forest, and now, a different place. A place he still recognized as a memory of his bedroom, but one from a long time ago and back on Earth. The very place he’d left Rain’s remnant spirit.

“Don’t.” It was the smallest sound, a hoarse whisper from the wind. It came from the place where there was a faint impression of ghostly light.

And that one word was enough to break him free.

The bridge was the color not of silver moonlight, but of a pale maggot, slimy and gray-white. The whispers from beyond were lifeless and crooning, distorted into parodies of human speech.

Booker lunged out of bed and closed the blinds. As the light died to nothing, he sighed, feeling suddenly exhausted. His bed was calling and the sequence of what was happening was beginning to blur in his mind, details falling away rapidly.

Like something’s trying to erase it from my mind…

He sat down in the lotus position to close his eyes and replay the events through his mind again. The way it felt, and the way it really was. Going over the details again, Booker forced them into his memory like stone.

No, that wasn’t some weird dream.

That was an attack.

And I escaped it, thanks to Rain.

Thanks to someone remembering where easy routes to power really go.