Cira and her tour guides plus Lomp enjoyed lunch under the shade of an apple tree. She couldn’t bring herself to stomach anymore fish, but her guests were grateful. She decided it was a good day to bust into the lamb she picked up at Hawker’s Pact. It went well on a flatbread she baked the other day.

Soon, Cira was dozing off in spite of her best efforts. The trio had fun laughing at her but let her rest. She awoke suddenly as the sun moved past the tree and assaulted her eyes, “Gah! How long have I been asleep?!”

“Only an hour or so,” Chip replied nonchalantly.

“Dammit, why didn’t you guys wake me up?” Cira’s crankiness was only mildly subdued through half-closed eyes.

“You seemed tired.” Lomp shrugged.

“Meh, whatever. I need to get to back to work. Stay here for a minute.” She left the bewildered husband and wife plus Lomp in the garden, heading off to the infirmary. Next to the bridge of salt and a moderate distance away from the mass grave, Cira prepared to perform her second great feat of saltomancy since coming to this island. She needed a clinic.

Stopping here to erect a clinic of salt before she visited the spring was a necessary step to take because the alchemical process she needed to perform took time to complete on its own. Time she could spend taking care of her other duties. Efficiency was key and Cira was intent on getting to bed not a minute later than necessary this evening or tomorrow.

There were other reasons for setting up out here, but the dry environment actually worked out conveniently for what she needed to synthesize.

“Lady sorceress,” A guard approached her and bowed low, “We’re still working on getting all the infected to the infirmary but they’re nearly out of room. Is the second ward safe to enter yet?”

“Ah, I don’t need that room anymore. I came up with a more elegant solution. On that note, do you think you’ll run out of space again?”

“Soon, I imagine.” He said frankly.

“I’ll fell two stones with one bird,” Cira said. It was to take care of two issues at once, such as a single gull could cause two debris stones to plummet with a single swoop.

Cira lifted a gnarled staff to the sky and it began emitting that soft, sandy glow.

“Erm, sorcerer…” Lomp interrupted her, having apparently followed her, “What do you intend on doing?”

Ahh, right. That’s what he’s here for.

“I intend to build a clinic. I need to do some alchemy and soon we’ll have far too many patients to fit in the infirmary alone.”

“Build… a clinic? How do you mean?”

“See that bridge?” She pointed at the bridge to the second ward.

“I see…” He looked stumped, “I guess that’s alright?”

“Excellent.” Cira again lifted her gnarled staff of enhanced botanical efficacy that she happened to have on her and began molding the ground. She pushed it over in small streams, forming a large void in the mass of salt. As the streams worked their way around the proposed site, they left layers of salt behind, making sharp corners and flowing over each other. Eventually it formed the walls that would become her clinic.

She tried to make it around the same size as the infirmary, but couldn’t trust the salt for a second story and went long, stretching it along the field of salt. Once that was done, she added a peak roof on top—she wasn’t expecting snow, this just made it less likely to collapse.

“You’re done?!” Lomp was shocked, “You can just put up a building like that? How much is Pappy paying you for all this?”

“I’m not quite done, and it’s not like I can leave it here when I’m gone.” Cira deflected.

The clinic took maybe twenty minutes to complete, but she had some finishing touches to make for the patients. Claiming one end of the building closest to Breeze Haven, she separated it with a wall and got to work lining the rest of the interior and exterior with a thin layer of conjured stone.

Their dehydration was already severe, and putting patients in a giant box made of salt would turn them into jerky. This process was slow going, as she had no source material to draw from. To conjure something truly permanent was a masterful feat that required insane amounts of mana, but using a mildly copious amount instead, one could create a construct that lasted for months.

This would only be up for a month if that, but it’s always the safest bet to double that. Wouldn’t want rocks falling on the patients.

She saw furniture summoning in her future, but she was done conjuring for now. She took a small vial out of her pocket and drank it, restoring a decent chunk of lost mana. Phew, haven’t had to use one of those in a while. Feels good. Not drinking potions, the first chance in a while perform so much sorcery felt good.

With a new spring in her step, she ran home to complete this pit stop. Lomp chased frantically behind her to catch up once he realized she left, and Cira ran past a very confused husband and wife in her garden, gawking at her clinic.

And Cira ran all the way downstairs to her alchemy workshop. In case it wasn’t clear, rapidly restoring mana gives one a burst of energy and focus.

The smell of herbs and various oils was pungent down here. Tables lined with beakers, alembics, and other crystal instruments for the various stages of creating potions and the like. The workshop was lit by a single window and two undying torches mounted to either wall.

The low-grade elixirs she made at Hawker’s pact were as simple as simple can be. Throw a pound of Limwurt and literally any alcohol with a fistful of redcaps in a pot and stir it every three minutes—boom, there’s your healing tonic.

