“So, I still don’t understand the point of this,” Mariah complained as she followed beside Rory, who inspected the wall, occasionally chiseling a rune into the side with his knife.

  “Ascension Energy can do a lot to improve stuff directly, and Fabricate Matter can likewise reinforce things. You know what they can’t do? They can’t add inscriptions that aren’t already there.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Mariah frowned. “I still don’t understand why you’ve had me tag along for this. Weren’t we supposed to be doing alchemy?”

  “We are,” Rory confirmed with a nod, carving a set of inscriptions into the patch of the wall before moving several feet down. “Except, I don’t know alchemy, and you don’t know alchemy.”

  “And that explains working with Inscriptions… how?”

  “Inspiration. And education.”

  “Inspiration?”

  “Yes, sometimes one field inspires another—and, more importantly, education. I want you to be capable of seeing things at a deeper level, seeing connections, and forming complex thought webs. Inscription is almost entirely revolving around such tasks. Learning a rune is one thing, anyone can copy down something, it’s about making sense of what the meaning behind it that matters.”

  “I still feel like we should be doing… more?” Mariah paused midsentence as if trying to find the right words. “You’ve explained some of the basic runes and have had me taking notes as I tag along, so don’t you think we can finally give it a go?”

  It was Rory’s turn to pause as he considered it. She had been a diligent student for some time now, far better with Inscriptions than Apostolos ever was.

  And truthfully, Rory was beginning to feel an itch to try something new. He’d been slowly playing with a few ideas regarding the alchemy field, and part of him was feeling it was about time to give them a whirl.

  “Fine,” Rory sighed. “Yes, I believe it’s time. You’ve been learning well, so now we can learn together.”

  “Really!?” Mariah clapped cheerfully, hopping up and down before gathering her composure with an awkward cough into her fist. “Um, I mean, I’m glad to hear that.”

  Rory smiled, rolling his eyes at her attempt to be cool. It was painfully clear that the girl wanted to cultivate the image of an aloof academic type, but in reality, she was a giggly girl with a sharp tongue and an even sharper wit.

  “Go do whatever you need to for the afternoon, later in the evening when I’m done with this patch of the wall-” Rory paused, staring down the next hundred yards of the wall in pain. “-I’ll meet with you at the campfire.”

  The girl nodded, running off as Rory was left alone to look at his work.

  And there goes convincing her to pick up Inscription so that she could help me.

  “I see you’ve prepared yourself,” Rory announced as he sat across from Mariah. Stacked all around her were piles of random herbs or other materials that could be useful for alchemy.

  Assuming they figured out a way to make alchemy work.

  “Yeah. I asked Mr. Apostolos if I could grab stuff from storage, and when I mentioned that you would be working with me for this, he said I could go ahead and take what I wanted.”

  “Good call on asking,” Rory nodded appreciatively. “Anything else?”

  “Uhh, he said something about ‘Check in with Irene after,’ too.”

  “Huh, so she was serious,” Rory mumbled. Irene had mentioned wanting to start taking inventory of things within the camp, but Rory had thought she’d been joking.

  She really is serious about this overseer stuff. Good for her, I guess?

  “So, how do we start?” Mariah asked, arms crossed, even if Rory could see the corner of her lips quirking upward every few seconds.

  “That’s a good question, Mariah, and the answer is I have no idea.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” Rory said. “In the past, when I created new skills, I generally had a vision for what I was doing, something I was specifically working toward. Alchemy is… an odd thing to plan around, as in theory, it can take many different forms, basing off of, uhh, intuition.”

  Rory still hadn’t talked much about the old universe with the kids, and he wasn’t sure he felt the need unless one of them put two and two together at some point. From what he’d heard of the kids, even the Null Window had a slightly different description that did not comment on any ‘former’ universes.

  All of that was to say, Rory tried to guard his tongue and not elaborate too much on his ‘intuition’ on how alchemy ‘should’ work.

