Farming
As I wandered the dim industrial complex, old memories rose to the surface.
They belonged to the days when I still looked at this world as nothing more than a game—the stretch of time after alchemy had been exposed as a trash profession and the number of people still clinging to the class was freefalling by the hour.
Hey, doesn't this scream easter egg?
That line had once been left by a former employee on a workplace community board. A review written by someone who had actually done the job—the pros and cons of the company—set the user community on fire.
Four advantages. Seven disadvantages.
The part that exploded the hardest was the very last entry under the cons.
— Half of them are the type who keep trying to hide stuff inside the game, or detail demons who obsess over every bizarre little thing.
Part of the reason it blew up was just how deliciously nasty that word freaks sounded—but later on, I used that same post as the springboard for a massive discovery of my own.
Even now, the title of the post I wrote comes back to me with perfect clarity.
People who keep trying to bury things inside the game.
Working from that single phrase, I reasoned that the game still had far more undiscovered content than anyone realized—and it wasn't long before my guess was proven completely right.
A hidden event visible only to pure alchemist characters who unified both their main and sub classes as Alchemist and completed every succession and awakening along the way.
The story of that event—titled The Secret History of Hohenheim—was simple enough. It exposed the corruption and decadence of the existing Hohenheim family to the world, then thoroughly cleaned house so that the family could stand proud again as one of the premier alchemical houses.
Up to that point it was ordinary enough. What I went wild for was the ending—and the reward that came with it.
As the story progressed, the Hohenheim family was shaken down like a dusty rug until only Charlotte remained as the sole heir. And if the player's affection with Charlotte was high enough at that moment, the player became the new head of Hohenheim as her live-in son-in-law.
Not that I particularly need the seat now.
The benefits that came with becoming the new head of the Hohenheim family defied imagination. Without the slightest exaggeration, I could explain my entire rise to rank seventy-three among alchemists by saying I had been the head of Hohenheim.
The universal substance that let you transmute anything: the Philosopher's Stone.
The treasure said to hold the truth of every alchemy under the sun: the Azoth Sword.
The tablet completed from the lifelong insights of the first Hohenheim: the Emerald Tablet.
Among the players, those pieces of gear had practically been my trademark. For all the grand descriptions, though, they demanded monstrous levels of mastery and understanding. They were the kind of equipment that endgame obsessives twisted themselves into pretzels to finish the event for, only to end up sticking them in storage with a full-body shudder—mostly out of pure collector's greed.
I don't really need them… but without them, things feel weirdly empty.
Truthfully, the Hohenheim family treasures had zero value to me now. The Philosopher's Stone and the Azoth Sword had already been replaced by Universal Transmutation, and I already knew every line of the Emerald Tablet by heart.
Which is to say: this was not a level any common, run-of-the-mill Hohenheim alchemist could even dream of touching.
"Gyaaah!"
The moment I poured Ether into the ground, a scream tore out of it. The sound came out muffled—because the man had been hiding underground.
I transmuted the earth again, the same earth I had already shaped into hard spikes and driven through every part of his body. The churning soil spat him out like a pond coughing up a corpse, along with the pool of blood that had collected around him.
A Hohenheim alchemist, soaked in his own blood, crawled across the ground and let out a low, pain-choked groan.
"Nice to see that face again. Hello, Mister Mole."
"Y-you… who the hell are you…!"
Even with holes punched all through him and blood pouring out in sheets, the alchemist in front of me still managed to bare his hostility. His hands moved as if scooping dirt, scraping at the ground.
Thud-thud-thud!
The Transmutation Circle etched into the gloves on his hands drank mana and glowed with a soft light. Transmutation kicked in at once, and the dirt floor thrust up toward me in the shape of spikes.
Rock deformation—the exact same effect as the alchemy I had just used.
I snorted at his judgment and used alchemy again. With a dry rattle, the stone spikes reaching for me simply crumbled away.
"How—!"
"Alchemy of that level doesn't work on me."
