♦•♦•♦ Alchemy ♦•♦•♦
Alchemy begins with sourcing appropriate ingredients. From there, one must extract the properties of one's ingredients. Then one must carefully combine the properties and finally condense the resultant combination into a useful form.
♦•♦•♦
Extracting alchemical properties from ingredients you have grown or harvested has a 10% greater chance of success.
For any formula you have concocted, your Journeyman Book will identify ingredient substitutions and their more subtle affects among any ingredients you have personally examined, to the limits of your examination.
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Techniques:
- Earthen Temper [Apprentice]
- Icebound Refinement [Journeyman]
- Radiant Transmutation [Expert]
- Shadow Flame Refinement [Expert]
- Water Extraction [Journeyman]
♦•♦•♦ ▲▼▲ ♦•♦•♦
That was the full entry for Kestra's Alchemy skill after her breakthrough to the Journeyman grade ranks. Over the past month, as she worked her way through the simpler formula she had brought with her from Moh, she had "taught herself" the two Expert grade techniques by using her elemental spells with her Mana Manipulation skill to mimic tools and lab set-ups that she needed for some of the plants she had also brought over. On moh, those plants were known to possess Light and Dark affinity. There were small differences to working with those plants in the Myriad Realms and their yin cycle of five elements as opposed to Moh's six, but in the end they were still attuned to the degree of light and shade around them.
She hadn't actually been trying for a technique when she taught herself the Icebound Refinement one. The Nature Sprite she had convinced to come take care of her retreat realm's plants had asked her about using Alchemy to make better plant food. Natspri, as he had agreed she could call him, took his end of their bargain very seriously, to the point that he very nearly tried to fight Graemire when the Emperor of Wood attempted to teach Natspri how to harvest her plants for her.
For a while, Kestra had thought it was because they were plants that he was tending that made him so edgy about their harvesting, but when she came out with them for some harvesting a few weeks ago, he had nervously clicked his twig-like limbs and asked, "Plant cuts good-good?"
"As long as there are more plants of the same kind growing, or seeds ready to plant when their season comes again, then harvesting is good," she answered. That had sparked Kestra going through all the plants originating from Moh, explaining what properties she wanted to enhance from them during their growth, how she knew to harvest them, and what they were used for.
Graemire and Natspri had taken her through the plants of the Myriad Realms, explaining what their Elemental senses told them of the plants' properties, with Graemire adding in what he knew of their uses, which mostly had to do with making mulches and medicines for other plants. Natspri had listened just as intently as Kestra, and then turned to her. "Make plant-grow food?"
"I'll show you one formula from Moh that should be good here," she agreed. Keeping in mind that Wood Element aligned beings weren't as good with magicking around Fire, Kestra made sure that Natspri learned the Control Water spell, then showed him how to use the spell to make the pseudo element of Ice.
They harvested some alustace canes, which were native to Kestra's former home of Tellenhook on Moh, slit open the hard outer layer, and removed the pulp from the center of the reeds. Kestra then smashed the pulp to a semi-liquid state. Layering a few lengths of gauze, she poured the semi-liquid through it into a collection jar, and wrung out the rest of the juices from the mash.
"The mash can be added to the clipping pile from our Cooking, and over time it will rot into compost, like loam in the forest. The juice here needs to be clarified, and what we want is the part that freezes. The part that doesn't will be a very concentrated sweet liquid that I'll use when I'm Cooking."
Suiting actions to words, she used the Control Water spell to freeze the juice, pointing out to Natspri, and Graemire, too, how she was controlling how quickly she was freezing the liquid.
When she finished, lifting the icy block off the top of the syrup, she got the notice about her new refining technique.
Earthen Temper was a new technique she had made, like the Water Extraction technique. It was the spell-based version of her mechanical acid tempering process.
That was what techniques were: spells used in a particular method to aid a skill. That had been what Ralouf told her, at least, when she asked why she wasn't finding anything about spell techniques.
The techniques were nice and all, and you didn't have to learn the spells to learn the techniques. The rank grade benefits were better. The books she has bought from the Reward Store had included mentions that the various rewards one got for their skills had to do with how they had used their skills to grow their ranks. It made sense to Kestra then that her harvesting and planting focus at first yielded the Apprentice grade benefit for harvesting and growing her own reagents, her ingredients.
The Journeyman Book her Journeyman grade reward mentioned was a nigh-universal perk for reaching that grade in any crafting skill, and served much the same purpose as the knowledge bank she had tasked Inspri with maintaining. Her servitor of Order had done a better job, in Kestra's admittedly biased opinion; she had formed Inspri while she was making her personal realms. The reward itself she attributed to forming that knowledge bank and then pushing into Journeyman rank when she finally got the time to start actively experimenting.
Which brought her back to why she had called up the skill description in the first place. The Alchemy of Moh had been mostly mechanical; few Alchemists had the ability to cast spells or use the fundamental elemental skills. That required somehow gaining the elusive Arcane Senses skill. Here, everyone with a single open mana foramen could be a [Mage]. It made their approach to Alchemy quite different.
