I awoke to the sound of rattling drawers and the muttering of Grey. I was laying in his bed again, in a mirror of my first day here. He must have moved me here after I had…passed out? Was that what had happened to me? Groggily, I raised my head to look around. I don’t think I had been out for very long, based on the light streaming through the window. Off to the side, I spied Grey hunched over his desk messing with something. I guess that was where the muttering was coming from.

I tried to sit up more, only to be hit with an almost bone-deep wave of exhaustion when I did so. Flopping back down onto the bed, I must have made a noise. Grey stopped his muttering and fidgeting and turned around to peer at me. I had to withhold a smile at his appearance. He was wearing a pair of oversized goggles of some kind. They were festooned with bits and bobs of a type that I didn’t recognize, and must have had some kind of magnification built into the lenses. The effect left his eyes looking comically large.

“Ah.” Grey blinked at me. “Welcome back to the land of the living, Nathan.”

“I-” I tried to say, before breaking out into a fit of coughs. Grey wheeled over to my bed, helping me to sit up. I was surprised at how weak I felt, and how much help I needed in order to just sit up in a bed. Once I was up, Grey handed me a glass of water sitting on his bedside. I took it gratefully, taking a few greedy gulps. Holding onto it, I tried again. “How long was I out?”

“Oh, perhaps an hour,” Grey said, taking off his goggles and resting them in his lap. “Not long. In retrospect, I’m not terribly surprised once I examined you.”

I took a breath, starting to feel a little better. “Yeah? What happened to me? One moment I was doing…something with, uh, I guess ‘Aetherial Melding’. The next, I’m out.”

“Complete Stamina drain,” Grey answered matter of factly. “So much so, that you drew on your own life force briefly to supplement your output.”

I tensed in sudden nervousness. “That…doesn’t sound good.”

Grey waved me off, completely at ease. “Oh, it only sounds worse than it is. While it’s sub-optimal to draw upon your own life force, or more technically the inherent Aether of your soul, you’re fine. You didn’t draw deeply enough to injure yourself, merely to exhaustion. You should recover shortly, although I don’t recommend drawing on your Stamina again until much later in the day.”

I let out a breath. “Okay then.” I paused briefly to sit up in a more comfortable position, already starting to feel better. “So…Stamina drain. I guess I…tried too hard or something? Making that potion? You know, we’ve never even talked about what Stamina is. I know Mana, Aether, and sort of know Ki, but not Stamina.”

“Making that potion, he says,” Grey muttered under his breath disbelievingly. He shook his head. “Stamina is easily explained. It’s believed to merely be a by-product waste energy produced by a soul. In truth, you don’t keep a Stamina bar for long, if you desire to be a Classer. It’s completely replaced by Mana or Ki upon performing the needed rituals to break through the first threshold. As for your first question…Let’s start from the top, shall we? Nathan, did you understand what you were doing?”

I frowned slightly, fiddling with the glass of water in my hands and staring off into space. “Sort of? I’m not going to lie, a large amount of what I did was instinct. It’s…hard to describe. It’s like I had control of myself, but there was a separate layer of understanding over everything. I don’t want to say it was anything like a System interface or something but…” I made a noise of frustration, looking back over to Grey. He was leaning forward in his chair, chin resting on an arm propped up on his leg, listening intently. “Using Aetherial Melding felt both instinctual and guided at the same time. Am I making sense?”

Grey was silent for a moment, before making a vague noise of assent. “Hmm. Continue, please. Try and describe the process.”

Over the next several minutes, I explained everything I had done with the herbs to Grey. I told him about the waves of Aether, and how they seemed to resonate with the Aether within the ingredients. I told him about how they responded somehow to both myself and the Aether of the plant that he had described to me earlier. I told him about how once all of the herbs had begun resonating with me, the boundaries that separated them began to break down.

“How?” Grey interrupted me. “How did you break down the boundaries separating each herb's individual Aether pool?”

All I could do was shrug at Grey’s question, to his frustration. I had no idea how I had done that. It was one of the things that had felt guided.

Once I had finished my explanation about how I had done everything, about how I had merged the Aether of the herbs together, I fell silent. Grey was visibly pondering what I had told him.

“Extraordinary.” He commented after some time, before focusing back on me. “Before we continue, let me tell you my own findings.” He wheeled away from the bed and back over to the desk, motioning for me to follow him.

I stood up from the bed, still exhausted, but recovered enough to manage standing. I shuffled over to the desk to see what Grey wanted to show me.

“This,” Grey said, motioning to the potion I had made, still sitting on the tray. “Is ridiculous. It is indeed a minor Healing Potion, but not like any I’ve ever seen before. It is, quite frankly, too good. Unnaturally so. I have seen grandmaster alchemists, myself included, struggle to create a potion this perfectly brewed, if such a word even applies. The potency of this potion is such that it could nearly be considered a regular strength Healing Potion. Which, I assure you, is quite an accomplishment, considering the weak ingredient base used in its creation. I have never seen the like, and if I had, I would have most likely taken the creator as a personal apprentice.”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Huh,” I said, quite intelligently. “How do you know how good it is?”

“Observe,” Grey told me, pointing to two small, rectangular pieces of paper laying next to the tray. “This is Aether reactive paper. Quite expensive to make, and I have limited quantities of it in my captivity. I was terribly surprised that the Prince was even willing to supply me the small amount I have. The point is, this type of paper is useful in alchemy to determine relative strength between potions.”

Okay, so kind of like PH strips back home. Only, magic, and not like PH strips at all.

Whatever.

I focused back on Grey.

“The paper on the left.” He pointed towards it. “Was treated with a random weak Healing Potion that I have on hand. While the one on the right was treated with the potion you created. Do you see the difference?”

