It had been a while since Theo went to the Marsh Wolf Tavern himself. He sat at his private booth–which Xam had held all this time for some reason. Perhaps she kept it free for him because he still used his bath in the bathhouse. Even at noon, the atmosphere was lively. Patrons from within the alliance and without were enjoying the food she had prepared for them. But the alchemist was there for only the moss tea and the atmosphere. Well, that and a conversation with Salire.

“Once we infuse the base reagents with mana, we’ll have a much higher success rate,” Salire said, taking a tentative sip of her tea. She added some amount of cream, which Theo wasn’t aware they had access to. It made sense, since the karatan produced milk.

“I guess we need to be worried about safety now,” Theo said.

The Newt and Demon was already introducing more safety measures. The first thing they added was the vapor detector that Throk had built. That would help them avoid any mixing vapors in the air, which could cause unexpected effects. Next was procedural, involving heavy testing before using any new alchemy techniques. Theo didn’t want to employ a new technique until it had been tested in a safe environment. Their testing with the first round of artifices had shown him the advantages of caution. Those early stills were all time bombs, ready to go off once some random condition was met.

“Have you been practicing your mana control?” Theo asked.

Salire averted her gaze, taking a sip of her tea and shaking her head. “Kinda. I was never very good at it to begin with.”

“You were fine. Let’s see.”

Salire held her hand out with her palm up. Prismatic mana flowed into her palm, sloshing like liquid before evaporating into the air. Her control wasn’t bad. Theo had found the hardest part to start was bringing the mana out from his soul. And he had made sure she practiced it weeks ago, drilling it into her it was vital to good alchemy. That was more true than ever, and she had a great point to jump off from. But it made the alchemist wonder about how attributes played into actions like this.

Theo summoned a glob of mana without issue, allowing it to float in the air before them. Perhaps Tero’gal was still figuring out what kind of mana it wanted to produce. He had seen it change colors before, but it current held a shifting scheme that never settled on one color for long.

“I think you’re doing fine,” Theo said, splitting the large blob of mana into five pieces that took different shapes. “You don’t need to do much, though. Could you try summoning some mana that’s about this big?”

The five split into twenty orbs that floated at different points above the table.

“That many?” Salire asked.

“No. Just one.”

Shrugging, Salire held her palm out again. A tiny puddle of mana appeared in her hand. Before it could evaporate, Theo withdrew a root from his inventory and placed it on the table.

“Infuse the root with your mana,” Theo said, nodding at the Spiny Swamp Thistle Root on the table.

Salire had done infusions like this before. She gripped the root, slathering the mana onto it rather than injecting it as Theo had done. He watched as the mana soaked in, imbuing the root with her power.

“Did that work?”

“I think so,” Theo said, holding the root up for inspection. He could feel the spots within the reagent where she had missed, but doubted it would cause problems during processing. “I doubt you need this level of control for the lower tier alchemy. But you don’t want to soak it in mana. Just small injections to bolster the properties.”

“I can do that,” Salire nodded. “But why is your control so good?”

“Wisdom and willpower, I think,” Theo said. “Which I have a lot of. There just isn’t much use for it right now.”

There might have been a lot of uses for fine control of mana down the line, but Theo wouldn’t get there before the next change. It was still more important than ever to keep trying to push alchemy to its limits. Sometimes it felt like Tero’gal was learning as it created new things. As the alchemist considered these things, his thoughts ground to a halt.

“Well, I just thought of something,” Theo said, taking another sip of his tea. It was sweeter than normal, holding that incredibly earthy taste he loved. “The dragon potions had been brewed before. I didn’t get a message about them being new.”

“What? There’s an alchemist out there working with ascendant dragon bones?” Salire asked with a scoff. She shook her head, pinching the bridge of her nose. “That would’ve been an enormous boost for you.”

