Wraithwood Botanist

B2 - R: Chapter 8 - Alchemic Creations

I unzipped my tent the next morning and stretched my limbs with a smile. It felt good to camp under the open sky. Nothing attacked—just like the other two hundred times that I had camped in the open wilderness. It was nice.

Kline and I ate breakfast by the smoldered fire and then packed up camp. The day was young, my future was bright, and if I lingered too long, I would start to think about the Trial of Survival. So, I opened up my Guide and planned out my plan.

I would start with alchemy. Alchemy meant health restoration creations, antifungals, antitoxins, cleansing elixirs, and other forms of medicines I’d need once I started learning soulmancy or searching for a home. So that’s where I began, moving into the Subclass tab and going into quests.

I found a suitable quest immediately.

—---

Neophyte Mira Hill has been offered a new Quest.

Legacy Quest: Create a Health Restoration Product.

Quest Summary: In a stunning reminder that the Oracle is not out to get you, it is now offering you rewards for creating idiot insurance products. That’s a miracle, considering how many times you’ve nearly killed yourself in the last week. So invest some time. But, for the love of God, don’t kill yourself while creating a health restoration product. If you didn’t use a diamond-level information suppression request, your strange and budding legacy would forever be remembered with ridicule.

Requirement(s):

Create a working health restoration product.

Use proper enchanting to connect your creation to the record.

Rewards:

Tutorial on health restoration basics that is one tier above your level’s creation.

One health restoration recipe with ingredients that are reasonably accessible to you. The recipe will be one tier higher than your own.

—---

My lips curled into a bittersweet smile. "I probably already have these rewards…" I muttered.

I had a diamond-level alchemy skill that came with hundreds of basic recipes and tutorials, moving all the way up to skills necessary for sixth-tier creations. I’d be able to take my alchemy skill all the way up to being a demigod on the seventh evolution. Such was the nature of diamond requests.

It was cool that I already had it, but… it was lame that I wouldn’t get any rewards.

I was gonna do it anyway, I reminded myself.

It didn’t make me feel better. Rewards were the shit—not getting them when I should have was extra not cool.

I sighed and turned to Kline. "You ready?"

He meowed, and we walked into the great wilderness en route to find alchemic ingredients for mana and health restoration creations, as well as cleansing elixirs, antifungals, and antitoxins.

We found a resource gold mine underneath a patch of deadfall, a bone graveyard of fallen trees from a fight that had collapsed during a vicious battle a few years before, judging by the bark. Then we traveled over a bog where we found so many edible mushrooms that the hilltop shone with gold.

I sliced and cooked them on a pan that I put on an alchemy heating array as Kline ate more meat—the only real things a cat could eat. The mushrooms tasted nutty like chanterelles.

We moved on.

Finding alchemic ingredients was easier after the Subclass but still very difficult. With the Alchemy Identify skill, which I got when I got the subclass, I could quickly identify them. That said, they didn’t glow gold or purple, depending on whether they were edible or poisonous.

I almost spent a diamond request to get the alchemic ingredients book that highlighted plants. It was invaluable—but I only had two diamond requests left. I’d think about it.

In the afternoon, I found a critical flower for health restoration creations, wreathing a meadow with shades of pink. We harvested them for two hours before we were swarmed by beasts the size of wolves.

Kline and I fought our way through it. Moxle Dilation was getting easier to control and my mana sharpening more deadly—the practice was paying off.

The day ended with every preservation jar and tub that I could fit in my backpack. I brought them back and put new ones into my bag.

The next day, I would work on creating the potions.

And that’s what I did. Kline and I ate breakfast at sunrise the following morning, and I grabbed my goods to create a health restoration balm.

I started by desiccating the dried ingredients and grinding them, pouring the dust into jars, and labeling them, as there were hundreds of jars available.

I then pulled out the wet goods that I needed to extract sap from and paused as I grabbed a processing knife. It was then I got a strange idea.

I wonder…

I picked up a random stick and held it in front of me and closed my eyes. I swirled mana around it and then sharpened it using my Mana Sharpening technique. To my surprise, it had a crude blade on it.

Interesting…

I walked up to a tree and left a gash in it. It cut like butter.

In~ter~esting…

I walked up to the counter with my sharpened stick and tried to cut a corner—it didn’t do anything.

Must be reinforced… or this isn’t sharp enough…

Either way, I figured out what I was going to do.

Pulling out a cutting board, I put the wet ingredients on the board and started chopping them with my stick. It was brutal work that required excessive amounts of mana and concentration, but I did it—

—I cut one root before my mana ran out.

Turns out, there was a big difference between wrapping a blade in sharpening and creating a blade out of raw mana. There was also a chasm between creating a weapon and stabbing with it blindly than it was to create a blade and use it to chop something evenly.

I stopped for the day, determined to practice every time I skinned a beast, and threaded for twenty minutes to regain my mana. Then I went back to work.

I mixed ingredients in a pan, adding oil, water, and an emulsifier to stabilize it. Once it cooled, I got the chime that I created my first balm.

—---

Congratulations! Neophyte Mira Hill has created a new alchemic creation.

Name: Trelfin Balm

Type: Healing Acceleration, Antibiotic

Effect: Closes minor wounds, keeps them clean, and accelerates healing.

Estimated purity: 47%.

—---

I sighed when I completed it. How anti-climatic… I thought.

