Yoh-jung's Liquor (1)
A day had passed.
Roy had not noticed it while he was constantly on the move, but the moment he lay down on the bed, exhaustion claimed him completely. He fell asleep at once and enjoyed a deep, restful sleep for the first time in a long while.
If it had been up to him, he would have skipped rest and sleep entirely. He wanted to learn the method for brewing that miraculous elixir—whether it was truly liquor or a breath of something greater—right that very moment.
But the witch had insisted it was impossible for the time being and put him off until the next day. Waiting was the only option left to him.
"I need time to prepare as well. There's no need to rush, little one. You passed the trial far sooner than I expected, so I simply wasn't ready yet. Be patient."
"Couldn't I help with the preparations?"
"Little one. Women dislike men who are too persistent. Remember that well."
"..."
When the person holding the key said no, what choice did he have?
Roy clenched his jaw and forced himself to wait for the next morning to come.
At last. Today's the day.
The boy woke to a sweet fragrance teasing the tip of his nose and rose from his bed.
The actual brewing only began after a simple breakfast and a leisurely cup of tea afterward.
"We're starting now, so both of you go wash your hands. Thoroughly."
It was a secretive chamber that could just as easily have been called the witch's laboratory or her research room. On one side, a large fireplace stood much like a kitchen hearth, complete with a setup for placing a pot above it to boil water. Nothing had been specially prepared for today; the room simply seemed to have been built that way from the beginning.
"Focus! From this moment on, if either of you lets your mind wander, I'll throw you out of here. Do not look away for even a second."
And so the witch's special private lesson began.
Ilia first taught them how to process the ingredients Roy had brought—methods that preserved the mana the materials naturally held without damaging it.
"We'll crush the Supple flower petals to extract their juice. Slice the Ide root thinly and double-boil it so only the essence comes out. The fairy fruit needs no processing at all. Eating it as is already restores mana, but when used properly it becomes the finest seasoning there is. Without this fruit, the liquor will never become true liquor. Have you both memorized everything so far?"
Lily's eyes sparkled as she nodded.
She was the sort of child who, once she actually concentrated, grasped content faster than anyone else—even if she normally lacked the will to try. And the one who stirred that concentration and will in her was the young boy listening right beside her: Roy Greenhilt.
"How long can these be stored? What's the difference between when they're still living and after processing? Did you settle on these exact amounts because it's a fixed recipe? Do the taste and effects change with different quantities? Is mass production difficult?"
Unlike Lily, Roy's mouth never rested. Explain one thing and ten questions came flying back.
At first it was admirable. As time passed, even the witch herself found her head filling with quiet chaos: Why didn't I ever think of that? He's right—why didn't I compare them? Oh, just stop asking already, you little brat!
Still, from Ilia's perspective, she had achieved one clear goal.
Her only blood relative, Lily Eastwood.
The scattered, distracted attitude that had persisted through every lesson until now had, in this moment, flipped one hundred and eighty degrees.
Lily...
Lily had never been the type to boast that she was the greatest child in the world, yet every so often she would sneak a look at the children in the nearby village and come back asking, "Why are the village kids so stupid? They don't know any magic at all." Because of that, ordinary children born in a small rural village could never become Lily's friends.
But that was fine. What did it matter if she had no friends? Ilia could simply fill that role herself.
Ilia stayed home all day and kept Lily company. She taught her magic and countless other things she had seen and experienced over long years. Lily, drawing on her natural talent, absorbed the knowledge with what looked like pure enjoyment.
Watching her child grow day by day was something that filled even Ilia—who had lived more than two hundred years—with overwhelming pride.
She had believed those days would simply continue forever.
Then one day Lily rummaged through Ilia's study and found a strange book: a volume interpreting ancient magic. It contained methods for summoning spirits and forming contracts, along with the summoning rites for several ancient spirits.
Without permission, Lily used the spells and summoned a black wolf behind Ilia's back. She even formed a contract with it on her own.
An elf, called a spirit of the forest, forming a contract with a spirit of shadow of all things...
Ilia herself could never form a contract with shadow spirits or any of the "dark" lineage. She was an elf, not a human. But Lily was a half-blood. With human blood mixed in her veins, she faced no such restriction.
That day Ilia scolded her daughter severely for the first time. Rage, disappointment, sorrow, despair—every emotion crashed through her at once. The sense of betrayal was beyond words, equal in intensity to the joy she had once felt looking at the daughter who so closely resembled her, the world's only remaining elf.
That day, for the first time, Ilia recognized that she and her daughter were entirely different beings.
It was probably from that moment that Lily's attitude during lessons grew so terribly scattered.
Ilia watched her daughter staring at the boy named Roy as if he were some fascinating new creature.
If Cliv had given permission the other day, I was thinking of giving her a younger sibling... a little regrettable, but it may not matter. A half-sibling is still a sibling. And it seems a subtle sense of rivalry has already formed between them.
Who would have imagined that the child the baron brought would change her daughter so completely in a mere three days?
Ilia felt a faint bitterness and loneliness. Yet she was certain it was a good thing for Lily. This would surely become the catalyst for the girl to grow even further.
