Panacea (Physical)
The elf elders of the Green Forest Dawn Society were not opponents to take lightly.
Everyone warned you not to underestimate an enemy only to get blindsided—but with these ones, the danger cut a different way. It wasn’t skill that decided their fights. It was how far they would stoop.
Don’t expect common sense out of them.
If anyone ever asked how filthy and underhanded a person could become, you only needed to lift your head and look at the Green Forest Dawn Society. That wasn’t hyperbole. Their elf elders would use any means, any method, so long as it served their ends.
Which makes them the kind of enemy you can hit without a second thought.
Whether it violated honor, the law, or basic ethics—none of that was their concern. All that mattered was whether the goal got done, and whether it benefited them. If the ends were within reach, the means were beneath their notice.
So before they stick a knife in my back, I move first.
The Green Forest Dawn Society had to be handled the way you handled a crook—by playing dirty yourself. Meet them with every courtesy and every rule of fair play, and they would take that as an opening to drive a blade into your ribs. People like that would never keep a promise in good faith. The moment Jerie stopped being useful, they would discard her. The same went for her sister.
“Miss Jerie. From this moment on, I intend to eliminate your greatest weakness.”
“My weakness?”
We walked an empty, deserted corridor, and I spoke in a low voice.
“The leash those old-fogey elves of the Green Forest Dawn Society have around your throat.”
“……!”
“I’m going to shatter it completely.”
Jerie whipped toward me, eyes round with shock. Strip away the euphemism, and what I had just said was no different from promising to heal her sister.
“Doesn’t it strike you as odd? You’re essential to those old elves’ plans—yet the moment you vanished, their response was strangely quiet.”
“……True enough.”
The Green Forest Dawn Society was unlikely to pour much effort into finding Jerie in the first place. They didn’t need to. So long as the Elixir remained in their hands and her sister still fought her disease, Jerie’s fate was bound to them by the neck.
But I could overturn that board. Shake the premise that locked her into that master–servant relationship, and a choice that had never existed before would open up.
“When they’re driven into a corner at the last moment, they will take your sister hostage.”
They might threaten to withhold the Elixir—or simply abduct her sister and hold her for leverage. They were more than capable of either, and I said so with absolute conviction.
“So if we prevent that situation and, while we’re at it, break the leash—everything gets resolved in one stroke.”
Cut off the Green Forest Dawn Society’s trump card in advance. Starve them out slowly. Then, at the decisive moment, crush them. That was the annihilation plan I had in mind.
“Is that even possible?”
Jerie asked carefully. Easy to say—but healing and protecting her sister was far more tangled than it sounded. The patient herself was in Hwan-guk, so even delivering an Elixir and treating her was already a hurdle. Send the Elixir alone, and there was no guarantee what the Green Forest Dawn Society would attempt once they noticed the change. The ideal solution was to bring her to Arca, cure the illness, and place her under protection—but that was easier said than done. Anyone could invent the plan. Almost no one could execute it.
Almost no one. Someone can.
I didn’t answer Jerie with words. Instead I stopped my busy stride, finally at the destination, and knocked on the door.
Knock, knock.
Two knocks. A moment later, a gentle voice came from within.
“Come in.”
I opened the door and stepped into the room with Jerie. Then I offered a quiet greeting to the room’s master, who smiled with a kindly expression.
Miles Magnus.
Once a hero who had made his name as the God of War—now an old man who, after an incurable wound forced his retirement, simply waited for death while holding the Headmaster’s seat at the Academy.
“Instructor Ryu Seojun. What brings you to me?”
“I have a favor to ask of you, Headmaster.”
I approached him as he sat, as always, at his work desk. Then I set a glass vial full of purple liquid on the wood.
The Headmaster’s eyes went wide as he stared at the contents swirling inside. His lips parted; he had recognized what it was.
The Elixir was the supreme panacea, famous as a cure-all. But its power was not limited to disease. It could wash away every wound and every affliction—and even correct innate disabilities.
