Making Bread from a Rock
A national strategic-class alchemist.
Just thinking the words was enough to put a grin on my face. The ring of them alone made me feel good.
Yeah. Alchemy really did have the answers after all.
I privately sang alchemy’s praises and laughed myself silly at every user who’d ever looked down on alchemists.
If I’d been isekai’d with some other class’s skillset, would I even have survived?
Absolutely not.
Mages have a mage’s specialty. Swordsmen have a swordsman’s. Even if I’d somehow dodged the Ether Storm, any profession but alchemy would have been next to useless in a situation like this.
I was standing in the ruins of the Destroyed Kingdom.
And ruins weren’t even the half of it. High-tier monsters prowled in every direction. Proper food, water, and supplies were a pipe dream in this wasteland. Even with enough personal combat power, crossing a whole country without logistics was a tall order.
For someone who needed to reach a nation where human civilization still stood, an alchemist’s ability to build shelter and generate supplies was as good as omnipotence.
If this is the world inside the game, then no matter what, I have to make it to Arca—to Origin Academy.
This world was ringed with danger.
Beings from another dimension—named the Abyss—poured in without end, and in that chaos, criminal factions ran wild. The place where you could feel that danger at its rawest was the Destroyed Kingdom: a realm that had finally failed to withstand the Abyss’s invasion and fallen, now a hellscape of inhuman monstrosities where criminals and vagrants from across the continent thronged.
I’ve heard there are survivor enclaves in the Destroyed Kingdom, but the intel is too thin, and it doesn’t get you free of the region’s inherent danger.
Luckily, I had a guide.
The world map and warp points I used to rely on in the game weren’t here, but the Ether Storm that had just scoured this whole area would serve in their place.
An Ether Storm was a natural disaster. Humans weren’t the only ones who feared it—every living thing in the Destroyed Kingdom, high-tier monsters included, dreaded it. It was the same logic as a man being chased by a bear throwing himself into a whirlpool: the bear gives up and stops chasing. No matter how tempting the prey right in front of them, creatures willing to defy the violence of nature itself were vanishingly rare.
So right now, with the Ether Storm only just passed, all I had to do was follow its path. The dangerous monsters would already have sensed it and fled. If even army-leveling horrors had run, vagrants and criminals weren’t going to be poking around the edges.
And if my memory isn’t wrong…
An Ether Storm behaved a lot like the zeroth law of thermodynamics. In the setting, Ether moved from high concentration to low, seeking equilibrium—so the storm’s path inevitably pointed outward, toward the lower-Ether lands beyond the Destroyed Kingdom. It marked the way forward with a trail of ruin, and with disaster-grade force it guaranteed my safety from monsters, criminals, and the rest.
They really did carve a clean path through.
I re-transmuted the bunker, climbed back to the surface, and looked out over the road the Ether Storm had flattened smooth. A dry laugh escaped me. With the ground packed that hard, at least I wouldn’t have to worry about taking a wrong turn and getting lost.
How many hours had it been?
I’d walked so long my legs were starting to shake. No clock, and the sky was stained purple from horizon to horizon—there was no way to guess the time.
Maybe I should rest here for a bit.
The Ether Storm’s aftereffects were fading. In the once-silent wasteland, small noises had begun to trickle back in. The things that had fled the storm were slowly returning.
If only I had even a basic Ether cultivation method.
Universal Transmutation let me use Ether in place of mana—but only for alchemy. My body was nowhere near as strong as this world’s superhumans, the powerhouses who crushed monsters all across the continent. I could work alchemy with Ether, sure, but without accumulating mana I couldn’t reinforce my body.
Common skills, usable by every class, required mana. And mana had to be refined from Ether through cultivation.
Anyway. I should rest for today.
This was a place where greed and overreach could get you killed in an instant. For a fragile alchemist who couldn’t even reinforce his body, every moment in the Destroyed Kingdom was a coin flip between life and death.
I put a hand to the ground, ready to transmute another bunker—and that was when I heard it.
Clang. Kak-kang!
…Metal on metal?
From somewhere far off, beyond the reach of sight, the scrape of steel was carrying on the air. And it was getting closer, little by little. Before I knew it my head had turned toward the sound.
What was a noise like that doing out in the middle of nowhere? The thought that it might be monsters fighting crossed my mind, and I transmuted the ground under my feet into a stairway leading underground.
I was about to slip into the bunker when my body froze.