Cira could significantly improve such a potion using false brimhorn, but that would require drying them, grinding them to a powder, boiling them, then separating out the lethal toxin. That had its own uses. It was known as brimbane, and this is what Cira was really after.

Brimbane could be used to derive a potent poison that only affected viruses and parasites, even bacterium that the body’s immune system disagrees with. These three ‘microscopic’ lifeforms were some of the harder to believe tales Gazen told his daughter, but she’d spent too much time seeing him combat them with absurdly specific spells to be able to deny their existence any longer.

These, too, were beyond her, but even without comprehending them she had the fledgling ability to combat them herself. Cira was pretty sure viruses and parasites were like fairies and imps, which were large enough to see with the naked eye but quite small. Considering their similarly devious nature, it only made sense these microbes would be similar in appearance yet smaller still. Bacteria, however, was closer in relation to the common slime.

Cira ravaged the barrels of herbs, throwing them into various baskets lined out on the table. These were her favorite inventions. She’d fill them with ingredients and when she’s ready, they lift up and follow her around. It was a far cry from Breeze Haven’s machinations, but she was proud of them. They were perfect for the alchemist on the go.

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Her lab was equipped far better than that Bortimer fellow, but the problem was its location. Sometimes it was nice how nobody could ever hope to access her space, but it came with its own inconveniences when she picked up a big job. Sometimes it was nice to work in the field. Especially with patients to treat, she could quickly test things or bounce ideas off the local healers. Cira could check on something fifty feet away instead of having to run home back and forth.

This time she had the luxury of landing next to the infirmary, but it was still two flights of stairs and a brisk walk away. So, Cira got to work packing up her lab. Ten items at a time, she loaded up her equipment in the storage ring which she was yet incapable of crafting an extra of herself, and started making trips back to the clinic, passing the winded Lomp just as he finally made it to the stairs.

Setting up her workshop wasn’t difficult, as she’d done it many times in the past. Tables made of salt held all of her various alchemical instruments and she was preparing to dry the false brimhorn she’d luckily found on the day of the festival. The one good thing to come out of that island were these mushrooms. The food was really good too…

Her salty little clinic looked like the most sterile alchemy lab she’d ever worked in. The walls and every surface was pure white with all her crystalware lined out on the tables. She felt like a real doctor for a moment. None of the rustic barrels of herbs and chemical stains across the floorboards that her home’s workshop boasted were present. Her beloved baskets were almost ruining the scene.

This part was hardly alchemy. She spread the mushrooms out on a tray, taking the caps off and laying them down flat, then built an extra tall table to rest them on high up near the ceiling. The finishing touch was to open up a hole to let the sunlight shine on them. This couldn’t be recommended if you wanted medicine, as it breaks down most of the compounds besides the poison. It was intended to make the next few steps easier.

Here, the salt and sun would form a bifecta of rapid mushroom drying, speeding the process up from a week to… hopefully a day or two? Once that was done, she could start the real alchemy, but this was a necessary waiting game. Perfect chance to head below ground.

She ran home and changed her robes again to something more practical. They were woven from silk of the cerulean silkworm, embellished with frills and white accents to appear as a flowing river. The go-to for water related work. Cira regrouped with her tour guides and an exhausted guard before heading towards the main entrance to the great mine. If you just kept taking staircases down, that’s where you’d end up. They descended through the various levels of the city, where around two-thirds of the population was supposed to live. Above, on the highest platforms were all the shops and stands. The bustle served to create the façade of a lively city as she saw last night, but below was in dire straits.

Rusted tin shacks like jail cells were all clustered up down here, sharing walls and stacked on top of each other. It was worse the lower you go. Some peoples’ walls were rusted through, and Cira could see a thin man and woman sitting at a table listlessly.

“The famine hit this place hard,” Chip explained, as they reached the lowest level. “Used to live here until a few years back. Managed to move up a couple.”

A couple levels up was hardly better but at least they all had a roof and there wasn’t anyone sleeping in the path outside against the railing. The buildings were all more rusted, likely just being closer to the salt.

“Did they repair the buildings down here before those fellows from above took over?” It was hard to tell how old the buildings looked when the whole island was salt.

“The place didn’t exist before then. The city was largely rebuilt and when Earth Vein came in and a lot of folks were shoved down here” Cira couldn’t imagine living somewhere like this. Her home island was bad, but Fount Salt had left a considerable impression on her in very little time. It’s like comparing limroot to dimnuts. Why am I even thinking about that place? The plague there was of an altogether different nature.

“Why don’t we hurry up?” Rosalie suggested, “I hate coming back here. We should have taken a different way.”

They continued following the staircases down until they’d left the residential district behind. Cira got excited as they approached a massive tunnel. Cave exploration would make for a nice change of pace.