Sourcing ingredients was essentially the same. The extraction, too, Kestra felt pretty comfortable with. Combining had been going well, but condense? That she wasn't sure she understood quite so well, despite the skill manuals she had acquired. Refinement techniques could be applied to the extractions and the combinations, but she wasn't sure that was the same as "condensing".
If anything, she kept finding references that implied there was a connection between the process she had undergone to form her solid mana drops in her dantian and this alchemical "condensing" concept.
"Well," she muttered to herself as she peered at the basic Healing Potion she had brewed up in her cauldron, "nothing attempted, nothing learned."
It amused her that what had been a Minor Healing Potion on Moh was simply a Healing Potion here. She had made so many of these that she needed next to no Focus to achieve a moderate success, and she had more than a few already bottled and set aside.
For this new bit, though, Kestra started by remembering the feeling of reaching into herself with her Mana Manipulation skill and pushing on what might as well have been water. She had had to make a sphere of that liquid-like mana to start with, then take command of the edges and push inward, carefully applying the pressure evenly across the surface to prevent bulges that weakened her control over the whole. The first had taken a frustrating week with Graemire's steady, calming support and direction. The second had taken three days, and the third a day. The fourth and fifth had been condensed in the same day.
So now Kestra reached out with her Mana Manipulation skill and caught up the mana in the potion. She investigated it with her skill before she poked here and there, just to see how it reacted.
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When she was done playing with the potion's mana, she pulled it into a sphere and began to press inward, to condense it as if she intended to form a solid-stage mana drop from it. A minute passed, then two, then ten, and then the mana seemed to catch fire as it exploded the potion.
Not through: the potion turned to char and smoke, spat all over the cauldron and up in a plume of angry darkness that was almost immediately siphoned off by the World Seed in her third, unformed realm.
♦•♦•♦ Condensation Failed ♦•♦•♦
Your attempt to condense a healing pill has failed, consuming your ingredients.
♦•♦•♦ ▲▼▲ ♦•♦•♦
"Really?" she snapped, still recovering from the fright she had taken at the explosive nature of that failure.
Kestra sighed, checked her cauldron for damage, found none, and cleaned it out. The charred residue was thankfully inert to her Mana Manipulation skill, but she still observed the proper procedures and stored the cleaned out failure in a mundane, glazed clay pot next to a Vining Mana-Fed Creeper. On the other side was a plant of the Myriad Realms called Alchemist's Friend, a kind of flowering ground cover. Both plants were highly resilient against poisons as long as there was mana involved. If there was anything magical to deal with, they would eat it, and then the resultant mixture could be dealt with as mundane matter.
That seen to, Kestra pulled out her journal and began to write down her observations.
She made two more attempts, getting the same flashing plume of soot-fine char and the same notice from the blue screens of the Living Scrolls of the Myriad Realms.
After recording her observations of her third failure, Kestra tapped the end of her pencil against her page while she thought out loud. "It looks like the physical part of the potion just can't handle the condensed mana of the whole. Is this a problem with my approach? Do I need to somehow condense the physical matter, too? Or do I need to add another reagent, something that can handle the greater mana but still be ingestible? What could I add?"
Inspri answered, «The Five-Seed Brumi fruit is both mana stable across densities and edible. You have seeds for Twenty Moon Lattice Flowers, which some of the ingredient encyclopedias suggest as similarly mana stable, but they're in a prize box you designated as a High Distraction box. The other ingredients suggested by the encyclopedias are obtained from Transcendental or Immortal Realm monsters.»
"That could work!" Kestra grinned on her way to the tree.
She loved the taste of the sweeter brumi fruit, which was the main reason Kestra had made sure to bring the seeds with her. The trees were usually grown from a single seed, and the fruits of the Single-Seed Brumi trees were uniform to the tree: primarily sweet, sour, or bitter. The rind of the fruit hinted at the tastes within. All of their barks were useful as salt substitutes, and their leaves could be used as a nose-burning spice.
The Five-Seed Brumi trees were mana eaters, and they produced all of the fruit flavors, but only after they had eaten enough mana. Back on Moh, those with Botanomancy high enough to speak with plants also could coax the trees to grow out living branches for special crafts. Most common of these were bows that could bond with an archer and grow with them. Living wood could also be healed, either with potions or by feeding the wood monster crysts.
Kestra wanted to get her Woodworking skill up into the Expert ranks before she tried to coax out a branch of living wood, but that was a project for after she was happy with her adjustment to the Myriad Realms' version of Alchemy.
She harvested not just the fruit, but some leaves and bark, too, being careful to use her Control Wood and Minor Healing spell to leave no damage behind.
Back in her lab, Kestra took samples of her harvest and began experimenting with the best ways to extract their properties.
She was happy with her findings about the bark and leaves, and moved on to working on the fruit when Graemire entered her lab. He waited for her to finish noting down her last set of observations before he declared, "Time to eat."
