Tristan was confused, so he turned to the young woman who had first answered the door, “So what do I call him, Mist, Haddie, or Hadrid?”

She sniffed, “You are not on a first name basis, so Mist will do. It will be Mister Hadrid when you get to that level.”

The maid tried to look down on Tristan, but she was short, and he was tall, so they shared an eye level. The inside of the structure was more mundane, several stalls held golize that were obviously pregnant and bagged dry food was piled in one corner. Straw covered the floor and several tools were hung on pegs by the door.

Tristan had been expecting more than a simple barn from the castle like structure. Hadrid led them down the steps at the back of the building and into an area that matched Tristan’s imagination much more accurately. The steps were steep, and quite long bringing them almost twenty feet below ground.

The basement had a hallway with doors going off to either side and at the end was a large open space with various pieces of equipment in the room. Most of the equipment was surprisingly similar to what Tristan imagined when Chase told them what he had pulled out of the mine. Glass table tops with areas to place objects to study beneath them.

The alchemist did not stop at any of the doors in the hallway, instead, he went towards the large room at the end. If each of the doors led to another large room, this basement would be the largest structure Tristan had ever seen.

Hadrid stopped after a few steps into the room and turned to face Luke and Tristan, “So, he needs artifact weapons? What kind, how long, and for what purpose?”

Luke started talking, “We need two, one at around eighteen inches, and one at around twelve. The shorter one needs to be a sword breaker, and the longer one needs to be a chopper that can be used to brace the breaker.”

Hadrid nodded, “What’s your budget.” Luke gestured for Tristan to hand him his bag of coins, when Hadrid looked in, his eyes widened, “Junior, who did you kill to get this?”

Tristan felt slightly offended at the insinuation that he could not earn his own money, “Hadrid, I earned that on my own, by working.”

“Mist, I don’t care about you yet, so we are not on a first name basis,” Hadrid said, “You’re a child, no way you earned more than the average adult. Also, so long as no one is coming to look for this, I don’t care where it came from.”

Luke shook his head, “No one will be looking for this.”

“Good, I can work with this,” Hadrid said, before tossing the bag to the maid.

Tristan was wondering how the man was just going to go about creating an artifact. He watched Hadrid walk over to a safe and unlock it. Inside were dozens of marbles of various colors, though the majority were of a silver color.

“What are those,” Tristan could not help asking.

Hadrid looked Tristan up and down before answering, “Essence cores.” Tristan still looked confused, so he continued, “Most people don’t know what a kern is or how to truly use it. It is a power source that stores essence and lets people use that essence for various purposes if they gather and store enough.”

“Most people can not store enough for it to be of any use, tier four is about when you can start getting use out of it, but I can still take the excess essence from a willing subject. These tools let me store it in cores that I can then use to enhance my products.”

Tristan’s mind went back to Sai, the grand elder. He was a tier six and had created a bar of shadow out of nothing. Originally, Tristan had thought that the grand elder could do whatever he wanted because it was the grand elder. Maybe he simply was using a dark kern to make a bar from shadow. He tried thinking of other people who had done similar things, then he remembered that Siren had used it to create a small stone knife. It made sense that the only people he had seen manipulate essence were almost tier four and a hero.

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Hadrid picked out two silver essence cores and turned to Tristan, “I need you to swallow these.”

“What?” Tristan asked in surprise.

“You have eaten before, so I do not need to explain the process to you,” Hadrid said, he looked at Luke, “He has eaten right, you didn’t raise him on your disgusting protein shakes?”

Luke rolled his eyes. Tristan reworded his question, “What I meant was why?”

“Well you should have said that then,” Hadrid said, “You are pathetically weak, your kern is like a malnourished horse and we want to use that malnourished horse power to pull the wagon needed to create something. You are so weak, that you are actually at the bottom of tier zero, you might as well not have a metal kern at all, that means any artifact at tier one will be too powerful for you to handle, unless it has your unique essence signature on it. To get that signature I need to extract the essence from you, but you need some essence injected into you, because you have nothing to extract.”

Hadrid was breathing heavily after saying all that on a single breath. All Tristan heard was you are pathetic, really pathetic, and that did not feel good. Supposedly he would be able to grow if he got some tier zero artifacts, he wondered if he could get some from the alchemist. He was not sure how the process worked though, no one had ever shown him how to strip an artifact of its essence to increase his own capacity.

The alchemist led him to the far wall where eight platforms were lined up. They were elevated around four feet off the floor and looked suspiciously like coffins. At first he thought that there was one for each of the elements, but earth, fire, water, air, light, dark, and metal were easily identified by the color of the material that composed the capsule. Each was clearly an artifact or something Hadrid had made.

The eighth machine was made of a mat grey material that had ripples marring an otherwise polished exterior. Tristan wondered if there was an eighth element, one that was not present in the caldera, or at least very rare. He could not imagine what it could be as the other seven covered everything. He was not going to ask Hadrid as he did not want to be insulted again.

“Normally, I would ask you to lay down and release your essence into the environment so I can gather it, but you’re to weak to do that,” Hadrid said, he opened the silver capsule and gestured for Tristan to get in.

Tristan hesitated, Hadrid had been nothing but antagonistic. He was not sure that he wanted to hop into a metal box, he would be at Hadrid’s mercy. Not sure of what to do, Tristan looked to Luke for support. Which in hind sight was not a good idea, Luke was not the biggest fan of safety.

“It’s safe,” Luke said.

Tristan still hesitated before climbing in, but after a few seconds he took a deep breath and climbed in. The interior was surprisingly comfortable. It was not because the steel slab was soft, but because of the strong metal essence it emitted. The discomfort of the table was overwhelmed by the comfort of the essence.

Hadrid handed over the two marbles, “Eat these,” he waited for Tristan to comply, then continued, “Please don’t scream to loud, I hate screaming.”

Tristan did not have time to question the statement, before the lid was slammed shut. For a moment he was glad that he was not claustrophobic, then the thought was washed away by fire. The waxy shell on the exterior of the marbles dissolved in his stomach and the storm of essence was released. Tristan should have known that essence extracted from a man as unfriendly as Hadrid would be toxic.

His blood was flooded with many times the essence his kern could handle. It circulated though his body, causing pain until it found release. Tristans nose and ears bled, he felt tears on his face and was sure that that was blood as well. His lungs burned and he vomited in the coffin, he was sure that’s what it was, because he was about to die.

Then it ended, the lid opened and something was poured into his mouth. It tasted disgusting, but Tristan was not able resist drinking it. He opened his eyes and saw Luke holding a bottle with his wind tuber mix, his other hand was over Tristan’s heart and it looked like he was focusing hard on that hand.

Hadrid snorted when he saw Tristans state, “Good, you survived, glad to know that essence cores are less dangerous than higher tier artifacts.”

Tristan wanted to throw something at the alchemist, but the only thing nearby was his own vomit. He saw the alchemist was holding two more essence cores, but he seemed to have a different purpose for these. Something for which, Tristan was grateful.