All Alchemists Are Psychopaths
All alchemists are psychopaths.
Lately it felt like incidents and accidents just would not stop piling up.
Every last one of them needed to be dealt with as fast as possible, so I had been throwing myself at whatever came through the door—but honestly, there was just too much of it.
"You planning to take that sword with you today too?"
"Ah, yeah. Figured I might as well show it to Instructor Sayulcheon once."
Jerie, still half-asleep and rubbing her eyes as she wandered into my room, stared fixedly at the sword hanging from my hip.
"I don't like it."
"Haha. Just think of it as me having scored a pretty good blade."
The look she gave the sword was anything but pleased. After hearing yesterday's explanation of what the weapon really was and how I had gotten my hands on it, her eyes were full of quiet resentment every time they landed on it.
In the end she let out a sigh and looked away. I offered her an awkward smile in return.
"Now that I think about it, you're packing a lot more than usual today."
Jerie had been watching me get ready for work when she murmured that under her breath. On a normal day I would have thrown on something decent, grabbed a coat, and left it at that. Today the bag was stuffed with documents and all sorts of other supplies.
"Midterms are right around the corner. These papers are all exam questions, answer keys, solution guides—that kind of thing."
"Hmm. Is that so? Sounds rough."
You're telling me.
I swallowed the words and stepped out through the front door.
The questions had to be solvable for the cadets, yet still had enough of a spread to actually differentiate them. Alchemy was such an unpopular subject that balancing the difficulty had been a genuine headache.
"Hard at work again today, Instructor Charlotte."
"Ah, Instructor Ryu Seojun. You've arrived as well?"
These days I always reported to Research Building 12. Checking on Charlotte's mental state was part of it, of course, but I also needed to build enough rapport that she would feel she could lean on me. More than anything else, being around her was simply enjoyable. As an unrepentant alchemy enthusiast, talking shop with a fellow specialist made the hours vanish.
"How is the midterm prep coming along?"
"Mm, I'd say it's progressing reasonably well."
For the cadets, midterm prep meant studying. For the instructors, it meant writing and proofreading the actual exam.
Until I dropped into this world I had always been the one taking tests, never the one creating them. I had severely underestimated how much work went into drafting and reviewing questions.
"Here—these are the ones I put together. I focused on interpreting Transmutation Circles and the history of their development. What do you think?"
Not too hard, not too easy, with just enough discrimination to measure the cadets' actual achievement and level. That was the guideline Charlotte had given me for writing the exam.
"The interpretation questions look fine. The history section is a bit uneven, though—we'll need to sand it down toward either the easy or the hard end."
But of course a job you had never done before was never going to go smoothly just because someone offered a few pieces of advice. On top of that, I used alchemy so instinctively that I kept making mistakes simply trying to tell the easy techniques from the hard ones.
"For this problem, if we focus on this part…"
"If we merge the classification question and the history question into one…"
"For the interpretive circle, if we draw this section a little more obscurely to raise the difficulty of the reading…"
I was not even that solid on alchemy history or famous figures. I used the art; I had never studied who invented which technique when. As a result I had spent so much time buried in textbooks just to write the questions that my sleep had taken a noticeable hit.
I did keep studying whenever the academy gave me free time, but the cadets' knowledge level was high enough that I was being forced into high-intelligence, high-education territory right along with them.
"Whew. Finally finished drafting everything."
"…We still have to proofread."
"Right. Damn it."
I had thought we were done. The finishing work was still waiting.
To prevent the kind of multiple-correct-answer disasters that even middle and high school exams regularly produced, the last few days before midterms were essentially devoted entirely to question review. Alchemy at least had a relatively small number of items, so as long as we did not drag our feet there was still time to proofread at a leisurely pace.
"Instructor Charlotte, how is the research coming?"
Once the instructor duties for the day had finally wound down, I took a short break and struck up conversation with her.
A project to restructure the entire theoretical framework of alchemy so that it could be performed without Transmutation Circles. The idea was absurd on its face, yet a real path to success existed—and if it worked, it would open an entirely new horizon for the craft.
The only problem is that the odds of that path actually working are vanishingly low.
Still, I was curious. Exactly how was she trying to approach alchemy without circles? The research of a first-rate alchemist like Charlotte was fascinating in its own right.
"No real results yet. I've been trying everything I can think of, but the further the work goes, the more convinced I become that the first head of the family's method was the correct answer."
"…The Azoth Sword and the Philosopher's Stone, you mean."