  “Hmm. So… then what?”

  “Well, how about this. We shoot ideas back and forth. When I say alchemy or chemistry, what does that mean to you?”

  “Breaking things down into baser forms and studying them to reconstruct into… other stuff, I guess?”

  Mariah looked at Rory as if hoping she’d passed some test.

  “Hey, your ideas are as good as mine. But yeah, I’d say it feels like the general direction of alchemy and chemistry. When you say ‘base’ forms, what image does that bring to mind?”

  “I’m not sure,” Mariah frowned. “I feel like there is just something… there, you know? If you could just look a bit closer, you could see things that normally aren’t there.”

  “Well, you’re not wrong,” Rory said, activating a partial release of Eyes of the Architect. “First off, what exists all around us?”

  “Pneuma,” Mariah answered instantly. It was one of the ‘intro’ lessons he’d taught the kids in their first few days on Aelia.

  “And what does Pneuma look like?”

  “Uhh, stuff?”

  Rory smiled, sagely nodding to the girl.

  “It does, in fact, look like ‘stuff,’ as you said. Can you describe the ‘stuff’ in any fashion?”

  “Small?” The girl shrugged. “I don’t know; how could I? I don’t even have a tier yet.”

  Which will probably change soon.

  Rory had a bet with Apostolos that Mariah would likely achieve a proper tier within a month. Apostolos had bet on two. If Rory won, Apostolos would be his personal hunter for his next project, tracking down any monsters or materials he might need out in the wilds. If Apostolos won, he had to make Apostolos an item of his choosing.

  “To answer your question, I can’t even see Pneuma at its smallest,” Rory finally relented, giving the girl a break. “But, within the Maw, on the third floor, is a place called the ‘Trial of Space,’ which can teach you a lot about things like that. You’d benefit from checking it out when you're tier five.”

  “Okay. And how exactly does that matter to me right now?”

  “It doesn’t, and I was digressing. My point is that you can think of the most minute forms of Pneuma as impossibly small sparks or embers. Gather enough together in a localized ‘area,’ and it grows in potency.” Rory hefted a small rock, tossing it up and down several times before flicking it gently to the side. “The physical stuff everything is made of also has a similar principle. How you arrange those specks of physical matter can change how things interact and appear. That’s a little bit of introductory chemistry.”

  “So, when you add in the magical stuff-”

  “Boom, alchemy,” Rory said with a nod. “Or at least, that’s my guess.”

  “So… we need to break things down to that small stuff,” Mariah said slowly before gaining confidence. “Or otherwise, get them to… interact somehow? It’s a bit like your forging, isn’t it?”

  “Sort of, but at a smaller scale,” Rory said, half dismissing the notion so she wouldn’t conflate smithing with alchemy.

  “But if we can’t see that tiny stuff, how do we get them to do stuff?”

  “And therein is the rub,” Rory said, rubbing the back of his neck. “I have an idea, but I want to see if you can come up with something.”

  Mariah rubbed at the back of her neck, emulating Rory as she thought. Watching her, Rory saw the moment an epiphany hit her, her eyes widening as she ran off to grab a small jar. Finding one inside the forge, she sprinted back, stopping by the essence spire to scoop around the pond before finally dashing back to the fire.

  “This!” Mariah said proudly.

  “What about it?”

  “You know how you like to drink that weird green stuff?”

  “Tea.” Rory corrected.

  “Yeah. Well, you boil stuff in the aisormba, and the liquid takes on properties of the leaves.”

  “And?” Rory questioned, prompting her to continue her thoughts.

  “Well, if chemistry or alchemy is about trying to get ‘small stuff’ to interact to make something else, isn’t that basically the same thing? So what if we start boiling stuff?”

  “Not a bad start,” Rory said, being genuine. “But don’t you think it's too shallow?”

  Mariah frowned, folding her arms as she placed the small jar of liquid down. “Maybe.”