That fact struck Theo as strange. It seemed unlikely for someone to have access to bones like that. Even more unlikely for them to take those bones and make them into a potion. The system might have been mad at him for exploiting the new potions the way he did. Was there an alchemist in history who had been the first to discover all of those potions, or was it an arms race to see who could make the most new stuff? Even the reagents Theo used every day were technically rare. The Spiny Swamp Thistle Root only grew in Broken Tusk as far as he knew. Yet someone before him had created a potion for every property, including the hidden one.

There was something comforting about the sound of the patrons in the tavern. Theo enjoyed his tea as Salire struck up conversations of a more mundane nature. Well, she was interested in the end of the world party. As was tradition in Broken Tusk, no one tried to keep secrets because those secrets never lasted. Instead, Alise had spread the word about the party and people were getting excited. Another tradition was not worrying about things they couldn’t change. If they were living in Iaredin, Tero’gal, or Tol’bak they didn’t care.

“I haven’t told anyone about Tol’bak,” Theo said, shaking his head. “Tresk made her own world. A dwarf planet orbiting Tero’gal, but the entire thing is covered in swamp.”

“Ah. I was hoping to live somewhere without a swamp, actually.”

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“Really? Well, there should be free travel between the two places. So you can pick where you want to be. But I’ll drop the alliance off on Tero’gal when we’re ready to go.”

“Sounds fun. I think,” Salire said, chuckling. “I guess this is our new reality, huh? Doesn’t this whole plan rely on you doing something in the void?”

Theo drummed his fingers on the table. “Yeah, that’s already a problem. Until that space elf recovers, I won’t know what we need to do to bring them all back.”

“And that’s a lot of potions. That reforge potion isn’t easy to make. Do we even have the space for that many people?”

“That’s not even our biggest problem, actually. Perhaps I can convince the gods to lend me more power than normal, but I need to place all the shards into specific places on the planet. I might actually see more of this world before I have to go.”

“Which means you’re planning to lean on Fenian and the Bridge of Shadows.”

“That’s the backup plan.”

The more Theo talked it over with other people, the more he realized he didn’t really have a plan. He hoped things would fall into place, but they rarely did. While it seemed unfair for him to have to take care of this problem on his own, he wasn’t truly alone. A petition to the gods could see all the throne-holders helping him out. Perhaps they could even make an exception, allowing Khahar to visit the mortal world once again.

After finishing up with his tea, Theo’s mind centered completely on the space elf in the care of the town’s healers. He bid farewell to Salire, heading straight for the temple. Fewer people were praying today than the last time he came, but there were still quite a few there. Of course the dungeon underneath the temple was musty, and lacking light. But a lantern burned at the far end of a hallway. A longer hallway than he remembered from last time. Ziz and his gang must have come around and expand the relatively small complex into something sprawling. How did they even build a basement under such wet ground? The answer was always magic.

“Zarali,” Theo said, turning the corner with a smile when he spotted the woman tending to the elf. “How is he doing?”

“Better,” Zarali said, pressing her hand against the man’s forehead. “His fever is still bad, but that’s nothing healing magic can’t ease.”

“Any sign of his recovery?” Theo asked.

Zarali looked down at the prone elf, shaking her head. “Thinking back to when Xol’sa had his soul reforged, I can’t help but wonder…”

“If he needs his soul reforged, right?” Theo felt the man’s skin. At least his body temperature was high. If his flesh was cold, the alchemist would’ve been more worried. Perhaps that meant his immune system—if such a thing existed in this world—was working. His body was fighting something off, rather than passively dying. “I hope he doesn’t. I truly hope the reason Xol’sa needed to reforge his soul was because he wasn’t born here, or that he was exposed to too much of the void without protection.”

“Right. Perhaps you’re right and I’m just reacting because of what happened to him.” Zarali placed her hand on the man’s chest, causing a flash of light to fill the room. “While I can feel his soul, I’m not sure if it was damaged. It feels good. I just don’t know.”

“How about his mind?”

