Chapter 12: Chapter 12: The Alchemist Apprentice

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Alchemist Apprentice

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Yup, you guessed it. I died. No, I’m not joking around. I burned up from the inside out thanks to the overwhelming power of the trinket I’d picked up without preparing to attune to its enchantment. It’s what usually happened when one attempts to read a grimoire that wasn’t exactly meant for them. And yes, it did call to me, but that didn’t mean the Elemental King of Fire’s symbol of power picked me right out of the gate. It tested me, and I failed the test spectacularly.  

As for Liara, I could only imagine what sort of frigid doom befell her, but the she-elf’s screams of pain hounded me past my death. Darkness took me, and I strayed from thought and time. No afterlife. Just inky blackness and the stars wheeling overhead while the pang of guilt I felt at Liara’s death made my temporary stay in the void feel even longer than usual. Death’s hold eventually weakened though, and I felt life in me again.

“Liara~~a!”

I woke up inside my room in the tower screaming in remembered pain.

“You’re having a nightmare again, aren’t you?” asked a voice that was like honey being poured into my ears.

I turned my head to the door and found her leaning against the doorframe. She looked okay. No sheet of frost coating her body or frozen tears marking a frightened face that knew its death was coming.

“Y-yeah…”

I looked away in embarrassment.

It wasn’t always like this, but some deaths stuck with me long after I experienced them. Not just because of their extremely violent endings, but mostly because I’d dragged someone to their graves with me.

Luckily for Liara, she would never have to know about how she’d just died. And, with Extra Life’s experience giving me newfound wisdom, she would never have to die that way again. It was a promise I engraved in my soul when I got up from my bed on shaky legs.

“Must have been a terrible dream,” Liara noted.

“Just the usual dragons eating me whole and demons enslaving my soul kind of nightmare,” I shrugged.

I noticed the smirk on Liara’s face.

“What?”

I didn’t mean to sound annoyed, but the aftereffects of my recent death still clung to me and made me slightly more irritable than usual.

“You called out my name,” she pointed out.

“Really?” I feigned ignorance while I put on my blue aviator jacket. “Didn’t notice…”

“Uhuh…”

Her smirk was growing.

“Look, you wanna keep giving me sass, or do you want me to show you what’s next on our chain of power-up quests?”

With a knowing, teasing look, Liara said, “Sure. Lead the way.”

My mood got considerably better after breakfast. A plate of mouthwatering bacon, a perfectly fluffy cheese omelet, and a glass of apple juice had remarkable curative effects for people who’d just experienced death.

“That’s the right stuff.” I leaned against my chair feeling immensely satisfied. “Sprite chefs are the best.”

“Are you done stuffing your face, or would you like a second helping of food that’ll make you too fat for future adventures?” Liara asked.

She’d barely touched her dryad’s salad, which I couldn’t blame her for. Ugh, rabbit food.

“Cool your unicorns… it’s going to be a long day of raiding,” I countered.

Our second chance to raid the secrets of the Academy’s Great Library started pretty much the same way with Liara explaining its interiors to me while we hung outside its front doors. Our experiences inside the library turned out a little differently though.

Yes, the first stack was still filled with red cloaks. Although there was a minor aberration during this run too. A blue cloak I’d never met before—a tall elf with long, pale blonde hair and a pretty boy face like one might find on the cover of a Realmsflix poster—was sitting in the middle of a gathering of red cloaks who were all engrossed in whatever it was the elf was discussing with them. Some of these red cloaks were even laughing as if he’d just told them a funny joke.

Liara stiffened at my side as soon as she noticed this new aberration to the timeline though.

“What’s he doing back on campus so soon?” she asked under her breath.

The elf’s pointy ears perked up, and he stopped speaking as his gaze drifted to the first stack’s entrance where we were. Pale gray eyes like Liara’s widened at the sight of her.

“You know that dude?” I asked.

“Not really,” she replied icily.

The elf waved to her, but Liara ignored him. She chose instead to grab my arm and drag me toward the arched hallway leading up to the second stack while the female red cloaks surrounding the pretty boy elf sent icy glares at Liara’s back.

“Wait, hold on”—I gently pulled her hand off me—“I’ll be right back…”

Liara looked uncomfortable but she didn’t stop me. “Hurry it up, Wisdom.”

I skirted the encirclement of red cloaks—with many of them whispering something crude they meant for me to hear—and then found Dess where I’d first met her near the back end of the first stack. She was just about to pull on the book that would send the entire collection of martial arts manuals on that burgeoned bookshelf crashing down on her when I yelled, “Wait!”

Dess glanced over her shoulder. “Y-yeah?”

“You pull on that book and you’ll bring them all down on us,” I explained. “Here—”

I reached up to her shelf and held the other books in the row together with my hands while prompting Dess to pull out the book she wanted. Thanks to my support, the martial arts manuals didn’t fall and cause a mess on the floor, which meant Dess was free from getting reprimanded by the first stack’s librarian, something I had felt kind of guilty for when I’d left her alone to deal with it during my last life.  