  “So, what do you think is missing then?”

  Once more, Mariah seemed deep in thought before she pounded a closed fist into her open palm. “Intent! It’s like magic or Inscription!”

  “It’s probably not as simple as having a specific intent while boiling stuff,” Rory amended, assuming alchemy worked like chemistry.

  “The intent… behind the stuff boiled?” Mariah said, using Rory as a sounding board more than genuinely questioning him. “Wait, maybe it's like Inscription, where linking runes together can modify a meaning or even alter a concept. Boiling one ingredient wouldn’t be enough then, would it? Put several things with a shared purpose, and maybe that’s where you’d get something!”

  “I don’t see why not,” Rory said.

  “Should we try?” Mariah asked, eyes pleading with Rory to say yes.

  “I don’t see why not,” Rory repeated, giving the girl an approving wink.

  “Awesome!”

  Days began to pass in a blur; at least for Rory, they did. Aside from minor things he had to handle throughout the day -such as continuing the work of ensuring that the secondary and tertiary walls were fully inscribed before the next Siege Wave- his time was mostly spent working with Mariah. They spent days tossing random ingredients together, boiling the hell out of them, and jotting down notes about what happened. Realizing they were starting to get too focused, they pulled back a step, first by documenting any potential alchemical ingredients and their properties, then documenting properties when boiled, and then attempting mixtures together.

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  Days of largely failure, with no notifications of new skill acquisition to reward their efforts. It wasn’t until nearly two and a half weeks later that Mariah stepped back, flipping through pages of notes as she tapped a pencil against her cheek.

  “I think I see a trend.”

  “You do?” Rory said, raising an eyebrow at the girl. Rory was reasonably positive he did as well, but the primary purpose was for Mariah and himself to develop the skill, not for Rory to do all the heavy lifting and leave the girl as little more than a bystander.

  “The solvent. We’ve been overlooking it.”

  Rory smiled, Mariah on the same track as he was. “Go on.”

  “At first, I thought the reason some ingredients seemed to react or not had to do with the ingredients themselves, but what if it's more than that? Let's call them ‘givers’ and ‘taker’ ingredients. I don’t know which is which, but for the sake of argument-”

  “It’s fine; you don’t need to overexplain; I’m following.” Rory stopped the girl before she could attempt to overexplain something Rory was reasonably confident he already had picked up on.

  The benefit of way higher Cognition.

  “Alright, well, the idea of a giver and a taker is that when paired, they ‘zero’ out, and it's that ‘zeroing’ out that causes some ingredients to react when mixed and boiled with the aisormba. Yet, if you pair two ‘takers’ or two ‘givers,’ you get nothing, even if individually they had specific properties that would suggest they should behave a certain way. As I was thinking about it, I thought that maybe the issue is that aisormba is an ‘equal’ base; it's neither a giver nor a taker. You take a giver, a taker, and an equal base, and you’d have net zero. So, what if we took two givers and paired it with a taker base?”

  “Acid, base, and neutrals,” Rory murmured, flashbacks to high school and college chemistry classes.

  “I don’t know what those mean,” Mariah said with a scrunched face.

  “Ehh, let's try a different term then,” Rory said. “Anionic and Cationic.”

  “I still don’t know what those mean.”

  “Positive and negative, just in fancy terms.”

  “I’m not sure of the point of the fancy names.”

  “To confuse people,” Rory said with a snort, reminded of the many nights he’d spent lost in terminology in his textbooks. “It’s half the fun when you’re on this side of things.”

  Mariah looked at him weirdly but didn’t seem inclined to argue the point.

  “So, we can text different anionic and cationic ingredients and dissolve or boil them in liquids of different types.”

  “So, aisormba is a neutral, and what else?”

  “We won’t know until we test-” Rory began, fingers drumming on his thigh. “But I propose we try using Liquid Fire and Running Ice as two other solvents and see how they behave.”