“Headmaster.”
To a man whose composure was, for once, visibly shaken, I spoke in a low voice.
“I’m going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
Politics was more complicated than people liked to admit.
Even in a world where strength could become power, try to solve everything with brute force and you would be branded a continental enemy. Human beings, though, were social animals by nature. If I was bad at politics, I could borrow the help of someone who was good at it. If I lacked power, I could go to someone who held it and ask.
Of course, without considerable rapport and the right circumstances, such help was as hard to get as stars from the sky. The powerful usually weighed profit and loss, and only moved when they judged the outcome useful to themselves.
But.
“As you can see, this is an Elixir. An authentic one beyond any doubt.”
People used negotiation and trade to overcome situations like that. The tools a human could wield were not limited to physical things that fit in two hands.
“I will completely heal the old wound you took long ago.”
“……Is such a thing possible?”
“An Elixir is a miracle medicine—but it is also a catalyst.”
An Elixir was already a finished product refined through alchemy, so even drinking it straight from the bottle produced tremendous effects. But it had originally been developed as a catalyst, and naturally had several proper methods of use depending on the situation.
“……You said you had a favor to ask of me.”
The kindly air the Headmaster usually wore thinned. He looked to be calculating the gains and losses of accepting my proposal—but I was certain he would grant my request. At his level, what I was asking was not difficult at all.
“Yes. I intend to bring one person from Hwan-guk to Arca and place them under identity protection.”
“You came from the Destroyed Kingdom, so if this is someone from Hwan-guk, I take it you are particularly close with that half-elf young lady at your side.”
The Headmaster’s gaze shifted to Jerie beside me. Her body flinched once—but with her sister’s life hanging on this, she met that look head-on without a single step back.
“Very well. If you can truly heal my wounds, a request of that scale I will gladly grant.”
“You have given your word.”
The Headmaster never broke a promise. Above all, he held a creed of keeping any vow that touched on grace or grudge. If I truly healed his wounds clean, he would fulfill his promise to me with every means at his disposal.
“Then let’s begin the treatment. Drink the Elixir, and hold out your hand.”
The Headmaster nodded and followed the instruction. He uncorked the glass vial, drained the Elixir in a single draught, and sealed its power within his body. Perhaps that was the stature of a martial artist once called humanity’s last bulwark—even old and wounded, the process was flawless.
“Do not reject the Ether I pour in. Attach your own Ether to its current and circulate it through your entire body.”
Attempting alchemy directly on someone who trained in Ether circulation techniques was harder than people imagined. The more mana they had accumulated, the more fiercely they resisted my Ether. At ordinary levels I could simply crush a body’s alchemical resistance with sheer volume of Ether. An individual’s stored mana had a limit; I drew on nature’s infinite Ether as it was.
The problem was that the Headmaster’s level was far too high. Even if he offered no conscious resistance, his body unconsciously shoved away every thread of Ether I fed him. And the quantity of that resistance was insane—trying to overwhelm it by force alone might take days and nights without sleep.
“Good. You’re doing well. Keep cycling the energy several times just like that, and help it adapt to your body.”
So I had the Headmaster consciously accept the Ether I was forcing in. At the same time, I spread the Elixir’s power through every corner of him, preparing his whole frame into a state optimized for alchemical reconstruction.
“……There is hardly a sound place left anywhere on you.”
“Haha. You can tell even that?”
“I have to know it to fix it.”
Physicians would all have pointed only to the major organs—the heart and the rest. Looking through his body myself, I found the entire frame in tatters. That he was still alive in this condition was astonishing. An ordinary person would not have lasted a day; they would have died the moment wounds like these formed.
“……This is going to need another Elixir.”
The damage far exceeded anything I had anticipated. One vial was nowhere near enough to salvage this.
“Miss Jerie. Lend me a hand for a moment.”
“Just say it. I’ll do everything I can.”
I nodded at the resolve in her voice.
Transmute the ingredients for an Elixir.
