Magic (2)
Now that I could use alchemy on my own, I was ecstatic.
It wasn't simply that I no longer needed my sister's help. What truly mattered was that I could practice alchemy however I pleased.
While my sister slept, I threw myself into testing alchemy with reckless abandon.
"The ointment and antidote stocks are growing!"
Maybe it was because I was still relying on tools for the combinations, but the time it took was a bit of a letdown.
The mana I could channel through the tools… or was it Holy Power? The amount of force I could release was limited, which made controlling the timing difficult.
I repeated the combinations again and again, trying to get a feel for releasing power through the tools.
"This is hard."
When morning gave way to noon, I roughly finished off the leftover soup and dove straight back into research.
"Hmm…"
Even after pouring power into combination after combination, I was still fine. I hadn't known how deep my reserves ran, but it seemed I had more than I'd expected.
I was sitting in a chair, resting and sorting through my thoughts, when my sister finally woke up.
"Sleep well?"
"Yeah…"
The hangover seemed to have eased a little. She looked better.
"Unnie, they said I really did gain power!"
She looked mildly surprised, but her face stayed blank.
"Congratulations."
"I don't need your help anymore."
At those words, her expression changed in an instant. I'd expected her to be happy… but her reaction was completely different. Her face went rigid, and it looked like fire was about to shoot from her eyes.
"You don't need my help?"
"Uh, uh?"
I was genuinely flustered. Why that reaction? The look in her eyes was terrifying. My hands and feet felt like they were trembling with fear.
H-how was I supposed to get out of this? While I fretted, words tumbled out without thinking.
"I-I still plan on getting help when we go gathering."
Not needing help only applied to the actual combining. When we went gathering, I still needed someone to keep watch, so having my sister along was better. Hearing that, she seemed to relax, and her expression softened.
"Okay."
When I told her I was going to finish my alchemy experiments, she packed her things.
"Heading home?"
"Yeah."
Well, it wasn't as if having her stay at my place was a real problem… but it did mean I had to be more careful about how I carried myself, which was a hassle.
"See you tomorrow, then."
She gave a small wave of her hand in farewell and left. Even after she was gone, I kept combining.
And I realized something.
"Ratios…"
Until now I'd been combining by pure guesswork, but success or failure was determined by the proportions of the materials. Of course, you didn't have to hit the ratios exactly — a slight deviation was fine.
When the proportions went wildly off, the combination failed and produced nothing but waste.
"The ratios probably differ depending on the materials…"
In the novels I'd read in my previous life, there was something called appraisal that let you check an item's effects and condition. But the world I lived in now didn't have that kind of magic yet.
That part was truly frustrating. I had no way of knowing how dangerous a finished product might be, or what effects it held and how strong they were…
"If I could just figure out the effects easily, I'd try all sorts of things…"
Even if I dumped materials in at random and somehow succeeded, I still wouldn't know what the resulting object actually did. And since it might turn out dangerous, I couldn't just combine carelessly. Create an appraisal spell…?
But I barely knew anything about magic. Could I really invent something that advanced?
"No chance."
I cleaned up the combination tools. I'd combined enough for today; for the next few days I planned to dig into theory. I pulled out the alchemy book and read through it again, hunting for anything I'd missed or any other hints.
"This is hard!"
Still, there was a small hint. Honestly, until now I hadn't even had the leisure to think about such things. Since I couldn't use alchemy myself, I'd stuck to the recipes in the book and only tried minor variations.
But that was no longer the case. Now that I could combine on my own, I could take on all kinds of challenges with the mindset that failure was fine.
And the hint I'd just found was important. It was about the attributes of materials.
"So material attributes matter in combinations…"
The book divided them into five attributes: Fire, Water, Earth, Wind, and Void.
It was a little different from the Five Elements, but it defined a devouring relationship of Fire > Water > Earth > Wind. Mixing a Wind-attribute material into a Fire-attribute one apparently strengthened the Fire material's efficacy or performance.
"Come to think of it, the ointment and the poison worked similarly…"
Herbs and poisonous plants were Earth-attribute, so if you added too much water during combination, the Earth materials would have their power siphoned off strengthening the Water-attribute material — the water itself — and the combination would fail.
There was a reason I hadn't paid attention even after reading that. Right — the biggest problem with this whole attribute business was that I had no reliable way to identify a material's attribute.
"I'd just been roughly adjusting the material ratios…"
With no way to know the attributes, I'd simply glossed over it. If I could properly understand and handle these profound attribute relationships, it would help with adjusting ratios and creating new recipes.
"This is tough."
Even so, alchemy — which had felt hopelessly distant — now showed a glimmer of hope.
I was going to need a way to identify material attributes, weren't I?
"Releasing power is one thing, but magic… I should learn it, right?"
Surely there was a spell for that sort of thing. The magic-related books I'd seen at the used bookstore had mentioned attributes too. So there had to be a method for identifying them. The problem was that this village had neither a bookstore nor a mage.
In other words, learning magic meant going to a city… and I didn't even have the money to buy a spellbook.
Hmm… disappointing, but maybe I should set this problem aside for now?
One week after awakening my Holy Power, I finally learned how to release it outward. The staff magic tool had been a tremendous help.
Fine control was still beyond me, but it was something.
Thanks to that, I could slam Holy Power in and adjust combination times to some degree. I handed the extra antidotes and poisons over to the Vigilance Corps, and distributed the ointment among the villagers.
Whether the things I'd given out had proven useful or not, the villagers thanked me and offered pickled meat, fruit, and vegetables in return. My table had grown considerably more plentiful.
And today, as always, my sister showed up at my house first thing in the morning.
"Yuli, gathering again today?"
