“And these dried bas’akar’ar leaves are the best in this side of town. And I’ll throw the roots in for half off if you buy all of this now,” the plant breeder of Leafy Sundries with the graying shoulder-length hair said as he counted out everything on his counter that Eik had chosen.

There was enough there for seven new stamps on the stamp card. “Yeah, I’m getting it all now, thank you. I’m going home to experiment with some new things.”

“Oh yeah?” the shop keeper said as he loaded Eik’s purchase carefully into a paper bag. The man’s name was Wanjihan and he had opened this very store thirty-three years earlier. He had welcomed Eik with open arms as an enthusiastic young alchemist. “What are you going for?”

“It’s my first time with these techniques, so just a simple pain killer and then, uuh…” — He had already been holding the new recipe book to confirm the ingredients he needed so he glanced down at the page he had been keeping open with a finger — “’Kiq’s Temper’?”

“Aha, interesting. If it’s your first time then you’re definitely going to need this much of each ingredient, yes,” he chuckled. “But be careful with Kiq’s Temper. It can be dangerous. Both to consume and also to make. It can become quite unstable if handled incorrectly.”

“I know,” Eik assured him with a nod. “It’s all mentioned in the book. Thanks, Wanjihan.”

“Call me Wanji. You can buy the last of the stuff you will need for that at Ji’kl’s on the next corner down the street. She’s an honest business person — like me.” He flashed Eik a grin and held up his own credit slab to accept payment. He stamped the card, filling it up to nine stamps, and handed over the bag of ingredients.

Eik thanked him and turned to leave when Wanjihan stopped him. “By the way, Eik. You do know you bought some things that you don’t need for those two concoctions, don’t you?”

Eik smiled cheekily. “You say that now that I already paid you? Nah, I’m just kidding. I know. I, uuh… One of my friends from yesterday asked me to bring him a few things as well since I was coming back here today anyway.”

“Alrighty then. Be careful, and see you soon,” Wanjihan said with a nod.

Eik raised a hand in greeting as he opened the door. “Yeah, Wanji. Have a good one.”

He picked up the last few things from the Ji’kl’s store on the corner as directed. She mostly dealt in gear for distillery and brewing as well as chemicals.

Eik simply shoved all of his purchases into the mighty rucksack of holding that he had been given as a reward for saving those kids way back when. It was the most convenient most awesome thing he had ever had the pleasure of owning.

With energetic steps, he made his way to the lift that would take him to all the way up to the headquarters. He nodded to people as they passed, but as Atla had remarked the first time he’d come, people up here behaved quite differently from those living their lives in the city below. There was a certain guard constantly maintained that made everyone rather unapproachable.

Mis came up to greet him as he opened the door. Then, when he turned to close it, she ran in behind him as if coming from outside. Recently she'd been doing strange things almost every time he saw her. Like always, she was begging for food as if she hadn’t been allowed to eat anything for a week. She had already gobbled down a healthy helping of breakfast before he’d left to buy ingredients.

With great, lumbering reluctance Mikla had taken her back to Eik’s apartment. She had been staying in the fracture specialist’s quarters while Eik was away and he could swear that she had put on weight in just those few days. The man had completely fallen in love with her and was already brainstorming the possibility of finding his own cat on Earth to bring home and take care of.

Cooing quietly over her he tucked her into a mountain of soft pillows and covers, hoping that the feline comfort of a little hidey-hole would keep her occupied long enough for him to get into a creative flow.

He unslung the rucksack of holding and set the cauldron down on a small table. Lining up the ingredients on a clean cloth he found in a drawer in the back of the room he opened the recipe book onto the page that described the production process of the pain killing drug.

“Let’s see what we have here…” he drawled and picked out what he needed. Wanjihan had been kind enough to tag everything with their ingredient names so he could tell what was what.

“Alright.” Crushed bas’akar’ar leaves went in, followed by a couple more dried herbs. With a mortar and pestle he’d also bought today he mashed the dry ingredients together into a power.

With a knife he sliced into a bulbous leaf, revealing the thick, viscous plant flesh on the inside, and pressed it out into the bottom of the vessel. Even though the cauldron wasn’t much larger than his own head, it was much bigger than what he really needed for the small amount of pain killer he was hoping to make.

Eik mixed it all together into a sticky paste. According to the recipe book and Mikla’s advice, this was the most difficult part that required actual practical skill from the alchemist. With ingredients that contained the energies of the multiverse one needed to use one’s own energy to influence them.

This was usually to, for example, stabilize the mixture, to activate it, refine it, or destabilize it — and in some cases several or all of those in necessary sequence.