“Shield Tactics for Dummies,” I read out loud, causing Dess’s face to flush with embarrassment.

“It’s not for me… My friend—”

“Shieldmaiden’s a tough specialization to train for.” I cut her off as gently as I could while also pulling out the book that I’d given her in the previous run. “Here, your ‘friend’ might find this useful too.”

I shoved Lagertha, The Last Shieldmaiden into Dess’s hands, earning myself the same skeptic gaze she’d given me the first time we did this. As before, I gave her a quick explanation of its merits and secured myself some brownie points with the teenage fairy that I hoped would translate into future favors.  

With my good deed for the day accomplished, I made my way back to Liara while pretending that I didn’t see the pretty boy elf give me a curious look. Somehow, I felt like getting entangled with him might be a bad idea. And no, I wasn’t being racist even though I had cause to be wary of bright elves. It was the way Liara reacted to seeing him that made me decide to follow her lead.

Anyway, we moved on to the second stack where we followed Divah’s Peter Pan clues and found ourselves in the special section once more. I wowed Mistress Grimsever like I had the first time, retrieved the Lesser Key of Solomon lickety-split, and then repeated the steps that led me and Liara back into the Academy’s Vault of Glass.

In this run, however, I made sure to let Liara know of the trap that would have set off her gold fever. This forewarning allowed us to pass by the many treasures of the vault without incident. Although that ‘Sword of Damocles’ was pretty insistent in its attempts to catch Liara’s attention much like a certain elven aberration tried to do earlier.

We didn’t go directly to the dais of the elemental kings like before though. Instead, I led Liara to a row of shelves that carried goodies that weren’t grimoires but were no less as priceless as the repository of relics the Academy’s custodians had left behind for us to plunder.

“They store materials in the Vault of Glass?” Liara asked curiously.

“These aren’t just your run-of-the-mill mats.” I plucked a glass case from the shelf in front of us and showed it to her. “Do you know what this is?”

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The item inside of the glass case was a flower as pretty as a blooming rose, but its blue petals glowed with the tell-tale signs of magic.

“It’s elf’s foil…” Liara’s brow creased the longer she inspected the flower. “But it’s been strengthened somehow… filled with more magical energy than a common elf’s foil would have.”

“This is a royal elf’s foil,” I revealed. “Elf’s foil only grows where elven blood is spilled, and a royal elf’s foil is a flower that stays in the earth hundreds of years longer than the common version, allowing it to soak up more of the latent magic dead elves leave behind.”

I opened the case and took out the flower, prompting Liara to grab my forearm in alarm.

“Didn’t you say we could only get one or two items from this place?” She couldn’t help glancing left and then right as if reminding me of the many treasures stored in this vault. “Are you sure this flower’s what you want?”

“I meant that for the grimoires.” I gently shrugged her off and then pulled out another item from the shelf. “These mats are fair game… they’re meant to be used.”

Liara raised a skeptical eyebrow at me. “What do you mean?”

I stifled the shiver that came when I recalled the moment we’d died in this vault while reminding myself that it wasn’t going to happen again. “…The grimoires we want are special, and we’ll need to prepare our bodies first before we can attune to them. And these herbs and spices are here to help people do just that.”

The next item I plucked from the shelf was another rare ingredient. It was purple dust that glittered inside its pouch like a sea of sparkling stars.

“This is pixie dust,” Liara deduced. Then she punched me in the shoulder suddenly. “Pixie dust’s a hallucinogenic—it’s a party drug!”

“That’s just how you party animals at the tower use it,” I chuckled. “Pixie dust—especially the high-grade ones in this pouch—well, it’s used for something more serious than getting shit-faced and high… it’s a damn-good catalyst for combining strong ingredients.

The final ingredient I acquired was a tiny vial of ‘Hallowed Tears’ harvested from the waterworks of a living saint. I assumed that the saint in question was long dead, but that didn’t mean their tears had lost their power.

“Okay, now comes the fun stuff.” I pulled out Divah’s journal and reread the instructions for the attunement ritual she’d written down for me. “Combine the three ingredients in a sanctified bowl of rosewood—”

I glanced back at the shelf and zoned in on the tools I would need for this.

“Grab that wooden bowl for me, will you,” I asked Liara. “And don’t forget that ‘Ever-Heating Jug of Spring Water’ on the shelf above it, too.”

“Anything else?” she sounded a bit annoyed.

“Nope. That’s about it.”

“Isn’t it strange that all these materials are readily available to us?”

“Well, these mats are necessary to attuning with any one of the grimoires found here so~~o not really.”

“Same rules as the special section then?”

“Exactly.”