“That part of the process is working amazingly. It already rebuilt itself, and now his mind is… What’s the best way to put this? Making all the old connections. That’s what Bilgrob, myself, and Sulvan decided anyway.”

That was some progress, at least. Xol’sa had taken a few days to recover when his entire soul was reforged. No one could know if a soul or a mind was harder to reforge. The best they could do was watch and wait, hoping for the best.

“You guys are doing a great job, though. I doubt he would have lasted without you.”

“No need for praise,” Zarali said, waving him away. “We’re going to get much more busy around here when you bring the other elves, right?”

“Oh, only a few hundred elves to take care of. No big deal, right?”

Zarali scoffed. “I appreciate the optimism, but it might get tricky.”

“Maybe… Well, I wouldn’t presume to know how the healing process for something like this works. But maybe there’s a potion I can make to ease his transition.”

“Because every solution is a potion.”

“Isn’t it, though?”

Zarali explained how the condition provided by the system worked. Since it was an all-in-one cure for all mind problems, there was little else they could do. This made Theo realize there was something he could do. The first Reforge Mind potion he had crafted was a tier two, 75% purity potion. If they increased the purity of the potion and the tier, it could easily increase the effectiveness of the potion itself.

“We can increase the purity and tier of the potion pretty easily,” Theo said. “Keep up the good work. I’m going to get working on that.”

“You do that,” Zarali said with a nod.

The Reforge Mind potion was made from Searing Regeneration Essence combined with Intelligence Essence. Those were bound with the Suffuse Potion, allowing the resulting potion to jump a tier. Theo headed for the lab right away, not bothering to run this by anyone but Salire.

“Good news,” Salire said, gesturing to the now-empty stills. “We finished a run and we have space. How much do we need?”

“A test run, of course,” Theo said, pointing out three stills. “We only need Suffuse, Searing Regeneration, and Intelligence properties of the highest quality we can manage. Which means doing a run with infused reagents, then another run in the centrifuges to get them to tier two.”

“Phew. Sounds like a lot of work,” Salire said. But she was already preparing the four stills. “Might as well make it six stills, right?”

Theo clicked his tongue, looking at the floorspace of the lab. “Let’s repurpose some of the second floor for brewing. Perhaps we can just do second tier work there. Six centrifuges?”

“We can move them around as we need,” Salire shrugged. “Six up here leaves me four stills to work with. And I can order more of those. The only problem is that I have a massive pile of residue that’s piling up by the minute.”

“Right. You get working on the stills and I’ll chip away at the pile.”

“Perhaps you should imbue the reagents, first…”

There were a few factors working in their favor here. The first was Theo’s ability to imbue reagents with the exact amount of aligned mana they needed. Next was the quality of the reagents. The Lightning Poppy were growing in the aligned greenhouse, giving them the best chance at being as pure as possible. Last was the vast amount of equipment they had at their fingertips.

“We have plenty of Troll Blood,” Theo said, passing his hand over a flask of the disgusting blood. It smelled horribly. “Although I wish we didn’t.”

“At least the mushrooms don’t stink,” Salire said, setting out a tray of the Dragon Talon Mushrooms. “Infuse these with as much mana as you can. They’re the lowest quality of all the reagents we have.”

“Check the quality on the cheese.”

Salire gave Theo a pouting look. “The quality of the cheese is excellent. But I want to eat the cheese.”

“This is alchemical cheese, Salire. Sacrifices must be made.”

Salire huffed, but vanished into the other room before returning with a comically large wheel of cheese. Miana’s cheese-making skills were just increasing as the days went past. “Yeah, we’re using the cheese. I barely have to put any mana in it to infuse the properties. Cheer up. We’ll barely use a quarter wheel.”

“And we can eat the rest?”

“No. But you can have a nibble.”

“Just a nibble,” Salire said, taking a bite out of the wheel. She spat it on the ground. “She’s covered it in wax.”

“She always covers them in wax,” Theo said, peeling back the layer. “Try again.”