  Liquid Fire and Running Ice weren’t literal in their naming convention -Rory hadn’t been the one to name them either, as on discovery, he’d found they’d already had names- but they weren’t entirely inaccurate. Liquid Fire was an orange fluid that burnt like melting plastic and smelled, oddly enough, like bananas, and it was found only in spots where lightning had recently struck. Rory didn’t have much of the stuff, but he had a few corked bottles in storage. Running Ice was far easier to get their hands on; dig deep enough and, by straining the soil, you’d end up with a coffee-colored liquid that would turn arctic blue when the light struck it exactly right, and in doing so, the liquid would instantly drop to temperatures that felt colder then nitrogen.

  Maybe that’s hyperbolic, but the sentiment stands.

  Rory hadn’t figured much out about the liquids, so he'd bottled and stored the stuff, not wanting to mess around with something he was almost entirely clueless regarding, not when he hadn’t come up with clever ideas to test the liquids.

  Now, though, was the time for experimentation.

  “Have you shown them to me before?” Mariah asked, looking lost.

  “No, but Irene has got a pretty thorough catalog going. She’s left a notebook with all that stuff in storage so you can find them pretty easily, not like they’re hard to miss.”

  That said, Rory was reasonably optimistic that would soon change. Their shed was on the verge of exploding with everything stored, gathering far more than they used now. He was sure he’d have to make a proper storage ‘warehouse’ at some point, but he’d been putting it off as a low priority. Ironically, to circumvent the exploding resource collection, he’d begun to feed more and more materials into the Stellar Heart simply so they wouldn’t run out of room.

  “Should I go fetch them now?”

  “Do you have something else to be doing?”

  Rolling her eyes at Rory, the girl jogged off, leaving Rory a few minutes to examine the ‘camp,’ though calling it a camp was starting to do a disservice. Having the benefits of the Sovereign System, renovations were far easier and faster to do than ever before, anything dismantled could be reabsorbed by the camp at eighty-percent efficiency, and then used as either Fabricate Material or as a means of jumpstarting a few ascensions for whatever was built in its place.

  Taking advantage of that, he’d once more torn out the camp's flooring, switching to a material he’d called ‘Night Cobble. ' It was ground stone and obsidian that had then been infused with Stellar aspect Pneuma—something that had come far easier since he’d adopted the Star World perk for their settlement—before being flash-fired in a rather mundane-looking kiln. The main ‘road,’ though there was only one, was made of the Night Cobble, and even the flooring within the forge, their storage shed, and the Runic facility had been converted into the material, cobblestone that looked like it had the nightscape captured within.

  Then there was the ‘Runic Facility.’ Starting as nothing more than the settlement’s permanent bound circle, Rory had erected several arching walls around the bound circle before adding a slanted terracotta roof. Connected to the settlement’s energy grid, even the untiered kids could use the circle if needed; the only thing they couldn’t do was aspect any Pneuma with an affinity.

  This was where Rory concocted the next part of the Runic Facility, adding several large, albeit rudimentary, crystals near the circle. Each was surrounded by four concentric rings of runic inscriptions that would slowly fill the crystals with Pneuma of varying aspects. He’d settled upon six to start. Wood, Earth, Fire, Liquid, Wind, and Stellar. The three fastest replenishing were Wood and Earth, unsurprisingly, given they were in the middle of a jungle, but Stellar was the third fastest. Once more, Rory chalked it up to the benefit of the Star Land Perk.

  The one Pneumic affinity Rory didn’t bother with was blood affinity, wanting to withhold spreading knowledge of the affinity lest it prompt emotionally immature teenagers to get any bright ideas, whatever they may be.

  With the aid of the Runic Facility, Rory could offload quite a bit of ‘busy work’ as chores to the children while he worked on other things. Free of taking care of so much busy work, Rory had instead been able to focus his time on constructing scaffolding around the secondary and tertiary walls surrounding their camp. As soon as he was done with their inscription work, he planned to fill them in utilizing the Fabricate Material that they had available.

