Charlotte van Hohenheim
Charlotte van Hohenheim.
She was the idol and the dream of alchemists everywhere.
Heir to the storied Hohenheim line, and a genius who had carved out an entirely new field—combat alchemy.
She had devised and refined countless transmutation circles, and in the end risen all the way to instructor at Origin Academy. A hero in her own right.
And so she was strong.
She had to be strong. Because of that, she could be strong.
She believed that was the only way to prove herself.
That only by producing results, by endlessly justifying her right to exist, could she ever be loved.
To a girl genius, the house she had been born into was stagnant water—water that had stood still so long it rotted anything that fell into the pool.
—A genius has been born to our family!
—The Founder's return, without question! What greater joy could there be?
—Charlotte, our precious little blessing.
As a child, Charlotte became a single ray of hope for elders whose talent had hit its ceiling and whose patience for hard work had long since run dry.
Because she was hope, those elders forced their dreams onto her.
—You must become an alchemist who surpasses the Founder.
—You are the hope of House Hohenheim.
Charlotte was lucky.
Her natural gift was extraordinary, and she had grown up in an environment perfectly suited to make that gift bloom.
There was only one problem: the people around her wanted nothing more than to ride her talent.
That was her only misfortune.
—Charlotte, your progress has been lagging of late. Do not disappoint your father.
—…Yes, Father. I'll work harder.
But people always begin to break from the smallest, most trivial unhappiness.
Charlotte never even realized it was happening. She simply… crumbled, little by little, without noticing.
Having never received true love, she tried to fill the hole in her heart with other people's approval.
Produce results. Stack up great deeds.
Shake the world with your name and raise the family's glory.
Without ever knowing what love was, the girl simply went on craving warmth and recognition.
And into that long, unbroken life, one day, something extraordinary appeared.
—Instructor Sayulcheon… what did you just say…?
—It seems even you find it hard to believe. Well, of course. A young man who uses alchemy without a transmutation circle…
Ryu Seojun.
The arrival of an alchemist no one had ever heard of.
"I'm sorry, but my method isn't something that can be taught."
I turned down Charlotte's request.
Setting interests and gains and losses aside entirely, the way I used alchemy without a transmutation circle simply wasn't something you could hand to another person.
"W-why not?"
"Because my alchemy is supported by a Gift."
A Gift.
A present from the world itself—the manifestation of one person's talent.
They were so thoroughly unique that the gap between someone who possessed a related Gift in a given field and someone who didn't was absolute.
That gap could never be closed.
It wasn't only a difference in skill. It produced an enormous difference in perspective and in the way a person thought.
"There's no special theory or secret technique to how I use alchemy without a circle."
I rested a hand on the desk in front of me and poured ether into it, working alchemy.
From the flat surface of the desk, a neat cube rose up in a clean bulge.
"I simply handle the mana manipulation and structural calculation of matter myself—the work a transmutation circle normally takes care of."
Why do alchemists need transmutation circles?
The answer is almost insultingly simple.
Because it is that complex, that fiendishly difficult.
Even if you only reshape matter without changing its elemental composition, you still need at least molecular-level mana control and structural calculation.
And if you want true alchemy—turning lead into gold, rewriting the elements themselves—those operations drop all the way down to the subatomic scale.
You have to process all of that, simultaneously, every single time you work alchemy.
"Write that method up in a paper or try teaching it to people, and you'd get nothing but a mountain of abuse."
"That can't be…"
Despair settled over Charlotte's face.
She had thought she had finally found a clue—only to realize in the same breath that the clue was useless.
I understood her disappointment.
"That said, it's not as if there's no way at all."
"What?"
Her eyes snapped to me at once.
The look that flew at me was so sharp I half expected it to burn a hole clean through my chest.
"Never mind me for a moment. I've heard the first Hohenheim used alchemy without a circle as well."
"Ah—yes. The founding head of the family didn't need a circle for his alchemy…"
Paracelsus van Hohenheim.
The man who had laid the foundations of every form of alchemy still in use, the alchemist who had first discovered and then transmuted the Philosopher's Stone, Elixir, and substances like them.
Blood will tell, as they say: generation after generation of Hohenheims had been born with exceptional talent for the art.
The problem was that for all those long years, not a single one of them had ever surpassed him.
More precisely, no one with the talent even to reach Paracelsus's level had appeared.