After watching a balm reconnect Kline’s bones and water that healed me on sight, this creation felt like Neosporin. Yet that’s all I could do—

—without learning enhancements.

Alchemic creations were like fuel for magic spells that performed healing magic. There was a relationship between the two and I didn’t have the foggiest clue how enchantments worked—and that’s what Elana would teach me. So, I had to settle for medicine.

It was underwhelming but it did have a nice benefit. Two seconds later, I heard a chime and got my first subclass announcement.

—---

Congratulations! You have completed the mission, "Create a Health Restoration Creation" for your subclass.

Rewards:

Tutorial on health restoration basics that is one tier above your level’s creation.

One health restoration recipe with ingredients that are reasonably accessible to you. The recipe will be one tier higher than your own.

—---

I was about to complain when I got another notification.

—---

Due to already having the rewards, you have been given alternative rewards.

Rewards:

One bronze recipe request.

One bronze tutorial request.

—---

I slightly smirked when I saw the rewards. Bronze? I thought in a British accent. Bronze! What type of meager pittance is this? Lithco demands golds to breathe!

I swiped away the screen, shrugging it off. It was better than nothing.

Finally, I got a new notification.

—---

You have unlocked the following quests:

Create a Sealing Clay

Create a Skin Binder

Create a Muscle Binder

Create a Bone Setter

…

—----

Just like that, I unlocked two dozen more basic quests, asking me to make a basic creation type. There was also a new quest that asked me to create a higher tier Healing Acceleration Creation. That meant higher enchantments or more unstable compounds. Then I’d get higher-level rewards.

I clicked on the higher-tier quest. Turned out I would get a silver request. I’d probably get a gold for a third tier.

Should I take an enchantment tutorial? I pondered. Probably not…

I still needed to figure out what Elana would tell me. If I had learned anything going to school, it was that teachers had egos, and as soon as I learned anything, they would make me undo it. So, I was sticking to the basics, teasing out the differences between alchemy and science.

So far there was none aside from essence extraction.

Enchantments would change that.

Let’s just grind out products.

I then started working on a mana vein restoration creation. It was also quite simple to make, simply requiring me to use essence extraction on certain leaves in boiling water, put on simmer as I added sugar as a solvent, ensuring an even distribution of active ingredients in the liquid form, and mixing it with powdered active ingredients that restored structural proteins around my body’s developing mana channel structures, and reinforced the channel walls. Oddly enough, this particular drug would help my mana channels form and become stronger. So it wasn’t just a drug—

—it was like anabolic steroids.

Score.

I dipped my finger into it and gave it a taste.

Poison.

It tasted like poison.

But! I refused to retch and lose something so valuable, so I carried on until I got the chime.

—---

Name: Selenara Syrup

Description: Like maralune syrup, only made by a botanist who thinks highly of herself as a professional chemist just because she minored in it in college.

Purity: 49%.

—---

My face twitched. "On to antitoxins…" I seethed.

Antitoxins, like the cleansing elixir I had, were problematic because they made me empty my stomach and bowels, and I couldn’t have that in battle. Instead, I decided to make a cream.

To do that, I decided to make a shea butter equivalent as a base.

I started by peeling the fruit away from wyndrel fruit I had collected with my fingers. They were pink fruit thick as acorns but shaped like textbook cylinders, filled with an uncracked nut. I put the pulp in a bowl and selectively desiccated the outer pulp, drying it out and forcing it off the shell.

I then took a rock and broke the shell, pulling out the kernels and collecting them in a bowl. It was hard, laborious work to go through a thousand, so I used Levisphere and Separate to collect the kernels after smashing the shells in bulk. It helped significantly.

I roasted the kernels in a pan, stirring constantly till the oils separated. Then I smashed them in a long, laborious process and wetted my hands to knead the paste, adding water to separate oils. I was tempted to waste a request on another spell for these processes—but didn’t. I didn’t get a spell for needing or mashing because they weren’t necessary—and I needed to save my requests for things that were.

It took four hours to heat the paste gently in a pot for the oils to rise to the surface and only five minutes to skim the butter from the top and separate the impurities. Ten minutes later, I had a jar of wyndrel butter, which would act as a moisturizing agent, stabilizing agent, and binding agent for creams.

It would go far.

That’s enough for today, I thought. I purified the butter and left it out to cool it slowly. I’d use it on the morrow. Let’s eat.

Kline snuggled up against me during dinner, falling asleep as I watched the fire. So much had happened in less than two weeks. Now, I was facing my greatest challenge yet, and I felt… calm about it. Satisfied, even. I drifted off to sleep.

The next morning, I mixed the wyndrel butter with medicinal herbs and essence roots, completing a tier-two topical antitoxin. I was satisfied with the chime.

—---

Name: Marindel Cream

Description: Deceptively innocuous as a cream, this cleansing cream isn’t hydrocortisone. It’s a powerful cleansing agent that takes anything cut into skin or muscle and flushes it out, like putting a scrunched up sponge in a bloody wound and releasing it, allowing it to collect the blood. Keep what it does in mind before you see it in action. Otherwise, you’ll be treating your information requests like WebMD.

Purity: 64%.

—---

I shivered at the warning but was glad for it. That meant that it worked. Now, I had mana restoration syrup, some basic medicine, the Diktyo River water, and an antitoxin. I was on my way to challenging the forest.

It was time to meet Elana and start my journey.