"Yeah. I want to go a bit deeper this time."
I'd decided to wrap up the herb-, poison plant-, and mushroom-focused gathering and start looking for other materials.
Now that I could keep up with my sister's pace, it no longer took forever just to get to the gathering grounds.
Once we reached the forest, I immediately started scanning the surroundings and preparing to gather…
"I'll keep watch."
My sister took up her post as a matter of course. Thanks to her, I could search for materials with peace of mind.
I collected tree branches and picked up stones that gave off a special feeling. It was time to put some of my previous life's knowledge to use.
"Rocks?"
My sister was watching what I was gathering.
"Yeah. Thought I'd try using them."
Combinations premised on failure… I also scooped up mud from the bottom of a stream and bagged some sand from the ground. As we roamed around diligently, we ran into slimes now and then and took them out.
"A core."
They were used in making magic tools, weren't they? The general store sold them at a decent price.
In games, slimes were trash mobs that showed up at the very beginning, but real-world slimes were far more frightening monsters than I'd expected.
Their bodies were made of acidic substances, so touching them carelessly would leave you with burns, and prolonged contact would melt your flesh right off. The same went for weapons — swinging a weapon at a slime to kill it would damage the weapon. Iron or wood, it didn't matter; everything rusted and fell apart.
They moved sluggishly, so defeating them was easy enough, but the fact that they ruined weapons made them monsters adventurers preferred to avoid.
Of course, if you could use mana, you could coat your weapon with it and protect it… but a strong fighter capable of using mana had no reason to bother hunting slimes.
Still, slime cores were worth a bit of money, so experienced adventurers would use nearby rocks or wood to kill them and sell the cores for a tidy profit.
"I can use these too, right?"
Since they were materials for magic tools, they might turn out to be surprisingly important. There weren't many cores, but I pocketed them for now.
Once we'd roughly finished gathering, we headed back to the village, and I went straight home to start combining.
"I've collected plenty of different kinds of wood, but I've never properly used any of it in a combination."
I cut the branches down to a size that would fit in the pot, added a little water, and got ready.
I'd try combining with just this first, and if it failed, add other materials little by little.
And three hours later…
"Ugh! So this is what failure looks like?"
What came out was wood in a form similar to charcoal. The problem was that it wasn't charcoal…
When I touched it, it crumbled into dust. I tried adjusting the amounts of materials, but the result was the same every time.
Apparently something else was needed.
I tried adding sand. I tried adding more water. Every attempt failed. One combination with sand produced a sticky black jelly-like substance that reeked so badly I had to throw it outside.
"Ugh, I think the smell's still lingering."
I'd aired the place out, but the odor remained.
After repeating the combinations so many times, the branches I'd gathered ran out.
"Last one."
Judging by the attributes, if there was too much water, the Earth-attribute branches probably wouldn't hold up. Water was essential for mixing in mana, so I couldn't remove it. That meant adding another Earth-attribute material would be better, right? I tried combining again by putting in extra branches.
"Same result…"
Even if they shared an attribute, just adding more of the same material didn't work.
So what I thought of next was adding different Earth-attribute materials — leaves or grass.
I couldn't add poison, so I mixed in a few medicinal herbs and tried the combination…
"Light from the pot?"
The materials inside began to blend, then started glowing with rainbow light. Considering that failed combinations produced murky light and smoke, something was clearly combining properly this time.
As I kept injecting Holy Power and stirring the contents, the light grew stronger. This felt like it was working.
I continued pouring in power and mixing the pot's contents until — bang! — the light burst.
"Combination success?!"
Inside the pot was a neat wooden plank. Yes — a wooden plank!
"Wait, what?"
I hadn't processed any wood. And a plank came out? How on earth…?
I soon gave up trying to understand.
That was alchemy for you…
I took out the finished plank. Tapping it to check its strength, I found it was quite sturdy.
"As for the size… hmm."
It seemed proportional to the volume of the branches that had gone into the pot.
In other words, the herbs — or grass? — going in had apparently bound the branches together.
"Alchemy concepts are still hard to wrap my head around."
I recorded the successful recipe in my notebook.
"Does this mean I've created a recipe that isn't in the book…?"
It was a combination method I'd figured out from scratch through careful thought. I felt proud, but honestly, I had no idea what I'd use this plank for.
Building a house? I'd have to run the combination dozens of times. At that point, I might as well just fell trees and build the house the normal way…
Besides, in the cities they mixed stone, clay, and lime to make a kind of concrete for raising walls.
Granted, the plank was sturdier than expected. But that was about it.
"A bit of a shame."
Well, I should leave a record of it anyway. You never knew when it might come in handy.
After putting the tools away, I opened the alchemy book and sank into thought.
"Alchemy, huh…"
Just what was the underlying principle?
My reflections on that… I'd vaguely had a theory already.
When you combined things and poured in mana or Holy Power, the original materials lost their form and took on a new shape. I didn't know the exact mechanism, but I guessed that the power intervening was what made it happen.
And this time, I'd learned a few more things.
Branches becoming a wooden board?
The parts I couldn't understand, I simply accepted as fact. Taking that as given, I defined alchemy in my own way.
It was a power that injected force into materials to either strengthen their effects or transform their form…
The ointment, the poison, the antidote — all of them could be defined that way.
With the ointment, I'd amplified the materials' healing capacity; with the poison, their toxicity; with the antidote, their detoxifying performance.
This wooden plank had simply taken the form of wood itself…
Of course, this was nothing more than my own speculation.
"It's fascinating and difficult at the same time."
Should I try using rocks or sand tomorrow?
It was already late tonight, so I'd sleep and start again tomorrow.