Rain was hammering against the cracked glass panes of the conservatory by the time I slammed the back door shut and threw the iron bolt.
The temperature inside the workshop was dropping fast, bringing with it the damp, earthy chill of an autumn storm. Up front, the fat marmalade tomcat had relocated from the counter to a high wooden shelf, glaring down at me as if the weather were personally my fault.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I told him, dumping my heavy basket onto the stone workbench. “If I let the Heroine die in my backyard on lease-signing day, the Royal Inquisition will have this place cordoned off with ward-tape before breakfast.”
I didn’t have time to properly scrub the copper alembic with vinegar and salt. A Spined Rift-Stalker’s venom worked on a twenty-minute metabolic timer. First came localized numbness, then severe mana-channel constriction, and finally diaphragm paralysis. If Seraphina had taken a claw to the shoulder or leg out there in the dark, she had maybe fifteen minutes before her knees buckled in the mud.
I needed heat, I needed a stabilized carrier base, and I needed someone to pump the furnace bellows while I ground the reagents.
Wait. The furnace.
I crouched down in front of the cast-iron alchemical stove built into the brickwork beneath the workbench. Inside the dark firebox, buried beneath a pile of cold grey clinkers and snapped glass vials, something was faintly glowing.
It wasn't an ember. It was a pale, pulsing blue mana core the size of a walnut, wedged inside the chest cavity of a tiny, soot-blackened clay doll.
The doll was no taller than a teacup, shaped roughly like a squat, round-bellied owl with stubby arms instead of wings. One of its porcelain button eyes was cracked down the middle, and its left leg was stuck under a heavy iron grate. As I reached toward the stove, the little creature let out a frantic, high-pitched squeak like a stepped-on bellows and tried to bury its head in the ash.
[Alchemist’s Appraisal (Lv. 1) — Active]
[Entity: Defective Cinder- Sprite Homunculus (Unnamed)]
[Grade: Scrap / Abandoned Construct]
[Status: Mana-starved (4% Core Integrity), cracked chassis, terrified of loud noises.]
[Note: Created by the previous tenant to regulate furnace temperatures. Left behind after the roof explosion. Feeds on charcoal dust and raw fire-aligned mana.]
A Cinder-Sprite. In Crown of Thorns, unlocking an automated workshop assistant normally required completing a tedious three-part side quest for the Alchemy Guild in Act Two and paying five hundred gold for a binding crystal.
And the previous idiot had just left one wedged under a grate to starve.
“Hey there, little guy,” I murmured, softening my voice as I carefully lifted the heavy iron grate off its stubby clay leg. “Nobody’s going to blow up any fire-newt spleens tonight. Promise.”
The homunculus trembled, its single intact button eye fixed on my fingers.
Evelyn Vance’s original stats weren’t good for much in a sword fight, but she did possess a natural C-rank Fire Affinity. Slowly, I pressed my thumb against the faint blue core in the construct’s chest and exhaled, pushing a steady, gentle trickle of warm crimson mana from my meridians straight into its starved matrix.
I didn't force a master-servant blood contract. I just fed it.
The pale blue flicker inside its chest flared into a rich, cozy amber. The tiny clay body gave a full-body shudder, the hairline cracks along its porcelain glaze sealing shut with a faint hiss of warm steam.
[Construct Stabilized! Core Integrity: 85%.]
[The Cinder-Sprite Homunculus has imprinted on your mana signature. Loyalty: Maximum.]
The little owl-doll blinked its repaired eyes, looked down at its stubby hands, and then hopped straight onto my palm, rubbing its warm clay head against my wrist with a sound like purring gravel.
“I’m going to call you Pip,” I decided, setting him gently on the lip of the firebox. I grabbed two handfuls of dry birch charcoal from a bin under the table and tossed them into the stove, followed by a single unripe green Cinder-Berry. “Can you give me a steady six hundred degrees on the left burner, and a low sixty-degree simmer on the right? No spikes.”
Pip saluted with a stubby clay arm, hopped onto the charcoal pile, and inhaled deeply. When he exhaled, a clean, smokeless ribbon of blue-white flame curled around the underside of the cast-iron plates. Within ten seconds, the frost on the nearby windowpanes began to melt.
“Incredible,” I breathed. “You’re getting top-shelf anthracite for Christmas, Pip.”
Now for the real work.
I didn't have the materials for a traditional Royal Purging Draught—which required unicorn horn shavings and blessed spring water—so I was going to use an exploit recipe discovered by speedrunners on the old game forums: a Silver-Tier Meridian Flush, disguised as a basic stamina restorative.
I grabbed a clean glass beaker, filled it with fresh rainwater from the collection barrel outside the broken conservatory pane, and set it over Pip’s low-simmer burner.
While the water warmed toward sixty degrees, I snatched four pale Weeping Ghost-Caps from my basket and spread them across a flat iron pan directly above Pip’s high-heat vent.
Hiss.
Putrid, greyish-purple steam erupted from the mushrooms as the dormant toxins boiled off. I held my breath, counting the seconds in my head while watching the edges of the fungus curl.
One. Two. Three. Four.
Right as the grey steam turned clear and smelled faintly of wintergreen, I whipped the pan off the heat and dumped the brittle, flash-dried mushrooms into the stone mortar. Had I left them on the iron for two seconds longer, the Hydro-Ether would have evaporated into useless carbon.