"Finally, there's no need to cut the unicorn horn. You can use it just as it is."
"This is a unicorn's horn, but the scroll said a unicorn's horn is the highest grade. Is there any difference when using horns from other single-horned beasts?"
"You'll understand that naturally once you see the next step, so don't get ahead of yourself."
"Aha! Yes, ma'am!"
Up to this point the process held little excitement for Roy. The witch never gave him any particularly special answers to his questions. The processing methods for the materials differed slightly from what he already knew, but nothing was surprising enough to astonish him.
In his previous life Roy had handled far more numerous and varied materials—ones that were a nightmare to process, byproducts of vicious monsters where even gathering them meant risking one's life, finicky ingredients that turned every other component into garbage with a single mistake, and precious ones thousands of times more expensive than gold of the same weight. Compared to those, the witch's methods were so ordinary he almost wanted to yawn.
Oh?
What finally caught Roy's interest was everything that came after.
"Do you know what this is?"
"It's a mana solution."
The quality's better than I expected. Mid-grade at least.
"My, my. You've seen this before?"
When Roy answered so casually, Ilia looked thoroughly surprised.
"...Yes. Is that strange? It's a common ingredient used when making potions."
Mana solution was primarily used in potion crafting. He did not know how many existed across the continent now, but any alchemist—or any eccentric mage people called a witch, like the woman standing before him—would know how to make it. Of course, those capable of producing anything a grade higher than this were probably vanishingly rare.
Still, potions were openly sold on the market, so any proper mage should not find mana solution particularly unfamiliar. Yet Ilia was greatly astonished, and that in itself piqued Roy's curiosity.
"Of course it's surprising. Unless your master is a witch, where would a child like you have seen something like this?"
"He's not a witch, but he can craft enchanted weapons. My master, I mean. I've seen him use it often."
"Hmm... I've heard the rumors, but is he truly that impressive? I'd like to meet him sometime..."
"I can make it myself as well. Is that really such a big deal?"
"Do you know how expensive potions are? If they were simple to make, they wouldn't cost so much."
"Is that so?"
Roy wondered whether the witch was using mid-grade quality as her baseline for mana solution. Certainly, producing mid-grade required a steady supply of mana stones and monster blood for materials, which was no easy feat. If he had not recovered a large quantity of mana stones from the ogre's blood and organs four years earlier, even Roy would have struggled to make mid-grade mana solution.
"A mere eleven-year-old can make mana solution? Your master must be quite the remarkable fellow."
"Well, yes, he is that kind of person. People try to recruit him from all over..."
Naturally Roy felt as if he himself were the one receiving the praise, not Geren. He had to struggle to keep the corners of his mouth from twitching upward.
"So how exactly is that solution used?"
"You mix it with water and bring it to a hot boil, then put all the processed materials into the pot and stir with the unicorn horn. From here on, we're entering the true realm of magic."
Roy's eyes lit up.
Finally!
In truth, the earlier steps mainly concerned which materials went in and in what amounts. The truly important part began now.
"I'll teach you the incantation from this point."
As I thought—there was a separate spell after all.
The witch handed a scroll to each of them, Roy and Lily. Fresh scrolls she had stayed up writing the previous night. Naturally, what was written on them was a magical incantation.
"...Um, what kind of spell is this?"
"A bit unfamiliar, isn't it? It's been passed down among us witches for generations, so you've never heard these words before. Memorizing it will be quite difficult, but if you try hard enough it isn't impossible. Do your best."
More precisely, it was not a spell of witches but of the Eastwood family—the forest elves. The traditional incantation for brewing Yoh-jung's Liquor, handed down through the generations.
Ilia knew that with her the Eastwood bloodline would end. That was why she had decided not to keep the dying wish her predecessors had left her.
"Ilia. Yoh-jung's Liquor belongs solely to us elves. It must never be stolen by humans or demons. For us elves to survive in this harsh world, you must reveal nothing—nothing at all—about the liquor. Only this liquor can one day bring about the revival of the elves upon this land, our sole remaining hope..."
The elves fell into ruin trying to protect this damned spell. Now I'm the only one left...
If they had simply sold it to the humans for a high price, the elves would never have collapsed so hollowly like this.
Ilia had steeled her resolve long ago. She had waited for a moment exactly like this to arrive.
The moment when she would share every secret of the liquor—forged from the blood of foolish elves—with a human, and finally put an end to the ancient curse that had been repeated countless times.
Lily. Live as a human, not an elf...
If she passed this spell on only to her sole blood relative, Lily, that pitiful child would meet the exact same fate as herself. She would wander endlessly, wounded over and over, lost in despair, and even if she barely clung to life she would have to hide alone in a quiet forest just like Ilia did now.
If that was the destiny waiting for her, then it was better to teach this cursed spell to the family that had quietly honored their contract with her for over a hundred years without greed—the family that had given her the precious gift of a daughter. Cliv Greenhilt.
Yet the baron had told her to teach it not to himself, but to his son.
Ilia understood the reason almost at once.
Talent so brilliant it nearly blinds the eye...
Looking at her daughter and the baron's son as they memorized the incantation, Ilia smiled softly.