Roasting a pound of live Abyssal Rot-Beetle Larvae in a closed cast-iron Dutch oven at seven in the morning should have smelled like a war crime.
Fortunately, when you threw in three sprigs of dried rosemary, a crushed stick of cinnamon, and let Pip vent the exhaust straight up the tall brick chimney at three hundred degrees Celsius, the resulting aroma was surprisingly pleasant—somewhere between toasted hazelnuts and a campfire in an orchard.
I stood at the stone workbench in my clean linen shirt and apron, using my heavy stone pestle to grind the brittle, blackened beetle carapaces into a fine, glittering violet-black powder.
Across the room, sitting at the small wooden table beside the hearth, Seraphina was eating her way through a stack of four buttered buckwheat pancakes drizzled with wild clover honey, while Tax Evasion sat politely on the stool beside her waiting for his mandatory corner crust.
“Did you sleep at all after two o’clock?” Seraphina asked, cutting a neat triangle of pancake and offering it to the cat on the flat of her fork.
“Like a baby with six hundred gold crowns under her mattress,” I said cheerfully, scraping the shimmering Mana-Eating Ash into a velvet-lined wooden box. “Though I did wake up at six when the milkman came down Bramble Lane. Apparently, the Night Watch caught two glowing blue goblins sneezing blood outside the Rose Spire gates at two-thirty in the morning, and only refrained from shooting them with crossbows because one of them was wearing Senior Apprentice Vane’s signet ring.”
Seraphina’s mouth curved into that quiet, warm half-smile that had become a regular fixture over the past forty-eight hours. “The Wardens detained them?”
“Released them into Master Corvus’s custody at dawn,” I replied, picking up a small, round ceramic ointment jar and filling it to the brim with a thick, foul-smelling greenish-yellow paste I had whipped up on the side burner before making the pancake batter. “Which means right about now, Corvus is locked inside the back room of the Academy Infirmary, desperately trying to scrub hydrophobic blue lichen dye off his star pupils using standard Temple purifying soap.”
“Which won't work,” Seraphina noted.
“Which will actually set the stain deeper into their pores because Temple soap is alkaline,” I corrected with deep professional satisfaction. I pressed a cork lid onto the ceramic jar of greenish paste, tied it with a neat little pink silk ribbon left over from Evelyn’s old hair accessories, and tucked it into a small wicker gift basket alongside the rusty iron crowbar Vane’s accomplice had dropped in our mud alley.
[Alchemist’s Appraisal (Lv. 4) — Active]
[Item Crafted: Concentrated Porcine-Vinegar Scrub (1 Jar)]
[Quality: Copper-Tier (100% Chemical Efficacy)]
[Ingredients: Boiled Cider Vinegar, Rendered Pig Bile, Crushed Pumice Grit, and zero fragrance oils whatsoever.]
[Effects:
Instantly dissolves Silver-Tier hydrophobic lichen resin upon contact.
Side Effect: Causes the user to smell intensely of pickled slaughterhouse offal for 72 hours. Cannot be masked by cologne.]
“How is your shoulder feeling?” I asked, glancing at her left arm as she stood up to carry her empty plate to the washbasin.
Seraphina rolled her left shoulder in a full, wide circle—no stiffness, no hesitation. Earlier this morning, when I had unwrapped the linen bandage to check the three Rift-Stalker gashes, the deep muscle tears had already knitted into thin, faded pink lines thanks to the combined regeneration of the nettle salve and her expanded meridians. She didn't even need the wrap anymore.
“Completely healed,” she said, drying her hands on the dish towel and reaching for the dark wooden hilt of the Ashen Bough hanging by the stairs. “Are we taking that basket to the Infirmary ourselves, or hiring a courier?”
“Oh, we are delivering this in person,” I said, slipping my arms into a light wool riding jacket and picking up the wicker basket. “If you let someone try to burn down your greenhouse on Friday night and don't show up at their desk on Saturday morning to ask how their weekend is going, they think you’re scared of them. Besides, Saturday morning at nine o’clock is when the Student Council and the Guild liaisons hold their weekly supply audit in the Infirmary atrium.”
Seraphina buckled her sword belt around her waist, her slate-gray eyes glinting with quiet anticipation. “You want witnesses.”
“I always want witnesses, Seraphina. Witnesses are how we keep our legal fees at zero.”
