The Way Ahead

Chapter 96a: Where There's Smoke

Edwin was torn. His first reaction was to run away, but that reaction was overridden by his desire to prove he could take care of himself by fighting off whatever pack of animals was next to him. That reaction was in turn subsequently vetoed in favor of yelling for help from Lefi, though.

Identify was no help. Whatever was attacking him, he couldn’t get a proper read on them to get a response. That meant one of two- well, really three- things. Either Edwin couldn’t properly focus on any of the eyes individually as to Identify it and not its neighbors, and the alternative was just that whatever it was didn’t have an Identify tag, meaning it wasn’t actually alive. He… wasn’t betting on that one. The third option was that it could hide from his Identify, which while possible was not something he’d encountered. To be on the safe side, he was once again assuming the first scenario was most likely.

It wasn’t very flattering to his mental state, though.

“Lefi! Heeeellllpp!” he yelled into the silent night air, disturbing the gentle peace countless insects had so delicately established.

He scarcely looked back in his headlong flight, more interested in getting away than seeing how close whatever pack of predators had literally glowing red eyes was to catching up to him. He wasn’t sure, but it looked like they continued to close in on him, judging solely from the terrified flashes of light his eyes caught on the edge of their vision.

By the time he slowed down, he’d left them far behind him, but he was still a bit jumpy that they might be right behind him. Fortunately though, Lefi had arrived, summoned by Edwin’s yelling.

“Edwin! You are alright! When I heard your cries I feared the worst. What happened?”

“I’m fine, personally,” Edwin explained, scarcely winded from his flight thanks to Breathing, “Just a bit of a scare. Some pack of creatures nearly pounced on me. Glowing eyes and all that, you know?”

“I’m afraid I do not, at least not especially. But there is a beast that needs vanquishing? Where might I find it? What do you know of the creatures?”

“They’re magical predators of some kind. There was a big pack of glowing red eyes and they lit up on my magic sense- some kind of intense darkness. I managed to run away well enough,” Edwin summarized. Those were probably the main points, right? Was there something he was forgetting? Oh yeah, “And I was having issues Identifying them. Not sure why exactly, but I don’t know what they are.”

Lefi perked up, “A pack of predators, you say? Is there to be a hunt tonight?” he eagerly asked.

“I mean… maybe?” Edwin tried, “If you… ah who am I kidding? You’ll be fine.” He sighed, “You want me to come with you?”

Lefi patted Edwin’s head, and he had to fight the instinct to shy away, “No, no. There is no need for such actions. I will be sufficient to deal with whatever attempted to prey upon you. You said it was back in that direction?”

“I… I think so. I wasn’t paying that much attention, but I’m pretty sure it was basically a straight line that way.”

Magical propulsion was much easier to ensure a consistent direction of travel than walking. After all, he didn’t need to worry about obstacles other than just trees. He wouldn’t be on a slight incline or need to slog through mud, after all. Hence, he felt moderately confident in saying his travel had been geometrically sound.

“Very well! If you’d just return unto the caravan, I shall return once this foe has been truly vanquished!”

The adventurer vanished into the darkness, slipping away like a fleeting shadow. Within moments, Edwin had lost track of where the man was… which made sense, he must have had a truly astronomical Stealth skill to keep an eye on him while he was with Niall for a few days while being wholly unnoticed. Vanishing into darkened woods must have been almost literal child’s play for him by comparison.

In any case, with Lefi off hunting the hunters meant that there was nobody at the camp, and he flew off in that direction at a decent pace, not wanting to leave them all unguarded for too long when there were dangerous creatures about.

Everyone was still sleeping when he got back, and only Kynigos- did the dog actually sleep or not? Edwin was starting to suspect he didn’t, and just lay next to Yathal to keep the boy company- acknowledged his presence.

There was nothing else to do about it, so Edwin took a seat by the cart with a sigh and waited for Lefi to go and fight the monster for him, like he was a good little NPC.

Oi. Shut up, brain. As established, no complaining about friends being able to help out. That’s how society works.

Lefi returned very quickly, all told, holding a dead, turkey-sized bird with black and green feathers by its talons, completely unharmed. “Edwin! I thought I was due for a fight!”

“So did I,” Edwin muttered, looking at the fowl in Lefi’s hand, “What’s that?”

“This is a lybird! A powerful illusionist related to the peacock of the south! It summons the apparitions of glowing eyes to scare off predators! Fear not, they are mostly harmless but you are not the first to have fallen afoul of their defense!”