Eik had no idea what this meant for everything he’d learned on Earth. Whether it would become useless or not. If what he’d seen of alliance product, such as the healing potion and the little blue pill that was still keeping Olivia alive in a stasis even in this moment, was any indication of the potential of these recipes, then it was definitely worth investing his time into.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

He liked to fantasize about establishing a medical emporium on Earth and making so much money that he could fill up a swimming pool and cosplay as a certain wealthy duck, but he always found his thoughts returning to what all of this could do for the people. The people of Forest desperately needed better medicines. Most healers did their best to help everyone but they were few and far between and that was even truer for high-ranked healers.

He cracked his fingers and held his hands palms down directly above the mouth of the cauldron. For several long moments nothing happened. With no real way to know if he was doing it correctly or incorrectly he reached out for the energies that apparently existed in the air all around him.

Supposedly “all” one had to do was harness the multiversal matter that swirled around inside the body of any Awakened being to control the matter in the atmosphere. Easier said that done.

In fact, a saturation of such matter within a living thing is what triggers the Awakening. Apparently.

“Hah!” he shouted, trying to make something happen — hoping that anything might happen.

“Hiyah!” Nothing. Mikla had told him that, if he was close to succeeding, he would be able to feel it, somehow. Even with his decidedly mystical experiences with Profound Toxin, he really had no idea how this was supposed to work.

Taking a few deep breaths, he reached deep inside himself. Anything that felt like power. Anything that felt magical. Anything that felt tangible he sought for. With his mind’s eye he raced through his own body, from toes to crotch, stomach to fingers, chest to head.

There!

Something lurked there! Something of which he seized hold with all his might. It struggled and undulated in his mental grip, clearly unwilling to simply succumb to his attempt to take charge. That defiance only made Eik metaphorically stomp it into the ground harder.

For more than a dozen minutes he sat there, face the embodiment of dignity and relaxation, while his inner self was fighting a battle of epic proportions. That dang magical matter was trying to eel its way out of his embrace and it was a slippery son of a gun. Any time it felt like he had gotten it pinned down and under control, it wiggled out from between his fingers.

“By Odin’s beard,” he cursed under his breath, sweat running down his forehead and into his closed eyes in thick beads. His breath came in short ragged gasps and his ass hurt from sitting deathly still for so long. “Why don’t you sit still for just two second so I can… get you!”

Redoubling his efforts, he threw the entire weight of his mind onto it like a sack of potatoes. It squirmed like a plate of pudding but this time he had it. It could do no more to resist him. Like he had done with snakes so many times before, he had its head pinched tightly between a mental thumb and index finger.

Sensing its presence inside his body, he gathered it and redirected it down his arms and into his palms where he urged it to flow into the prepared mixture. As he felt it release from his hands he risked his concentration and cracked open an eyelid to take a look at the result.

It was blue… Everything was blue. The cauldron looked more like a children’s science experiment than a legitimate attempt at alchemy. Spiritual exhaustion quenched his frustration to the point where all he could do was learn back in the chair with a weary sigh.

What he had been wrestling with had never been the strange energy, it had been the Profound Toxin messing around with him from the beginning. No wonder the sensation of it all had felt so familiar — this wasn’t their first rodeo. It might have been his mind playing tricks on him, but he could swear a tiny diabolical laugh echoed faintly inside his head.

With a thought he reabsorbed the entire load of toxin through his fingers, leaving only the ingredient mix that he had hoped to make into a pain killer. It was ruined.

He retrieved another cloth from the drawer and cleaned the mixture from the bottom of the cauldron.

Repeating the same steps to prepare the ingredients for the second time that day, he sat down and dove into his mind again, determined to reveal the multidimensional energy this time.

***

For three days straight, Eik spent most of his waking hours in his room trying to connect with the energy that should supposedly exist within him. In that time, he mistook Profound Toxin for the otherworldly power seven more times, killing the attempt completely each time.

The other eighteen times he sat unmoving in front of the project for so long that it dried out and became inert. And if he ever managed to succeed in harnessing the energy, that ingredient mix had better be ready to receive.

On day two his friends had managed to pull him along to town so they could eat dinner at Mogu’s restaurant. The dirt duck really hit the spot on his mental and physical fatigue, and the sour, purple juice that Mikla had chosen for him to go with it worked as the perfect accompaniment to refresh his motivation to continue.

On the fourth day he sat at the table again, his mind in the dumps. After a dreamless sleep he had become convinced that it would never happen. He must be some kind of defective Awakened. Surely he was shackled with a spiritual handicap of some kind. No matter how he felt around, there was just nothing there except the damned Toxin, which, by the way, was undoubtedly enjoying his ordeal.

It was then, when his brain had completely disconnected from the process, that something changed. If he hadn’t become so familiar with the absence of results over these past three days, he likely wouldn’t even have noticed that there was something different.

He'd found it!