Saturday mornings on the main campus of the Royal Academy were a completely different world from the muddy, bustling chaos of the Lower Merchant Quarter.
As we walked up the wide white-marble steps leading into the Central Academic Quadrangle, the autumn sun was gleaming off manicured boxwood hedges, floating crystal fountains, and statues of dead emperors. Dozens of students in weekend dress uniforms were strolling along the colonnades, enjoying their morning off from lectures.
Three days ago, when I had walked out of the Grand Atrium after dumping Prince Julian, the whispers following me had been shrill, scandalized, and gleeful—vultures watching a disgraced noblewoman fall into the gutter.
Today, as Seraphina and I crossed the courtyard side by side, the reaction was markedly different.
A trio of third-year combat cadets jogging past the fountain spotted us first. It was Thomas—the lanky boy with the formerly bruised jaw—and two of his squadmates. Instead of sneering or looking away, Thomas immediately snapped his spine straight and offered me a deeply respectful nod, while his friends stared openly at the dark wooden sword hanging at Seraphina’s hip before hurriedly clearing a six-foot path for us on the pavement.
Ten paces further on, near the steps of the library, four first-year girls from the Rose Spire—all of them sporting luminous, poreless, completely rash-free complexions—spotted my wicker basket and broke into eager, conspiratorial whispers, waving politely over their silk fans.
“You have a strange reputation now,” Seraphina observed quietly as we mounted the wide granite steps of the West Wing Infirmary. “Half the campus looks at you like you’re a crime lord, and the other half looks at you like you’re the Tooth Fairy.”
The Infirmary’s main reception hall was a cavernous, sterile room tiled in white marble, smelling heavily of bleached linen, burnt sage, and overpriced rubbing alcohol.
And right in the centre of the room, standing around the circular mahogany reception desk, was the exact audience I had hoped for.
Chief Bursar Master Barnaby was standing with a thick leather ledger tucked under his arm, waiting patiently with a fountain pen in hand. Across from him stood Prince Julian Solaris—dressed in his weekend white-and-gold student council sash—flanked by a sour-faced, red-eyed Master Corvus in his midnight-blue Guild robes.
Behind Corvus, sitting miserably on a wooden bench outside the quarantine curtain with wet, soapy towels draped over their heads like disgraced bridal veils, were Senior Apprentice Vane and his junior accomplice.
Even beneath the towels, the lower halves of their chins and their tightly clenched hands were glowing a brilliant, unmistakable cobalt blue. Every thirty seconds or so, a muffled, synchronized “ACHOO!” echoed from beneath the damp terrycloth.
“—simply unacceptable, Master Corvus!” Julian was saying sharply as the heavy doors clicked shut behind us. “The Student Council allocates four hundred gold crowns a month to the Infirmary for weekend tournament prep, and two of your senior dispensers are incapacitated by some mysterious forest rash?”
“It is an anomalous fungal spore from the outer greenhouse beds, Your Highness,” Corvus said through gritted teeth, his knuckles white against the edge of the mahogany desk. There was a bright blue smudge of lichen dye stained right across the cuff of his own pristine velvet sleeve where he had clearly tried to scrub Vane’s face earlier. “Once the Guild receives the supplemental budget for High-Tier Purifying Salts—”
“Actually, purifying salts won’t touch a hydrophobic Ghost-Cap resin binder,” I called out pleasantly, my leather boots clicking briskly across the white marble tiles as Seraphina and I strolled right up to the reception desk. “You could soak them in blessed cathedral water until midwinter and they’ll still look like a pair of frostbitten smurfs.”
All three men around the desk froze.
On the bench behind them, both wet towels twitched violently upward. One bloodshot, neon-blue eyeball peeked out from beneath Vane’s towel, spotted me and Seraphina, and immediately let out a terrified whimper before yanking the cloth back down over his nose.
Master Barnaby adjusted his brass spectacles, looking from the glowing blue apprentices on the bench, to the blue smudge on Corvus’s sleeve, and finally down to the wicker gift basket in my hands. The old Bursar’s mouth remained completely flat, though the crinkles around his eyes deepened suspiciously.
“Lady Vance,” Julian snapped, his posture stiffening instantly as his gaze flicked between me and Seraphina standing half a pace behind my left shoulder. “This is an official Student Council and Guild supply audit! Civilian merchants from the outer district are not permitted in the administrative wing without a summons!”