The entrance was lit with artifacts and there was a constant flow of miners entering and exiting, all equipped in heavy gear and wielding pickaxes. Some looked sickly but Cira couldn’t just stop them and heal them out of the blue. Hopefully they’d turn up at the clinic. She’d been ill before, but nothing serious since she was young owing to her dear old dad and his teachings. She couldn’t imagine having to mine while sick with whatever her patients had—she could hardly get herself out of bed with a light cold.

“This is as far as I go,” Rosalie spoke up before turning to Chip, “But you should probably check in with your supervisor, shouldn’t you?”

“Aye…” He said in a depressed tone, “I wanted to push it off another day but now’s as good a time as any.”

Rosalie departed after they shared a heartwarming goodbye. Apparently going to the mines meant one wouldn’t be home for days or weeks at worst. Fount Salt was massive. She made sure to wrestle a promise out of Cira to let her know when she could visit her daughter.

Chip led Cira into the mine, which narrowed into a spiderweb of tunnels. If she didn’t have a guide she’d lose her way in an instant, but the miner knew these tunnels like the back of his hand. After a few minutes of twisting and turning, it opened up into a large chamber with a bunch of doors set into the stone.

“We call this the other noose.” Chip filled her in, “Takes you to work, wherever you need to go.”

One door opened and a small group of bearded men with pickaxes stepped out looking tired, seemingly on their way home. Recessed into the stone were a series of elevators. From what Cira could see they weren’t her father’s make. They were built from the same material as the reservoirs and Cira was upset to discover they resisted inspection.

How dare you?! She shook her fists at the artificers who died hundreds of years ago after building out the island.

“How far down is the spring?” She asked.

“Couple hours,” He shrugged, “Don’t expect to get anywhere quickly down here.”

She took that as a challenge.

So, the monotonous elevator ride began. The interior was raw metal and it was constructed with no concern for aesthetic or dampening for sound, so they got to enjoy the sounds of metal scraping for three hours. Chip and Lomp took a nap somehow, but most of Cira’s time was spent trying to look at the mechanism behind this artifact.

By the three-hour mark, Cira was beyond frustrated. She hadn’t learned a thing about how the elevators were built and all she discovered was the method they used to prevent her observation. Resist spatial sorcery, short and sweet. She’d have to vandalize these relics to learn more—either disassembling them or attempting to selectively disable parts of the inscription. The latter being quite the feat when you couldn’t see it, and an attempt would likely end in its complete destruction.

They stepped out into a dark cave where people walked around wearing headlamps to see. Where the elevator let out was something of a nexus, and there was another maze of tunnels to navigate. Instead of grabbing a headlamp off the wall like Chip, Cira cast Lamplight again and a ball of light the size of her fist followed her around like a personal sun.

“Don’t worry, little miss. We’re almost there.” Ten hours later, that is.

She could smell it in the air, almost like the scent of the ocean. The salt clung to the moisture in the air from the nearby spring and she could taste it. It dried her lips out and she was forced to cast Lesser Hydration on herself. A spell she’d thought up towards the end of her stint in the infirmary where she creates a hyper-humid pocket of air around someone to force their skin to absorb it. In this case, she just moisturized her face, leaving her feeling like the freshest daisy in the salt mine.

Soon, the sound of rushing water could be heard.

“What do you intend to do here?” Lomp was visibly worried.

“Just take a few samples. Nothing to worry about.” Cira skipped along to the sound of water, arriving at the spring promptly. Any given island’s aquos was going to vary greatly. Heron’s Island had a very subdued spring that sent gentle streams flowing through the woods, but Fount Salt was a massive island and had a massive spring to suit.

Water violently exploded like a geyser from the center of a bowl polished into the salt and full of water. A spiral staircase led straight up far beyond the distance Cira could see, into the dark. Chip explained that they just keep building down as the spring sank. A canal was carved out just above where the water pooled to, suggesting it had found another way out.

“It sinks a few feet each year. It’s a huge hassle to keep digging these canals only for them to be useless in a few months, but we have to stay ahead of it best we can.” All the canals led to a major spillway, but they had to submerge themselves in potent saltwater to dig them out twice a year. Grueling work that just went to waste.

Cira approached it and pulled a couple jars out, taking two samples of the spring, one from the pool and one from catching the bursting water in the air. The room was a good hundred feet across, and walking around it, Cira found the path the water was taking to escape. It was a massive underwater river leading down into a steep underground cavern.

“Is that it?” Lomp asked, “Can we go home now?”

“Sure thing,” Cira said before running towards the water and taking a leap, “I’ll see you guys topside!”

“Wait, what are you doing?!” Lomp chased after in a panic.

“I’m off to see the salt nymphs!” The rapids took her, and she was quickly submerged, picking up speed as the tunnel grew darker and darker. She looked up and the last thing she saw before going blind was her lamplight trailing pitifully behind and Lomp entering the water behind her.

That Fool! And just like that, Cira was forced to perform a series of miraculous feats to prevent someone from killing themselves through sheer idiocy.