Once we’d gathered everything, I set them all on the floor and began to bring these dissimilar materials together with the power of alchemy. If it wasn’t obvious yet then now was the time to reveal that besides being a kickass all-rounder, I was also a budding alchemist. Groovy.

Remember, the chant is just as important as the ingredient if one wishes to create an attunement spell of expedience.

Per the journal’s instructions, I poured water from the Ever-heating Jug of Spring Water—this cool-looking thermos made entirely of something that looked like molten obsidian but was cool to the touch—into the sanctified bowl of rosewood while reciting the incantation Divah had written down for me. “Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and wooden bowl bubble…”

The water inside the bowl instantly turned from hot cocoa levels to boiling temperature heights.

“The flower born from an elf’s mistake”—I crushed the glowing petals of the royal elf’s foil in my hands and dropped them into the water—“in the bowl to boil and bake…”

Then I sprinkled pixie dust into the bowl in a clockwise rotation.

“Enhance with the power of groovy dust, to wish for a body made robust.” I chanted.

I picked up the tiny vial next.

“Finish this tincture with hallowed tears”—I poured two drops of the old saint’s tears into the bowl to represent the two idiots who were preparing to take on insane-level risks for the allure of power—“and banish away all doubts and fears.”

“Form a charm of powerful muscle”—Finally, I formed a ‘valknut’ over the sanctified bowl of rosewood; triple-linked triangles that reflected the connection between earth, heaven, and the underworld and then brought them together in harmony—“like a Viking’s mead of fun and trouble.”

With the assistance of the valknut, the water in the bowl turned from its colors of blue and purple swirls into a mixture that glowed like a deep blue sea reflecting the pale light of a full moon.

“Double, double toil and trouble”—Liara joined me in chanting these final lines—“our mana burn and our magic rumble!”

The valknut winked out as the liquid inside the bowl began to cool. A sweet, sugary aroma wafted out of it, which Divah’s journal claimed was how you knew you’d concocted the potion the right way.

“That was…” Liara’s eyes were glittering at me. “It was…”

“Incredible?” I supplied. “Amazing—stupendous—uncanny—out of this world?”

Honestly, a normal-grade potion like an attunement draft wasn’t anything special to me as I’d witnessed Divah concoct excellent-grade, life-saving elixirs before. But, a novice like Liara who probably didn’t have as much experience with alchemy as I did certainly would have found this moment an achievement worth feeling excited about. Well, I guess the caveboy in me was a little thrilled that she was excited.

“Don’t push it, Wisdom.” Liara’s elation deflated just like that. “So, what’s next?”

“Now we get naked,” I grinned.

Okay, okay, I know how that just sounded. But absorbing magical energy through the skin was an efficient method of cultivation, and stripping down to our undies to expose more skin was the quickest way to go about things.

Anyway, after I suffered through Liara’s look of disdain, I led her back to the dais where we’d both met our ends in the previous run of my crazy life.

“Okay, do as I do…” I stripped to my undies without looking at her because even I felt embarrassed about showing off too much of my skinny teenage body to the pretty elf maiden. Once that was done, I took a long swig of the potion we’d made, and then offered it to Liara. “Remember our time inside the fairy pool?”

“Yes,” she said as she took the bowl from me. “You want us to absorb and attune to the magical energy leaking out of those grimoires, right?”

Dwalinn did call her a wunderkind so she was pretty quick on the uptake.

“Yeah…” I glanced her way and noticed that she’d also dressed down for the occasion. “Ahem… we’ll begin the attunement process once we’ve gotten close enough to them.”

“Alright.” Liara slapped me in the small of my back, causing me to stiffen unexpectedly. “Lead the way.”

Her smile—that playful, mischievous look she gave me then—was the very thing that tethered me and kept me sane throughout the rest of the painful attunement process. Yep, it was unimaginable pain all over again because that’s what you get when you try to absorb the raw magic of the Elemental King of Fire into yourself—pain like washing your insides with lava over and over again.

Divah’s journal was little help here as the wisdom she left for me was distilled into a single word; Endure.

Still, just like that time within the fairy well, this torture was a feat of mind over matter. And, eventually, as my body gradually attuned to the elemental energy I absorbed from the grimoire on the pedestal before me, the searing pain in my insides cooled into a tolerant warmth that made me stop wishing for another quick death. 

I didn’t know how Liara was doing either. I couldn’t bear to look and see that pained expression on her face for a second time. She didn’t cry out though. She seemed to be enduring as I did, and I knew we would both be stronger for it.

Later—much, much later than I anticipated—that feverish feeling finally went away. I opened my eyes and reached out for the pendant nestled on the pedestal. It was an orange gemstone shaped to resemble a fireball. A soft, golden glow emanated from it, bringing heat and warmth to my palms.

A chime from my status bar drew my attention to my pile of clothes beneath the dais and the blue screen resting on top with its notification that was easy enough to read from where I stood.

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