“I’m not here on council business, Your Highness. I’m here performing a civic neighborly duty,” I said, setting the wicker basket down right in the middle of the mahogany desk with a heavy, metallic clunk.
I folded back the checkered gingham cloth covering the basket and pulled out the two-foot iron pry-bar—which still had Senior Apprentice Vane’s initials (S.V. - Infirmary #3) stamped neatly into the iron handle—and laid it on the polished wood directly in front of Master Barnaby’s ledger.
“Someone accidentally dropped this right beneath my back conservatory window around two-fifteen this morning,” I said, my voice ringing clearly across the quiet marble hall. “Right next to a one-pound burlap sack of live Abyssal Rot-Beetle larvae and rock salt. Can you imagine, Master Barnaby? If those poor, lost apprentices hadn't accidentally stepped into my patch of experimental blue garden fertilizer in the dark and fled back up the hill, all those illegal, Guild-restricted blight beetles might have crawled right into my nettle beds!”
Dead silence descended on the reception hall.
Julian looked down at the iron pry-bar stamped with the Infirmary’s serial code, then slowly turned his head to stare at Master Corvus and the two shivering blue figures under the towels.
Julian was pompous, self-righteous, and hopelessly romantic, but unlike Corvus, he actually believed in his own shiny golden-boy chivalry. He had thought Evelyn Vance was a petty bully; discovering that his own royal apothecary had sent two thugs in the middle of the night to dump illegal agricultural blight into a girl’s greenhouse was visibly making his stomach turn.
“Master Corvus,” Julian said, his voice dropping an octave as the aristocratic colour drained from his cheeks. “Tell me right now why an Infirmary pry-bar was found on Bramble Lane alongside restricted blight larvae.”
Corvus’s face went clammy, sweat beading along his hairline as he glared at me with pure, trapped hatred.
“A—a blatant fabrication, Your Highness!” Corvus stammered, though his voice lacked its usual oily confidence. “That tool was reported missing from the storage shed three days ago! Clearly, Miss Vance stole it herself to frame the Guild after I warned her about her unlicensed liniment yesterday!”
“Oh, I didn't say your apprentices dropped it, Master Corvus,” I replied with wide-eyed, angelic innocence. “After all, it was pitch black outside! It could have been anyone who crept into my alley, triggered twelve decibels of pressurized Cinder-Capsaicin and permanent blue night-lichen, and then ran screaming past the Night Watch gatehouse leaving size-ten bootprints full of Bramble Lane clay.”
I reached back into the wicker basket, pulled out the small ceramic jar tied with the pink silk ribbon, and set it gently beside the crowbar.
“However,” I continued smoothly, “since I heard a rumour from the milkman that two members of the Infirmary staff happened to contract a completely unrelated, mysterious blue fungal rash at two-thirty this morning, I brought over a jar of the only chemical solvent capable of dissolving hydrophobic Ghost-Cap resin before next month.”
I tapped the pink ribbon on the jar lid.
“Concentrated Porcine-Vinegar Scrub,” I announced to the room. “Normally, I’d charge fifty gold crowns for a custom alchemical neutralizer. But since Master Barnaby is standing right here with the Infirmary’s monthly budget ledger, I’m willing to donate this jar to the Academy out of the goodness of my heart—in exchange for a formal, stamped waiver exempting the Bramble Lane Apothecary from all local Guild inspections for the remainder of the academic year.”
Corvus choked on his own spit. “An inspection waiver?! Outrageous! I am a Master of the Imperial Guild—”
“ACHOO! Master Corvus, please, my eyelids are glued together!” Vane wailed from beneath his wet towel on the bench, clutching his glowing blue ears in sheer agony. “Give her the paper! It burns!”
With the practiced efficiency of a bureaucrat who had already seen enough nonsense before ten o’clock on a Saturday, the Chief Bursar pulled a blank sheet of official ivory parchment from his portfolio, ticked three boxes with his fountain pen, and stamped the bottom with the heavy brass seal of the Royal Treasury.
“One annual Guild Inspection Exemption for Property 14-B, citing conflict of interest between local chapter officers and independent campus contractors,” Barnaby recited dryly, sliding the crisp parchment across the mahogany desk toward me. “And I will be deducting forty gold crowns from the Infirmary’s quarterly discretionary fund to cover municipal hazardous-waste cleanup along Bramble Lane. Do you have any objections, Master Corvus? Or shall we ask the Night Watch captain to bring over the plaster casts of those bootprints?”