Whether it was a side effect of Universal Transmutation or something else, I could look at a Transmutation Circle and instantly grasp which alchemical theory it contained. The man's circle was even simpler than I expected.
A circle that rearranged silicon molecules—put more plainly, dirt and rock manipulation. Given the nature of the circle drawn on those gloves, his alchemy had no real use outside of fabricating structures. Even the attack just now had only hardened dirt into rock and shaped it into spikes.
"Looks like I came to the right place after all."
It had been so dark I had half-worried I might have taken a wrong turn, but the existence of this alchemist settled it. Somewhere nearby was a hideout for the low-ranking alchemists the Hohenheim family had planted here.
I transmuted the ground and sank the man deep underground, then walked on as if nothing had happened.
The presence around me is thickening.
Voices, running footsteps, and other signs of life grew denser and more numerous by the second. The earlier noise must have drawn the rest of them.
I didn't feel the slightest regret. I had been aiming for this from the start.
Find one, and the rest will come swarming.
There had been no need to drag out the alchemist who had been watching me and waiting for a chance to ambush. I could have simply driven rock spikes through his head and heart, or shifted the earth and crushed him outright. But that would have been wasted effort. Better to use one as bait, pull every eye toward him, and wipe out the whole pack in a single stroke.
"Wow. You planted a lot of them."
I stopped and waited. Exactly as expected, within a few minutes the Hohenheim family's low-ranking alchemists came pouring in as a crowd. When I muttered that in genuine admiration, the one standing at the front and glaring at me twisted his face into a scowl.
"What is that supposed to mean?"
They were the alchemists the Hohenheim family had quietly seeded in Arca for the purpose of watching Charlotte. Naturally, they had spent their days pretending to be ordinary criminals and had never paid much attention to the affairs of the back alleys beyond tracking Charlotte's movements and whereabouts.
"Does it matter what it means? Do you really need me to spell it out?"
They might not care about anyone besides Charlotte—but I cared a great deal.
"'Keep Charlotte van Hohenheim under surveillance.'"
"……?!"
"That ought to be answer enough."
The ground rippled and heaved. Earth transformed by my alchemy clung like sticky mud and dragged the Hohenheim alchemists down into itself. Several of them, startled by the ground turning into a swamp without warning, screamed and fell. Even the ones fighting to keep their composure were rattled just the same.
"D-don't panic! We can handle this with the family's Transmutation Circles!"
So the one at the very front really was the leader. The moment he shouted that through gritted teeth, every one of them slammed their hands into the churning ground and unleashed their alchemy at once.
Harden the liquid mud. A simple, clean countermeasure.
Should I laugh that it took them this long to think of it, or praise them for pulling themselves together and responding at all? Either way, it didn't matter much.
"That was disappointingly quick."
Thuck. The wet sound of skin tearing and bodies being pierced rang out, cold and thin.
True to their low rank, they hadn't thought past hardening the ground. Freezing the earth while half-sunk in mud was the same as locking yourself in place—and somehow none of them had accounted for that. Or maybe they had known and done it anyway. They were bottom-tier, after all. With only a handful of Transmutation Circles they could actually use, they never had any real options.
Maybe I should head back.
I had killed as many as needed killing. I didn't believe I had wiped out every last plant, and some of them had to be left alive. Only then would the survivors run home to Won-guk and report on the situation in Arca.
Even if I slammed into the Hohenheim family head-on by myself, it wouldn't be a problem. They couldn't put so much as a scratch on me. What I lacked was a justification. I needed to prod the Hohenheim family carefully, blow the incident up, and secure both public attention and a legitimate cause. On top of that, I still had to tell Charlotte the truth about the Hohenheim family and the Philosopher's Stone. The to-do list was stacking up like a mountain.
I finished my late-night stroll, turned my back to head home—and that was when it happened.
"You've been up to something interesting."
"……Ha."
A familiar figure of an elf.
No—a half-elf stepped into my path and blocked the way.