  The joys of free manual labor.

  There were a few other signs of things changing around the camp; the moss and clovers underfoot were beginning to slowly change into a dark purple shade with speckles of midnight black and red stems. Time would only tell how much more drastically things would change, but it was then that Mariah returned with two bottles, one filled with Running Ice and the other with Liquid Fire.

  “Found them,” Mariah said, slightly out of breath.

  “Wonderful,” Rory said, clapping his hands together once before rubbing them vigorously. “It’s time to get testing.”

  Several things happened over the next three weeks.

  First, Rory lost his bet, as Mariah reached tier one a week after the one-month cut-off he’d called for in his and Apostolos’s bet.

  Second, their experiments with Anionic and Cationic alchemical ingredients were paying off. They labeled Liquid Fire as Cationic, whereas Running Ice was classified as Anionic. Placing a bloodwood bark slab inside Aisormba or Liquid Fire did nothing interesting. When placed inside Running Ice, the bloodwood appeared to react, seemingly breaking apart like ice splintering and cracking within warmer water.

  Through that process, they soon had a proper classification for varying ingredients as either Anionic or Cationic based on how they reacted to Liquid Fire or Running Ice.

  Having done that, they began to attempt full-on mixtures, tossing one or more cationic or anionic ingredients into their opposing ‘charged’ solvent.

  Third, though most were total failures, they began to see results, reactions that bubbled and fizzled and then appeared like sludge.

  But nothing was ever a true failure. With each attempt, they began to narrow in on the missing puzzle piece.

  Harmony.

  It wasn’t simply enough for a solution to ‘zero out’; it also had to have a certain amount of harmony. If you were trying to make a healing potion in a video game, you’d use ingredients relating to health or health-related properties.

  Thus, their catalog of ingredients expanded, no longer just tags of ‘anionic’ or ‘cationic’ next to a listed potential alchemical ingredient, but also tags relating to ‘concepts’ that something could potentially relate with.

  Fourth, with the rules of ‘charge’ and ‘concept’ ironed out, they next tested ‘ingredient types.’ That itself was reasonably easy; things were either Physical Cores, the primary source of a mix’s concept, or physical Subsidiaries, the secondary source of a mix's concept and the ‘direction’ of a mix. There were also the Botanical Cores, an organic ingredient such as an herb that, like the physical core, represented the concept of a mix, albeit with an organic origin.

  Taking the four lessons they learned over those few weeks and the pertaining observations, the duo began testing more and more mixes until, at last, one quaint afternoon, they found themselves staring down at a steel-colored solution.

  Brew of Steel Skin

  Tier: Six

  Quality: Tonic

  Effect: Physically hardens the skin of the consumer. Reduced/adverse effects may occur without adequate Flexibility.

  “Did we do it?” Mariah said, her words barely whispered as she examined the mix, the same as Rory.

  “Well, we succeeded in something,” Rory said. The potion, or ‘Brew’ as it was called, was made using Running Ice, a chunk of Enriched Iron, a piece of bread as odd as that was, and finally, a slice of tree flesh from the inner portion of a bloodwood. Enriched Iron had a conceptual nature that leaned toward toughness. So they’d kept the trend going, further mixing in bread, which strangely seemed to lean toward the concept of the body of all things, and finally, bloodwood, which combined the two, toughness and flesh all in one. Each ingredient involved was anionic; thus, the obvious solvent had been Running Ice, which was cationic. Lastly, having added everything together within a nice flask of Running Ice, they’d used the Runic Facility to simmer the mix over an entirely magical flame.

  “When will we know?” Mariah asked.

  “Well, usually it happens right about-” Stopping mid-sentence, Rory smiled as a notification appeared. Opening it, Rory took in the sight of the freshly minted skill.