Something had appeared beyond the empty horizon. What started as a blurry speck grew with every blink.
…A person?
A person. What came over the horizon was one woman and one beast. A sword-wielding woman locked in a brutal fight against a massive monster.
No—calling it a fight was wrong. Distance had fooled me. The closer they got, the clearer the picture became, and my body began to tremble.
The woman with the sword was carving the monster apart. She cut, sliced, severed, and smashed. The monster’s thrashing only looked like counterattacks because of its size. The actual flow of battle was her one-sided dominance.
Who is she?
Absurdly strong. Someone who’d appeared in the game? I dug through my memory and came up empty. Far too few Destroyed Kingdom–affiliated characters had ever been revealed.
Of all places to drop into the Destroyed Kingdom…!
Most game isekais started at the tutorial zone. Why was I the only one stuck grinding in an unreleased endgame region?
I clenched my teeth and started to turn away—and every hair on my body stood on end. Thought never got a chance. My head whipped around on pure reflex: an animal’s instinct to move when dread hits, to get out of danger’s way.
She saw me!
There was still distance between us. From here she was only a sharp, clear point. But that was my vision. I had no business assuming the eyes of a woman currently dismantling a monster were anything like mine.
No doubt about it. She’d spotted me. The second she finished the monster, she would come straight for me.
Bunker. Now—!
If I didn’t want to die, I had to hide. Alchemy was a powerful weapon, but with my current strength a frontal clash with that woman would have my head off my shoulders before I could blink.
I turned to dive into the bunker—and something split the air and came flying.
Whhhsssh!
It streaked in with a shriek of wind and slammed into the ground right in front of me, kicking up a storm of dust. The impact was so violent the shockwave nearly knocked me over.
What the hell just landed?!
I thrust out a hand and transmuted the dust choking my vision. The cloud collapsed in an instant into a neat ball of dirt and dropped to the earth. Sight restored, I saw what had been thrown.
“A sword…?”
Why was that here?
The question had barely formed when a death-cry like a scream punched through my eardrums and yanked my gaze around. Once again I turned on pure reflex—and saw the head of the monster the woman had been butchering erupt into hundreds of chunks of meat.
But the woman herself was gone.
The gears in my head spun hard, piecing it together. She had been swinging a sword. What had landed in front of me was a sword. Immediately after, the monster’s head had exploded—not sliced by a blade, but as if something with crushing force had slammed into it.
…No way—!
I poured Ether into the hand still braced on the ground. No more time to dither. To buy even a second, I transmuted the dirt into rock and raised a barrier—and at the same time shaped a slide that would drop me deep underground.
“Never seen a technique like that.”
Even that wasn’t enough.
“Interesting.”
The walls I’d thrown up around me shattered. The body that should have been plunging down the slide into the bunker was caught by something and held fast.
“Hey.”
White hair falling all the way down her back, and eyes the color of blood—chilling, vivid—filled my vision. Her face was beautiful enough to belong to an angel, but not a flicker of emotion touched it. Flat, doll-like.
“I’m hungry.”
Her coral-red lips moved. Still expressionless, she looked down at me with nothing but cold appraisal and stated her empty stomach.
“Got anything to eat?”
Instinctive fear crawled up my spine. If you don’t, I’ll eat you—that was the feeling in the stare pinning me down. The image of the monster’s head exploding into meat flashed through my mind like a death reel. People didn’t eat people… usually. But every so often, “usually” was exactly how people got killed.
“I—I do!”
I snatched up a broken chunk of stone and transmuted it on the spot. I didn’t have any actual food on me—but as long as I had material, my alchemy could make food out of nothing. If you could turn lead into gold, what was so hard about turning a rock into bread?
A stone about the size of a brick, a little bigger than my fist, became a perfectly appetizing loaf of white bread in my palm. I’d only rearranged the matter’s structure, so there was no heat in it—nothing warm and fresh from an oven.
“Here! Please, take it!”
I squeezed my eyes shut and held the loaf out to her. Seconds ticked by. She didn’t take it from my hand.
Was she unhappy with it? Had she wanted meat or vegetables instead of bread? Anxiety piled on anxiety until my tightly shut eyes cracked open a sliver.
“……How did you do that?”
Her eyes darted wildly between my face and the bread in my hand. The same hand that had crushed a giant monster’s skull in a single blow was stretched out right in front of the loaf I was holding—and it was trembling like a leaf.
I was genuinely terrified.