Corvus looked at the stamped paper, looked at Prince Julian’s cold, disgusted glare, and looked at Seraphina—who hadn't said a single word, just stood calmly beside me with her thumb resting on the dark root-guard of her wooden sword, looking ready to turn the mahogany desk into kindling if Corvus raised his voice by one more decibel.
“No objections,” Corvus hissed, the words tasting like broken glass in his mouth as he snatched the pink-ribboned ceramic jar off the desk.
“Pleasure doing business with you all,” I said brightly, tucking the precious inspection waiver safely into the inside pocket of my wool jacket and swinging my empty wicker basket onto my arm. “Oh—and Master Corvus? Apply that paste in a well-ventilated courtyard, and don't let them stand near open flames or stray dogs for three days. Pig bile has a very robust bouquet once it warms up.”
We made it all the way down the marble steps of the Infirmary and halfway across the sunlit grass of the quadrangle before the loud, horrified shrieks of someone uncorking boiled slaughterhouse offal indoors echoed faintly from an upper-story window behind us.
Simultaneously, a soft golden chime rang inside my head, accompanied by a warm surge of system energy that made my fingertips tingle.
[Quest / Milestone Complete: "Regulatory Capture"]
[You have successfully defeated a Guild-sanctioned sabotage attempt using pure Alchemical Warfare without drawing steel or losing a single herb!]
[Hidden Class Prerequisite Met: "Heretical Apothecary" (2/3 Conditions Fulfilled).]
[Final Requirement to Unlock Class: Brew and stabilize a Mythril-Tier (or wholly unrecorded) concoction before the Autumn Equinox.]
[Passive Skill Level Up! Alchemist’s Appraisal (Lv. 4 → Lv. 5)]
[New Appraisal Sub-Feature Unlocked: "Molecular Echo" — Allows the user to trace the geographical origin or handling history of any alchemical substance within 24 hours of contact.]
I stopped walking near the edge of the central fountain, blinking slightly as the new layer of sensory information settled behind my violet eyes.
Beside me, Seraphina paused, glancing down at my face. “That look again.”
“What look?”
“The one you get right before you tell me a weed in the ditch is worth sixty gold crowns,” she said, shifting into the shade of a marble pillar as a group of second-years walked past. “Did you figure out a new potion?”
“Better,” I murmured, looking back toward the Infirmary windows where Master Corvus was undoubtedly gagging into his velvet sleeve.
When I had set the ceramic jar down on the mahogany desk three minutes ago, my newly upgraded Level 5 Appraisal had briefly brushed against a tiny, dried fleck of dark crimson powder caught beneath the silver rim of Corvus’s spectacles.
With [Molecular Echo] kicking in retroactively, a single line of red warning text was still hovering faintly in the corner of my vision:
[Trace Substance Detected on Target (Corvus): Refined Blood-Lotus Ash]
[Origin: Smuggled from the Southern Quarantine Zone. Used exclusively to mask the smell of decaying Rift-Corrupted tissue.]
In Crown of Thorns, the Demon Cult didn't breach the Academy catacombs until November.
Yet Master Corvus—the personal physician to House Redgrave and head of the campus infirmary—already had smuggled Blood-Lotus ash on his fingers on the first Saturday of September.
I kept my face relaxed and sunny as I turned back to Seraphina, letting the dark thought file itself neatly into the back of my mental ledger for later. There was no need to ruin a perfectly good Saturday morning when we had six hundred gold in the bank and an entire week before the Equinox Ball.
“Just thinking about what to make with that violet beetle ash sitting on our workbench,” I told her lightly, reaching out to tug gently on the cuff of her sleeve as we headed back toward the path down to Bramble Lane. “Come on, Head of Security. Let’s go stop by the butcher’s stall for some ribeye steaks—we just saved forty gold in yearly inspection bribes, and I feel like celebrating.”
Seraphina fell into step beside me, her shoulder brushing comfortably against mine as the marble spires of the upper campus gave way to the green, shaded peace of our lane.
“Rare or medium-rare?” she asked quietly.
“Medium-rare with garlic butter,” I replied. “And Tax Evasion gets his own saucer of gravy so he stops staring at your fork.”