  Alchemical Chemistry

  Rarity: Uncommon. Skill Level: Low

  Discovering a path walked briefly by another now past; you have given life once more to a dead skill. You may create brews and poisons of varying effects through careful analysis, study, and cataloging. The potency of a brew or poison will be determined by the ingredients involved and your practical skill and understanding of how to best mix a brew or poison.

  “Did you get it, too?” Mariah said, nearly vibrating with energy. “Alchemical Chemistry?”

  “Yes, I did,” Rory said, hiding a hint of a frown. The mention of walking a path of one ‘now past’ gave him a bad feeling.

  “Can you share what your skill says with me?” Rory said, curious.

  “Yeah. How do I do that again?”

  “Just imagine yourself sharing it with me and flick it over here. That’s how I usually do it.”

  Doing precisely as Rory said, Mariah proceeded to flick over her interface as Rory instantly noted the difference between their versions of the same skill.

  Alchemical Chemistry

  Rarity: Uncommon. Skill Level: Low

  You may create brews and poisons of varying effects through careful analysis, study, and cataloging. The potency of a brew or poison will be determined by the ingredients involved and your practical skill and understanding of how to best mix a brew or poison.

  Weird, Rory thought to himself. The only thing he could think of was that one of the other founders had created alchemy before them, only to die and leave the skill ‘lost,’ as there was none to continue practicing it. Why, specifically, did his skill description seem to hint at such a thing, whereas Mariah’s didn’t? He had only one idea: Eon was more willing to share such implications with him as he was also a founder.

  Ehh, oh well. Doesn’t matter to me. If one of the others died, that means they weren’t cut out for it or just had terrible luck. Either way, there is less competition.

  Callous? Perhaps, but when others had been having mental breakdowns facing the end of their old universe, Rory had been the sort of person to brush it aside as he enjoyed a rather lovely day, all things considered.

  Ready to brush the thoughts aside, Rory paused once more as a second notification appeared unexpectedly.

  Odd.

  Given his curious nature, Rory waited only a moment to open it. Within seconds, his eyebrow inched nearly the entirety of the way up his face, surprised at what he was seeing.

  “Is something wrong?” Mariah said, having seen his expression change.

  “No, not at all,” Rory said. “It’s just that we may have only uncovered half of what alchemy offers.”

  “Why is that?” Mariah asked.

  “Because of this,”

  Flicking his interface over to the younger girl, Rory watched her expression change, slowly darkening into an annoyed scowl.

  “Well, that’s not fair. Why didn’t I get that as well?”

  “I think it has to do with things I’ve done in the past, retroactive recognition,” Rory said, doing his best not to chuckle at how crossed the girl looked.

  I made the right call, letting her pitch ideas during the rediscovery of Alchemy. Because, dear god, I think she’d be ready to pop if, for our efforts, I received two skills and she received none, having only been recognized as minor assistance.

  Sure, he could have taught her the Alchemy skills afterward, even if she didn’t receive the skill upon the initial brew success, but with teenage girls, it was sometimes easier not to have to deal with the fallout of something like a perceived slight.

  Now, what exactly was this about a second skill?

  Glancing again at the second display he’d received, Rory exhaled, holding back an amused snort.

  Alchemical Transmutation

  Rarity: Rare. Skill Level: Low

  The rarer sister-skill to Alchemical Chemistry, Alchemical Transmution focuses on altering and converting through esoteric and essence molding methods, resulting in artificial materials and subjects.

  Prerequisite Skill(s): Alchemical Chemistry

  “I still don’t think it’s fair,” Mariah mumbled as Rory glanced at her with a gleam in his eyes.

  “Well, they’ve got a phrase for when things feel unfair,” Rory said, nodding sagely.

  “They do?” Mariah asked, eyes hopeful.

  “Yeah, it goes something like this.” Rory took a deep breath as if preparing to launch into a long-winded speech, barely suppressing his smile.

  “It sucks to suck.”

  God, I’m hilarious.