Kestra would have argued with him, but her belly cramped at the word "eat". "I'll just clean up for now, then, but I need to get back to this soon." She added a stern glare at her lover.
"After you wake," He calmly agreed. "It's been two days; sleep is a needful thing for even the Divine Ascended."
That made her blink in surprise. "Oh. Okay."
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When Kestra made breakfast the next morning, she found everyone but Eilith and Ambrose in more or less human shape and looking on with deep interest.
"That smells heavenly," Vostler sighed. "What is it?"
Kestra was feeling happy with how easily Graemire had kept to his word, and that put a lilt in her voice as she answered. "Goat in strips with pink brumi bark sauce over polished rice, with oil steamed shagam leaves. I wish I had thought to bring a yeast cake with me; there's so much I want to ferment."
"What's fermenting?" the Fire Elemental asked.
"A special kind of souring process. The brumi sauce is much better when it's blackened from fermenting, and there's also meads and beers and other kinds of alcohols. Yogurts are nice, and cheeses make good travel foods."
They spoke of foods and beverages throughout the meal until, near the end, Kestra said, "I need to get some more information about Body Tempering soon, and I'm thinking about finding some servants, maybe a family to handle farming some grains and raising some beasts. Does anyone have thoughts on what they'd like me to bring back, or how to go about looking for the information?"
"I'd like to get some metals so I can sell some of what I make," Su'ami said.
Kestra blinked, then tipped her head. "Orespri gave you ores, right?"
"Well, yes, but ..." Su'ami's voice trailed off.
"Not the right ores?" Kestra asked. "Well, give me an idea of how much of what you'll need, and we'll get it. It's probably a better idea to import for now, too, just to keep things around here more stable. If you're concerned about debts, well, I'm in need of getting rid of some mana stones. They're piling up on me, and there aren't enough Awakened around to naunch on them without risking being accidentally bound to the mana well. I won't tell you not to repay me, but I won't hold you to it."
Su'ami opened her mouth, closed it, then smiled, tears in her eyes.
Kestra ignored the other woman's emotional reaction. Not because she was unmoved, but because she had the feeling that Su'ami would be horrified if someone tried to fuss over her at the moment. "So, more shopping? Ideas on how or where to get the sticky on tempering?"
"The sticky?" Yorgin asked.
Hearing what she just said got a grimace from Kestra. "Phrase from Moh. There was a word-play that I guess just doesn't translate to the Realms. Information on tempering," she tried out, then nodded.
"The Jade Pearl Auction House can acquire the manuals from higher realms, but speed will cost more," Ralouf said. "If you go there, take some of Su'ami's work with you for appraisal, would you? Ask for receipts and the minimum bid price they'll start with."
Kestra fished out her token. "Will I need to ask them to keep that separate from whatever sales reports they put on this?"
"That's right, you've already sold them a license for the Water Extraction technique. Yes, you'll want a separate report. Make it clear that your business is separate from the brokering you do for Su'ami."
Graemire said, "I will accompany you, but I think it useful to see if there are any Esteemed Healers that would be willing to check how soon your remaining foramina can be opened."
"Ou!" Kestra perked up. "Also consulting how they use alchemical aids in healing! I still haven't gotten the Healing skill to unlock, even with the spell, and that's frustrating."
Yorgin asked, "Have you healed anyone?"
"Myself. I can't think if I've cast the spell on anyone else, but I'm pretty sure that I had to have done at least once during the whole thing with Sortalheim."
Su'ami snorted, still looking fragile from whatever inner demons had been roused by Kestra's willingness to buy her ores. "You break my senses! Calling taking over a city, reorganizing its laws, and setting up a successor government just so you can personally free how many hundreds of slaves that 'thing with Sortalheim'!"
"What? We had a quest!" Kestra protested. "And I'm not nearly as bad as these guys when it comes to breaking common sense!" She turned to the Divine Creatures. "It's just the power difference between Divine beings and all the rest of us, I think."
Yorgin's lips curled up in a sly smile. "True enough. But, with healing, you have to heal someone else to be granted the skill, and not with any alchemical aids."
Kestra pulled her head back on her neck. "Why not? I'll be the first to sing Alchemy's praises, but I can't think of a way to make alchemical aids -- you're talking Healing potions and pills, right? Yeah, they have to be formulated to target specific problems or they're just general curatives. Healers are the ones who know how to identify which alchemical aids are the most useful in a given situation, and if they're at all like the [Blessed Healers] or [Arcane Healers] of Moh, they can actively direct the mana of those aids to combat wounds or diseases. Alchemy creates tools, some of which Healers use."
Ralouf shook his head. "Be that as may have been on Moh, it is not the way of the Realms. At the Master level of Alchemy, the pills and potions may be Awakened and direct themselves in their purposes."
Kestra just blinked at Ralouf, three long slow blinks, then laid her chopsticks down and walked out of the cook room. She had ALCHEMY to perform!