I focused on the two strips of paper at his behest. On both pieces of paper, there was a small droplet of absorbed liquid, likely from the two droppers I noticed off to the side. On both strips, the area where the liquid had been placed wasn’t red like I would think it was, considering the color of the potion. No, both of them were green, oddly enough. At first glance, I couldn’t tell the difference. But taking a closer look…

I looked back up at Grey. “The one on the right is a little blue?” I asked unsurely.

Grey smiled at me and nodded. “Indeed. The way these papers work is by assessing their relative rarity as measured by the System. Very often, a mere diagnostic skill like Observe does not have the requisite detail to give precise readings for objects. This paper helps provide a…somewhat more accurate reading on the rarity of liquid applied. Of course,” He waved a hand dismissively. “Mere color analysis isn’t precise enough oftentimes, which is why there are even more specialized tools to analyze these results. Alas, I do not possess them here.”

“Rarity, huh,” I said to Grey. “How does that work?” I remembered seeing what I’d thought were rarity indicators on my class selection screen.

“Oh, yes.” He blinked. “Ah, well. It’s the method that the System uses to determine the relative strength between items and Classes. Nearly universally, an object of a higher rarity is either more potent or more powerful. Fairly easy to remember. In order, they are Poor, Common, Superior, Rare, Legendary, Artifact, and Unique. Correspondingly, their colors are white, green, blue, purple, red, gold, and a rather fetching rainbow color.”

I raised my eyebrows in interest. “Rainbow, huh? Like the color of my skill?” I was referring to the aurora that my skill The Scintillant Blade surrounded weapons I held in.

“Indeed. Quite a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?” Grey smiled wryly. “Back on topic though, as you noted both potions read as Common in quality. However, the one that you created is of such a purity that it is verging into Superior quality. Very curious, as I rarely notice such a phenomenon in regards to lower quality goods.”

I nodded to show I understood. “All right, I get it. What now, then? Where do we go from here?”

“Why, we experiment of course!” Grey said cheerfully. “Your new Profession is curious indeed, and I for one am quite eager to test the limits of it. What else can it be applied to? What determines a successful creation? How freeform can your creations be, using this Profession? I already have theories about how it functions, but I’m excited to either prove or disprove them!”

I held up a hand. “Not to rain on your parade, but slow down there. Is this it then? Is this Profession the silver bullet, the secret weapon you’ve been hoping I had? Do you think this is what we need?”

Grey visibly calmed himself at my words, folding his hands in his lap. “Possibly.” He answered soberly. “Very possibly, indeed. While it is not the fantastical solution that I had hoped for, it is promising. I had, rather foolishly in hindsight, imagined you manifesting some completely ridiculous skill to solve all of our problems with a wave of your hand. I really should know better by now, at my age. While knowledge of Precursors is rare, the System simply doesn’t provide solutions without a degree of effort attached. It’s a fantastical ability, of course, but if we are to devise a method of escape through its use, it will require research.”

I took a deep breath, and then let it out in a long exhale. I nodded. “All right. I’m up for it. Where do we start?”

Grey let out a small, short laugh. “Well, first you have to recover enough Stamina in order to use it again, Nathan. We don’t want you drawing on your life force any more than you need to, hmm?”

I felt my face redden before I coughed into my fist in embarrassment. “Right, right. Yeah.”

“No need to worry,” Grey said, smiling and shaking his head. “I believe you’ll have recovered enough to start attempting small experiments after lunch. The food will help in that matter. Speaking of, I believe we’re approaching that time. I don’t know if you’re hungry, but I’m feeling a mite peckish myself.”

Since I wasn’t in an anime or something, my stomach didn’t choose that convenient time to rumble. But I was definitely feeling a bit of emptiness in my belly and told Grey that.

We decided to take a brief break for lunch.

……………………………………..

Grey and I threw together a short, simple lunch from whatever we could find in the cupboard. Azarus didn’t join us, but I wasn’t too bothered by it. I could hear the audible, rhythmic hammering of his own work from out back in the smithy. Grey told me it wasn’t uncommon for him to get lost in his work. I guess we could tell him later what we had discovered about my new Profession.

Once we were situated back in Grey’s room, we got to work. This time, Grey had me testing at a much reduced intensity than immediately trying to create a potion. For now, Grey had me trying to sense and break down single ingredients to see what would happen. He was pretty happy about what we found.

“Well, I’ll be,” Grey said wonderingly, holding a small vial of my latest attempt up to the light beaming through his window. He turned it back and forth, letting the light stream through the small amount of thin pearlescent liquid within. “As I suspected, you’re creating Essences wholesale from the raw ingredients.”

This last time, Grey had given me a small, white tuber and asked me to try and break it down into a bottle. When asked what it was, he told me it was a powerful restorative named Mirthroot.

I was resting after this last attempt, leaning back on my hands on Grey’s bed. “Yeah? What’s that?” I said once I had caught my breath.

Grey snapped out of his wonder to look over at me. “Ah, essentially an Essence is a purified form of an ingredient in Alchemy. Think of them as the purest expression of a particular ingredient. Very useful, if not somewhat wasteful to create in the traditional method. Typically, you need a not insignificant amount of a particular ingredient in order to distill one. If someone had told me that one day, I would be holding an Essence created from a one-to-one conversion of particularly ornery ingredient like Mirthroot, I would have laughed in their face.” He set the bottle back down on the desk before corking. “I’ll just be holding onto that. It’ll be quite useful in my work. Now, let’s get back to testing, shall we?”

I sighed at the nearly manic excitement on Grey’s face, before sitting back up. I guess there was more work to be done.