“Great, so I was scared away by an overgrown chicken? Wait, they’re a cousin of peacocks?” he asked incredulously.

“Indeed!”

“I… don’t think that’s how evolution works,” Edwin replied, “Like… you wouldn’t get an eagle that had a cousin with dragonfly wings. The end result may be similar, but the route taken was drastically different. Also, I think peacocks don’t actually use their plumage to scare off predators anyway...”josei

“Perhaps, though it is not what Identify said!” Lefi shrugged, “But do such things truly matter?”

“Well… Yes, but I’m not a Biologist-Errant, and biology isn’t a real science anyway so… no. I guess not.”

Lefi looked at him oddly, “I did not comprehend your statement. Outworlder terminology?”

Edwin sighed, “Yeah, yeah. Just… don’t say it so loud, okay? The first time someone found out about it I ended up sort-of enslaved.”

“Do you want this?” the adventurer asked, hefting the bird carcass, “I’ve never eaten lybird before and I want to see what it’s like, but you’re the alchemist.”

“Oh, heck yes.” Edwin hastily said, “Give me a minute to start the fire, but I can feel the illusion magic in its feathers from here and I just figured out what Refine does. I’ll just grab everything we don’t cook up. I’ve been meaning to make a proper smoke bomb and I think this is just what I need to take it to the next level.”

Edwin was starting to get a hang of how Refine worked, he thought. He’d fiddled around with the Skill some in the intervening days (at least, when he wasn’t busy driving the carriage, making up for the days he’d missed) since his all-week Alchemy session, preparing himself for the dissection of the lybird’s feathers. The rest of the bird’s meat- which turned out decent and didn’t end up tasting like chicken- and other organs didn’t show up as magical to Edwin’s senses. While that didn’t mean they had no worth to Edwin, he figured they probably weren’t worth the hassle of trying to figure out what to do with them. Kynigos had eaten well that day.

For the time being, the feathers- which did still feel magical to Edwin’s senses, reminding him of inky blackness with perhaps some other details drowned out by the void- were being kept alongside the rest of his alchemy ingredients while Edwin tried to suss out the details of his ‘new’ Skill.

At first, he suspected it might brush alongside Alchemy Essentia. While his initial impressions had been that it had to do with System connections, it turned out to be much broader than that. His stamina catalyst had certainly been interesting, all things considered. When he directly ingested a single drop, it lit up his Stamina across his body. It didn’t seem to do anything directly, but it clearly interacted with it in some way. Trying to mix talsanenris in with the catalyst made his Stamina ‘glow’ for lack of a better term, and it appeared to recover faster.

It wasn’t very efficient, though, until he applied Refine to the talsanenris as well. With the higher Skill levels in Refine, and knowledge of how to use it in concert with Alchemical Dismantling, he was able to Refine a starting drop of mana in only an hour, and had subsequently used that to Dismantle a handful of his dried berries into a greenish-white liquid over the course of an afternoon.

By the end, there was no trace of the berries, the magical ingredient wholly consumed by the process into a ‘distilled life energy’ vial.

With Refining now in the 30s, and Alchemical Dismantling in the 40s, he could render down a single berry in about two hours, two in two hours and ten minutes, eight with two and a half hours, and every subsequent doubling of berries required just ten minutes after that. Unfortunately, the longer he held it, the harder it was to maintain the effect, so he couldn’t just continue the process arbitrarily long.

He could only Refine a single component at a time, though. If he tried to mix together a sinbalyne petal and a talsanenris berry, for example, the resulting creation would either be a stamina catalyst or distilled life. Well, there could be other results too, depending on what he focused on trying to Refine, but those were the primary things he was trying to create for the time being.

Then Alchemy hit level 90, and the whole world exploded into possibility.

The Skill had always provided little hints here and there, telling Edwin the rate at which he needed to mix two substances together and the like, though never the why before. He’d followed along with the nudges most of the time in part because the results were objectively superior to when he didn’t, and in part because it was like muscle memory. Unless he actively tried to avoid following the Skill’s guidance, he’d fall into the patterns without even thinking about it.

He still did his best to record everything with proper lab directions, of course, but he was starting to feel a bit jealous of the Empire’s alchemists and their automatic transcript of everything they did.

Now, though, the Skill gave him more insight into how to make his potions turn out the way he wanted them, rather than his former blind experimentation. It didn’t provide the knowledge directly, which he was grateful for, but if he provided it with a bit of Perception, he was able to… see the changes his potions underwent. He could tell how the color of his mixture changed in tune with his stirring rate, or the ways in which adding a bit more water would help to stabilize a volatile mixture by delaying the reaction slightly until he could add the next ingredient.