And into that situation, Charlotte was finally born.
No wonder the family's eyes had rolled back in their heads.
For the first time, a child had arrived who might actually outstrip the Founder.
The only trouble was that they had clung so hard to her talent they never once looked at the human being named Charlotte.
"So it isn't completely impossible. The founder of your house actually did it—which means, in some form, a method has to exist."
"Th-that's true, isn't it?!"
Which meant my job was simple.
"I'll help you."
I just had to see her as a person first, and an alchemist second.
What she needed right now wasn't another achievement in alchemy. It was the chance to understand that falling once doesn't mean the world ends.
"They say even a blank sheet of paper is lighter if two people lift it. Difficult research goes more smoothly when you do it together."
Whether Charlotte's research would actually succeed, or whether it would end in failure and frustration, I had no idea.
That she was even working on something like this never appeared in the game. The only way to find out was to try.
"But… what if it fails? There might not be any results at all. Wouldn't I just be wasting Instructor Ryu's time on something so risky and personal?"
Watching Charlotte fidget and worry, I gave her a wry smile.
"That's just how research works. You research because you don't know the answer yet. Failure is the natural state of things."
Research was, in the end, a battle of patience.
Either you endured until you had something real, or you couldn't and you washed out.
Sometimes a handful of tries was enough to get what you wanted.
Sometimes you slammed your head against the wall dozens, hundreds of times and still walked away empty-handed.
There was nothing for it.
Trying and failing over and over, and finding the answer in that process—that was research.
Demonstrating an answer you already knew was something you only did after the research was finished. That was proof of results, not research itself.
"…All right. If that's what you want, Instructor Ryu, then… I'll be in your care from now on."
One fire put out, at least.
I thought as much as I turned my gaze toward the window.
Unlike House Hohenheim, this place was full of people who would take her exactly as she was.
Honestly, I thought Charlotte's research had a high chance of failing.
Even in the original game's story—which ran all the way past academy graduation—alchemy without a circle was still nothing more than a theoretical miracle.
In the original, Charlotte had probably abandoned the research partway through, or else kept at it without ever finding a real answer.
It's not as if there's no method at all.
But it was next to impossible for that method to become a universal approach to alchemy—and more importantly, given Charlotte's personality, there was a good chance she would never be able to use it properly.
She and I differed too much in temperament and values for me to have any real doubt about that.
If she used the method Paracelsus did, Charlotte could work alchemy without a circle too.
Paracelsus van Hohenheim, founding head of the house, had been able to use alchemy without a circle the same way I could.
His method, though, was quite different from mine.
Paracelsus had used the Philosopher's Stone as a catalyst and the Azoth Sword as an aid, working alchemy without a circle that way.
In other words, he hadn't done it on pure skill. He had been an equipment alchemist, armed to the teeth with the products of his research.
Without either the Philosopher's Stone or the Azoth Sword, the method is impossible.
In alchemy, the Philosopher's Stone was an all-purpose resource that could become anything, and the Azoth Sword was an all-purpose calculation engine that could compute anything.
So Paracelsus had supplied the raw material with the Stone and offloaded the complex mana manipulation and structural calculation of matter onto the Sword.
If I remember right, he ran out of Philosopher's Stone mid-battle and died.
I recalled Paracelsus's end and let out a short, dry laugh at the thought that followed.
Looking back on it now, Paracelsus was a man posterity had polished to a shine.
Judged purely on his motives and way of thinking—on the man himself—he was a complete lunatic.
"Well. Not that I have any room to talk."
"Hm? What's this all of a sudden?"
"Nothing. I just remembered telling a friend of mine in the Destroyed Kingdom to stop doing insane things."
The faintly dubious look on Sayulcheon's face twisted.
In her eyes, what I was about to do was the real insanity.
"Not training—can a body truly be made that way?"
"I may not look it, but I've even repaired the Headmaster's body."
With that, I rose to my feet.
I looked over the transmutation circle I had drawn to my satisfaction, then asked Sayulcheon to stand guard so no one would interrupt.
"Well then. Shall we begin?"
I downed the Elixir I had transmuted myself and steeled my resolve.
It was going to hurt like hell—but at least I would finally be free of this fragile body with no cultivation method to support it.
The cold sweat trickling down the back of my neck was an unavoidable reaction.