“An alchemist is a general term covering two major branches: the magic forger and the magic pharmacist.
In simple terms, a magic forger uses magical power to forge tools and carve enchantment arrays, endowing those tools with magical effects.
That also includes setting magical cores, or crafting items directly from magical beast bones.
A magic pharmacist, meanwhile, refines magical potions to enhance certain abilities, lift curses, neutralize poisons, or cure diseases.
But whether forger or pharmacist, both absolutely depend on mastering raw materials.
Next, we’ll introduce the harvesting, processing, preservation, purification, and special properties of several kinds of raw materials…
‘Several’?
Ha!
With more than ten thousand entries, I’ll be reading until the cows come home!” Kent read the book aloud in a loud, dramatic voice.
This was the task assigned by his new supervisor, Niu Niu, who had since vanished to who-knows-where.
Kent couldn’t fight her anyway—he was no match.
And even if he could, he didn’t dare.
If she died, so did he.
Though he had his doubts about the soul contract, no sane person gambled with his own life.
Better safe than sorry.
“Iron ore, the most basic and common mineral…
Mithril, an extremely precious magical metal with the best magic-conducting properties.
It accelerates spellcasting; the exact effect depends on the percentage of mithril in the item.
It’s generally used only for carving magic circles.”
“Juluo flower: highly toxic.
Usually applied to weapons or hidden blades.
Anyone poisoned dies within sixty breaths.
However, if you combine Juluo flower with the venom sac of a fifth-rank three-eyed ring snake and the blood of a dragon-kin, it becomes the finest antidote for dark curses.
Swap the dragon-kin blood for three-legged toad venom, and you get an antidote for a hundred poisons.
But the Juluo flower is suspected to be extinct.
Damn it!
If it’s extinct, why write it down and torture us?
And who wrote this?
Ruian, Cyril.
If I ever meet this guy…
forget it.
Saint Mage Ruian Cyril.
Let’s just forget it.”
【About the Juluo Flower：
The Plant: It grows to about half a person’s height (60–80 centimeters), with a stem that is translucent ice-blue, as if moonlight had been poured into it.
Fine silver fuzz covers its surface, and in darkness the faint sheen gives off a phosphorescent glow.
The Leaves: They grow in whorls, shaped like curved crane feathers, their edges split into irregular, gear-like notches.
The leaf color is a strange, near-black dark green, yet the veins run with glowing purple patterns that pulse like living blood vessels.
When touched, the leaves slowly fold shut—a prelude to sensing prey.
The Flower: This is where the true danger lies.
The blossom hangs like an inverted bell of colored glass, about the size of a fist or palm.
Its petals are translucent, with a texture like solidified grease.
When it first opens, it is milky white; as sunlight grows stronger, it shifts to iris blue; finally, under the harshest noon light, it turns a dripping, blood-red scarlet.
At the heart of the flower there is no stamen at all—only a pitch-black hollow.
From its depths seeps a thick, sticky nectar that carries a cloying, rotting sweetness.
The Strangest Part: The flower never truly opens.
Its five petals remain tightly pressed in a bud-like cluster, with only five narrow slits at the tip—like five half-closed eyes.
When someone draws near, those “eye-slits” slowly widen and release a faint purple poisonous mist, visible to the naked eye.
The mist is not aggressive; instead, it coils around the observer’s wrists and neck like silk ribbons, creating the illusion of being held in a gentle embrace.
The Reaction to Touch: Once the flower is picked, the entire plant dissolves within three seconds into a pool of viscous black juice.
If that juice splashes onto skin, it leaves behind web-like red marks.
If the antidote is not taken within three days, the marks spread along the blood vessels and grow into the heart.
In one sentence: It is beautiful the way a carefully choreographed murder is beautiful—every petal writing a love letter to death.】
Kent was at his wits’ end.
The book was full of strange, bizarre names.
It wasn’t like chemistry, where the periodic table had a limited number of elements and everything followed a logical pattern.
Here, it was just a jumble of descriptions—like traditional Chinese medicine.
You just memorized the formula and followed the prescription; everything else was whatever it was.
Kent suffered through two months of this torment.
After all that time, he had memorized barely half the contents.
The days were short and the nights long in winter, which helped, but he still had to meditate, cook, and regularly check on the horses.
