'If I can get ahold of a French alchemist I could get this settled easily enough but I lack any real contacts over there.' Nick thought with a sigh before heading up to the newly refurbished study to draft a letter to Madam Maxime to inquire about a trustworthy alchemist. He had thought of seeing if Flammel would help him with it but chose to discard that idea since the only method to contact the man he had at the moment was through Fawkes. Nick doubted Dumbledore would be amused if he just suddenly walked into his office to offload a letter on his familiar when Nick wasn't even supposed to be at Hogwarts right now.-

Sneaking onto the campus to use the workshop a few times was tolerable for the old goat as he had plausible deniability since he never personally saw Nick there. The same could not be said if Nick just waltzed into his office to have Fawkes deliver a letter. With that understanding Nick chose the second best option of having the owl service in Diagon alley deliver the letter to Madame Maxime. The return letter will be a bit tricky since he himself was outside the owls tracking abilities but could be solved easily by having the owl service set up a postage box for him.-

Once that was taken care of Nick turned his attention to the large ruby he had received from Vlad as payment for a perfected ability ring. 'With this I should be able to create a rather powerful flame atronach , I think it may even be strong enough to successfully take on the properties of cold flame.' Nick thought with a smile as he started the blood binding process for the gem. Blood loss was easy to solve with potions so Nick didn't mind the loss of it to bind these gems to him.-

It certainly helped that the soaking gems were guarded more heavily than a dragon would their eggs. There was nearly no chance at all of someone even making off with a single drop of blood like this. Still the simplicity of this process meant that Nick had a few dozen magically grown gems all ready to be turned into atronachs at any given time. Out of curiosity he used the protean charm on two small magically grown sapphires before putting one of them through the process of becoming a frost atronach.-

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The result of this experiment made Nick excited as rather than become an atronach like it's paired version the other sapphire turned into frost salts directly. Nick had to kill a frost atronach to test it but the two piles of frost salts were indeed the same thing. This meant that Nick could not only create his normal four daily atronachs but also stockpile elemental salts at the same time. This discovery was huge for him as he had his own experiments in mind for the salts but didn't want to waste an atronach to conduct them.-

For example he wanted to know if the salts could be used as the core of a wand and if so whether or not they were a good one. Depending on the answer he received he may have found a way to drastically improve his power. His wand even now was only mythical grade and he wanted to push it a step further to legendary. He hadn't experimented with his wand until now as it was a unique existence that he simply couldn't replicate should he damage it. Even now he hadn't figured out what the wood used in it's construction was other than what the system told him which was sadly limited.-

Still now that he had spare elemental salt he could conduct a few experiments with it. He set the new atronach on patrol with the others in his growing army before taking the salt into the nearby enchanting room. Rowena Ravenclaw had truly done a good job in setting up this room to the point Nick only had to make a few small updates to some things in order to render it perfect for any sort of enchanting research he may do.-

The room had a veritology bench set up against the back wall with plenty of high quality tools to use. The first part of the experiment was testing the compatibility of the salts with each kind of wood he had available. He found that the frost salts agreed more with pine and ash woods than any of the the others so he moved onto the next step , core transference. After writing the runes on the inside of the wands he carved up Nick carefully poured in a solid line of frost salts before sealing the wand shut.