With Universal Transmutation, I could create whatever substance I needed on the spot. Need a sword—make a sword. Need clothes—make clothes. In that fashion, I transmuted finished products rather than raw materials.
But even I had a few substances I could not transmute as finished products outright. The Philosopher’s Stone, whose core materials were things that were not matter at all—and the Elixir, whose defining trait was a complex chain of alchemical reactions in themselves.
“Put your hands on my back, and pour mana into me until I tell you to stop.”
Mana was highly concentrated Ether refined in a special way. For the same volume, mana was far more efficient than raw Ether.
“Got it.”
Almost the instant Jerie set her hands on my back, mana I had never felt before surged through my spine and flooded every part of my body. Pure, and in staggering quantity—enough to draw a sigh of admiration. This would be enough. I curled the corner of my mouth, certain of success.
I scattered Ether in every direction. Furniture that touched the Ether under my dominion broke down piece by piece and sent its particles streaming toward me. I gathered them and began transmuting materials—herbs of every kind, then the key ingredient, Dream Lotus. I packed the prepared materials into an empty glass vial. Finally I drew every scrap of ambient Ether, concentrated it, and poured it into the bottle.
Every ingredient was inside. I sealed the stopper at once and transmuted the contents into an Elixir.
“Headmaster—drink it, quickly.”
He downed the second Elixir without hesitation. Power incomparable to before soaked into every corner of his body. His part was finished. What remained was for me to heal him through human transmutation.
Every organ. Every strand of muscle. Every single cell—map them all.
Some claimed human transmutation was impossible, and far too dangerous. To punish the arrogance of those who dared attempt creation and trespass on the realm of gods, the world would hurl back lumps of meat and bone as the result—and tear away a piece of the alchemist who tried. Some called that force the World. Some called it Truth. Some called it God.
Nonsense.
I dismissed all of it as rubbish. What alchemists throughout history had attempted was the resurrection of the dead—not human transmutation. Building a corpse from nothing without any information, then anchoring a soul already vanished from this world into that body. The premise itself was wrong. A living body could not exist without the blueprint called genes, and a soul was something outside matter—beyond alchemy’s reach from the start.
But put the other way—
A body that already held a soul was possible. If you could read the information composing that flesh—its genes—you could transmute it. Raising the dead was a miracle. Healing the wounded was a technique.
“It will hurt enough to make you scream.”
Of course it would. This was the process of dismantling a living body once through. There was no way it wouldn’t hurt—and that pain was not something a person could simply grit their teeth and endure.
“I am well acquainted with pain.”
The Headmaster fixed me with a look that said he had steeled himself for at least that much. I huffed a short laugh at that gaze, then threw everything I had into the alchemy.
Crackle—crack-crack-crack!
With a bizarre noise, the Headmaster’s body fractured and came apart. It split into squares, into triangles, into shapes beyond description—then broke down endlessly into pieces too small for the eye. And once the stages of understanding and deconstruction were complete, the alchemy moved to its final phase.
The instant I recognized that a body part had vanished from sight, that part’s flesh restored itself. No more corruption, no more damage—only the clean body of a martial artist returned to its place.
“Hoo……”
At last the reconstruction stage concluded successfully. The human transmutation had worked, and the result exceeded my expectations.
“Are you pleased? That is the product of two full Elixirs.”
I spoke to the Headmaster, who sat examining his body this way and that with a dazed expression. Right now he would be wondering whether the flesh he could see was truly his own.
“Seeing you so hale and whole makes the effort feel worthwhile. You look ready to march straight into the Destroyed Kingdom and start thrashing monsters.”
The old, ailing Headmaster was gone. Only humanity’s last bulwark, restored to the young body of his prime, remained in that seat.
Unable to string words together, still groping at himself, the Headmaster finally lifted eyes that shook violently and fixed them on me. In that state, he tossed out a single line.
“……You. Are you truly human?”
Well. As reviews of a treatment went, that was a rather startling one.