Alchemy that literally ground people down and used them as fuel. I had no hesitation about killing people who deserved it and turning them into materials, but Charlotte's temperament was nothing like mine. If she had still been ignorant of the fact that Philosopher's Stones were made from human beings, that would have been one thing. Charlotte, however, was the designated next head of the Hohenheim family. There was no chance she did not already know.
"If a human being is going to take the place of a Transmutation Circle itself… what method would even make that possible…"
With a soft hum of thought, Charlotte sank into contemplation. The moment I saw it, I smiled and turned my gaze back to the first draft of the exam papers. She was a researcher through and through; every so often she would fixate on a single problem like this. When she disappeared into her own world, the kinder thing was to give her space rather than poke at her.
The Green Forest Dawn Society should start moving soon too, now that one of their elders has been taken out.
Of course, it did not take long for me to fall into my own thoughts as well. I simply did not feel like staring at the exam any longer, so I decided to spend a moment considering what came next.
James Baker, the man with ties to the Hohenheim family, has gone missing. The Green Forest Dawn Society has lost their 'princess,' and now an elder has vanished along with a Philosopher's Stone.
In reality I had cleaned both of them up myself, but Johar, who did not know that, would be looking at the situation exactly that way.
He'll move earlier than in the original story.
I hardened my expression and let out a quiet sigh. Having already exerted this much influence, Johar's actions were going to diverge sharply from the trajectory I remembered. The real problem was that I had no way of knowing how a Johar whose course had been knocked off the rails would choose to act. Would he become more cautious and pull back? Or, realizing his tail had been stepped on, would he abandon the old playbook and go on the offensive? There was simply no predicting it.
This is getting inconvenient.
I did not particularly regret the choices I had made. I had picked the best options available to me, and as a result Johar was taking damage piece by piece. The Green Forest Dawn Society, in particular, was effectively dismantled already. Looking purely at the results, things were not half bad.
Maybe I really do need to build a force of my own.
If I had to name the single most lethal gap between Johar and me, it would be the difference in numbers. I was one person. Johar, even setting aside one of his organizations, still had any number of subordinate groups under him. And simply adding warm bodies would not solve the problem. Half-baked manpower was barely any help at all; whether in combat or support roles, people needed outstanding ability.
Especially on the combat side. I need allies who are actually good at fighting and who possess some kind of special power.
Johar Cardmon. The man who had the nerve to name his entire organization after himself was not someone I could afford to take lightly. Even a future version of me who had mastered internal arts and a whole arsenal of techniques would still have a brutal fight on his hands. That was simply the kind of ability the man possessed. Johar Cardmon did not merely sit in the category of "strong." He did not even allow the enemy facing him the luxury of understanding what was happening to them.
People like that are hard to just go out and find.
Even if they existed, they already had their own lives and goals. Expecting to persuade them to move with me was never going to be easy.
Then…
"Ah!"
"What is it?"
My consciousness, which had been submerged in thought, abruptly surfaced. The thread of my thinking snapped like a string cut by scissors, and I looked at the world in front of my eyes rather than the scenery inside my head.
I saw Charlotte's face after she had let out that exclamation. Her eyes were wide; her cheeks, flushed with excitement, were gently pushed back by the curve of a smile. I stared blankly at the sight for a second—until her bright, lively voice made me flinch.
"What if we applied Homunculus technology?"
"…Homunculus technology?"
Just hearing the words, I could not quite grasp the idea. On the surface the two fields looked completely unrelated. How exactly was she planning to process that concept into a way of performing alchemy without Transmutation Circles?
She must have read the confusion in my eyes, because Charlotte launched into an explanation in a thoroughly excited voice.
"We develop an organ that can perform the same function as a Transmutation Circle, then implant it into the human body as a replacement."
"So… embedding a substitute for the circle directly into the body."
The moment her explanation registered, my eyes went wide. Leaving aside how unique the idea itself was, it was startlingly close to something I had already been planning.
Use humans as materials to create Homunculi. Use Homunculi as materials to improve humans. Which one served as the material was different, but at the root, Charlotte's concept and mine were the same.
"There are still mountains of problems to solve on this path as well, but at least it's a route where I can see a concrete possibility."
Watching Charlotte flash a bright smile and steel her resolve, I could only let out a dry laugh. A half-joking proverb that circulated in this world had floated up unbidden, and the more I thought about it, the less wrong it seemed.
All alchemists are psychopaths.
Even now, I still could not offer a proper rebuttal to that saying.