It gave him hints about temperature, quantity and timing for adding ingredients, and even what certain additions would do to a potion. He made sure to ignore the Skill at times, in part out of stubbornness and in part to ensure it wasn’t lying to him. It never was, but simply relying on the Alchemy skill was what had gotten the Lirasian alchemists where they were today.

It was an additional factor to account for in his experiments, and a crutch to lean on when trying to make something new, but it was still just that: a crutch. He wouldn’t get complacent with it.

Probably.

Hopefully.

He was trying to delay it as much as possible, anyway.

The Skill also confirmed his suspicions with Refining, that it was a basic form of Alchemy Essentia. He couldn’t pull off some of the more impressive aspects of that particular discipline- he couldn’t directly transfer the properties of one substance to another, for example- but he could use it to get effects which might not be possible with more ‘mundane’ alchemy.

Edwin couldn’t help but chuckle at the idea that any alchemy might be considered mundane, but that was just the nature of familiarity. No matter how impressive the subject, it would eventually become rote.

He was really looking forward to tearing into the lybird feathers now, though. He’d applied Refining to some of his Infused phosphorus, reducing it into powdered, chalky ‘fuminary essence’ that consistently let off small amounts of heatless smoke, and was now trying to do the same to his feathers.

Edwin breathed out. Calm helped, he’d found. If he was excited or nervous, his mana was harder to Refine. Fortunately, he had a lot of practice suppressing his emotions and so it only took a few minutes before he was ready to proceed.

He let his mana flow. He didn’t know exactly what he was doing differently these days, but it felt so much smoother now. He would have suspected it was the result of Refining leveling, except he wasn’t using it yet. He might have suspected he somehow got levels in Basic Mana Manipulation, but his Status showed that was as impossible as everyone said it was.

Or maybe I’m just getting better at this outside of the System’s boosts.

He’d take some benchmarks with Flying later on. For now, he needed to focus.

Mana poured from his skin, invisible to all senses save one. Within seconds, his entire hand was sheathed in the mystical energy, but he kept at it. So long as he didn’t try to control too much mana at once, he could hold onto a decent amount, but there were still limits. Thus, he was only able to spend about a minute gathering power before he activated Refining and began to feed his Mana into it.

Forty minutes later, the tip of his index finger was blazing like a tiny star to his senses, and he was ready for the next stage. He lightly tapped the small stack of feathers he had at the ready, and the star vanished, spread out into the topmost feather and slowly seeping down.

He mentally twisted his mana connection, designating it as his tool while he Infused his Alchemical Dismantling. Immediately, the strain present in maintaining the connection to the feather lessened. It didn’t vanish, but it did become something he could use in a half-reasonable amount of time.

With his ‘mana knife,’ he slowly poked and prodded around the feather, using Alchemy to try and find the aspect of illusion- particularly one meant to hide things- that he was looking for. There was a lot here, and if he wanted to, Alchemical Dismantling would let him cut out what tiny amounts of fear-inducement, light-production, and illusion Essences that were present in the material. However, if he just used that, it wouldn’t produce nearly enough for his purposes.

Instead, he needed to pull on Refining and Purify’s abilities, which meant focusing on a single Essence and converting or destroying everything that didn’t fit.

Eventually, he found what he wanted. Ritual Intuition, when threaded through Alchemy and Alchemical Dismantling, pointed towards the particular inky black cloud that would create a corresponding concealing mist in the real world, and Edwin knew what to tug on.

The aspect was ripped free, and Refining got to work. Wherever his knife passed, magical structures were torn apart like cobwebs. Some just dissipated, but others were cut in such a way that his Skill grabbed ahold of them and twisted them into matching the misty illusions.

There was a lot wasted, and the original ‘pattern’ mana was destroyed quickly, replaced by the abundance of newly created misty mana. Overall, the process was highly inefficient. If he chose an Essence that didn’t have enough base material, the process would possibly fizzle out. If he didn’t use Purify to get rid of the destroyed and useless mana, it would have all clotted together and failed. If he didn’t have the ability to cut the substance into raw mana with Alchemical Dismantling, or create more Essence with Refining, it would have fizzled out with no effect.

When all combined, though, the result… was most satisfying.

An hour and a half later, Edwin opened his eyes and looked upon his accomplishment. The feathers had been wholly replaced by a pile of what looked like powdered darkness to his mana sense, but in truth looked like a vaguely reflective, off-white pile of dust.

Edwin smiled.

Perfect.