On top of that, the little housekeeper refused to eat meat—so poor Kent had to make trips to Harri City to buy cassava and such.
Fortunately, he’d already been to Harri three times: the first day to go, the second to return.
Later, when heavy snow fell, Kent simply sent Niu Niu by herself.
She could fly, so why make those of us without wings suffer?
Besides, Kent could tell that Niu Niu was far more likely to bully others than be bullied.
It was getting late, and Kent sat down to meditate as usual.
According to Niu Niu and the books, sensing the elements was supposed to be the greatest obstacle on the path to becoming a mage.
But for Kent, that obstacle simply didn’t exist.
The moment he closed his eyes and focused, he could sense the fire elements.
This was thanks to Niu Niu: she had “scavenged” a low-level magic skill book in the city, and it contained a concrete meditation method.
It was just like Foundations of Alchemy: you simply meditate, chant the incantation, cast the spell, and you’re done.
Not a single word about the underlying principles.
And honestly, Kent understood.
If you had to explain the theory behind everything, then even buying a notebook would require years of explanation.
And for someone a bit less sharp, what if you forgot the first half of the explanation before you even heard the second?
Kent endlessly reached out with his mental force, catching the magical elements that glowed with red light.
The others, he left alone.
Once, in his impatience, he grabbed a water element instead, and it ended up canceling out two fire elements.
The technique was to compress the elements into the point between the brows; those that merged with his mana became his own mana, and those that didn’t simply faded away.
What puzzled Kent was that the elements he sensed came in all sorts of colors—red for fire, blue for water, cyan for wind, green for wood, gold for metal, black for dark, white for light.
Then there was the gray one, shimmering and extremely rare; and a purple one; and a blue so deep it was almost black.
Right now, the blue-black elements were the most abundant in the air, so Kent had to spend a great deal of time filtering them out.
He had meant to ask Niu Niu about it, but then he remembered that Niu Niu had learned everything from books herself.
“Ugh!
Only thirty percent.
Just thirty percent.” Kent grumbled in dissatisfaction.
Only a mere three-tenths had actually been assimilated into his own mana; one-tenth scattered away, and the remaining six-tenths disappeared to who knows where.
It felt as though his body had absorbed them.
Kent had to comfort himself: “I’m training both magic and martial arts!” What he failed to consider was the season.
It was winter, the time when fire elements were scarcest.
Some mages in such places probably couldn’t even manage three-tenths—maybe as little as half a tenth.
That was the price of self-study.
But if Kent could get used to this environment, then there would be no place in this world where he couldn’t absorb fire magic elements.
Thump, thump!
A sound came from outside the door.
Kent knew Niu Niu was back.
“Coming, coming!
Don’t rush me.” Kent hurried to open the door.
Every time, Niu Niu didn’t come back alone.
Once, Kent had been slow to open the door, and a wild ox had burst straight through it.
The wild oxen here were more than twice the size of an Earth elephant.
That was why Kent had been forced to move into a cave at the foot of the slope.
So this time, he made sure to reach the door quickly.
“Took you long enough!” Kent swung open the plank door to the cave and found himself staring at a wolf the size of a calf, its fur a pale cyan.
Niu Niu popped out from behind the wolf’s ear.
A bundle was strapped to the wolf’s back.
The moment Niu Niu flew through the doorway, the wolf vanished like a shot, disappearing into the distance.
Anyone in the know would have recognized it immediately as a Wind Wolf—the most troublesome of all rank-four magical beasts, capable of taking on a rank-five beast all by itself.
“I just finished meditating—that’s why I was late.” Kent felt a pang of injustice, but what could he do?
He remembered the time he’d tried to ask, all tactfully, how to make a wild ox obey.
Niu Niu had simply clenched her tiny fist and answered cheerfully: “Beat it!” Kent had nearly collapsed on the spot, wailing at the sheer difference between his scrawny frame and that ox.
From that day on, he never dared to defy Niu Niu—even though she was still only palm-sized.
But fighting ability seemed to have nothing to do with size.
A pistol is small, a greatsword is big, and poor Kent was that greatsword being bossed around by a pistol.
“Can you cast magic yet?” Niu Niu asked, hovering casually by Kent’s shoulder.
She was holding a fruit larger than herself in one hand, munching away as she waited for his answer.