I grabbed the heavy stone pestle and crushed the dried caps into a shimmering, silver-white powder.
Next, I took three stalks of Ash-Crest Nettle, stripped the serrated leaves, and bruised them alongside two peeled tubers of Bitter-Root Ginger.
By now, the rainwater in the glass beaker was releasing lazy wisps of vapour—sixty degrees Celsius on the dot. I dumped the bruised nettles and ginger into the water. Immediately, the liquid turned a murky, unappealing swamp-brown.
In a standard alchemy class at the Academy, this was the point where the instructor failed you.
Instead of stopping, I uncorked a dusty jar of dried peppermint leaves left behind on the spice rack, tossed a pinch into the murky water, and began stirring with a glass rod.
Three rotations clockwise. Pause for two heartbeats. One rotation counterclockwise.
As I stirred, I let a tiny thread of my own mana travel down the glass rod—not enough to heat the water, just enough to agitate the bruised ginger fibres. Slowly, I sprinkled the powdered Ghost-Cap into the vortex.
The reaction was instantaneous.
The murky swamp-brown sediment bound to the fungal powder and dropped like lead to the bottom of the beaker, leaving the liquid above it glowing with a soft, luminescent moonlight-silver clarity. The sharp, earthy smell of wet weeds vanished, replaced by the soothing aroma of warm mint, roasted ginger, and fresh snow.
Using a linen filter cloth, I strained the glowing liquid into three thick-walled crystal vials and plugged them with cork stoppers just as a soft golden chime echoed inside my head.
[Alchemy Success!]
[Item Crafted: Moon-Drop Restorative (Modified)]
[Quality: Silver-Tier (92% Purity)]
[Effects:
Instantly neutralizes Grade-3 and below neurotoxins and paralytic venoms.
Clears acute Mana-Channel Burnout.
Restores 35% Stamina and numbs peripheral nerve pain for 4 hours.
Flavor Profile: Crisp peppermint with a warm ginger finish.]
[Skill Level Up! Alchemist’s Appraisal (Lv. 1 -> Lv. 2)]
[New Recipe Recorded in Mental Codex.]
I held one of the vials up to the lantern light. Inside, tiny silver motes swirled lazily like captured starlight.
Cost of materials: zero copper.
Time to brew: eleven minutes.
Market value at the Royal Temple: easily forty gold crowns a bottle.
“Not bad for our first shift, Pip,” I said, setting two of the vials onto a wooden display rack and slipping the third into my apron pocket.
Pip let out a proud little whistle from the stove, banking his flames down to a cozy, crackling orange glow.
I walked back into the front shop, carrying a dry linen towel and an iron poker to prop the front door unlocked. Outside, the rain was coming down in torrential sheets, turning Bramble Lane into a river of mud and drowning out the distant chimes of the Academy’s evening curfew bell.
If I remembered the map layout correctly, anyone retreating from the Outer Rift Perimeter toward the student dormitories had to pass the foot of Bramble Lane. And if that person was currently losing feeling in their legs from Rift-Stalker venom, the warm orange lantern light spilling from my front window would be the only shelter for half a mile.
I set a kettle of plain water on the small hearth grate to boil for chamomile tea, leaned my elbows on the scarred wooden counter, and waited.
Three minutes passed. Then five.
Then, above the roar of the downpour, came the heavy, uneven scrape of a steel scabbard dragging against wet cobblestones.
A shadow fell across the rain-streaked glass of the front door. The brass handle rattled once, slipped as if the hand gripping it had lost its strength, and then the heavy oak door banged open against the interior wall.
Wind and rain swept across the floorboards.
Standing in the threshold was Seraphina Valerius.
She looked like she had been dragged through a thorn bush backward. Her silver ponytail was plastered to her neck and cheeks, her standard-issue wool uniform jacket was shredded across the left shoulder, and three jagged, purple-rimmed claw marks ran from her collarbone down toward her bicep. Her skin was deathly pale, slick with cold sweat and rainwater, and her left leg was trembling so violently she was using her unsheathed, blood-stained iron longsword as a crutch just to stay upright.
Around her waist, tied with a length of coarse hemp rope, hung the severed, dripping head of a fully grown Spined Rift-Stalker.
Seraphina blinked the rain out of her slate-gray eyes, her vision clearly blurring at the edges as the paralytic venom hit her bloodstream’s final stage. She looked at the warm hearth, then at the rows of apothecary drawers, and finally focused on my face behind the counter.
Recognition hit her like a physical blow.
Even half-paralyzed and shivering from shock, her muscle memory was terrifying. In less than a heartbeat, she kicked the door shut behind her back and raised the point of her notched iron sword until it was aimed squarely at my throat—though the tip wavered by a good two inches as her numb fingers struggled to hold the grip.
“Vance,” she rasped, her breathing shallow and ragged. A drop of diluted blood and black venom dripped from her elbow onto my floorboards. “What... what kind of trap is this?”
I looked at the severed monster head dripping mud onto my rug, looked at the wavering sword point, and calmly picked up the linen towel from the counter.
“First of all,” I said, tossing the towel squarely over her face so it draped across her soaked silver hair, “if you bleed Rift-Stalker venom onto my oak floorboards, it’s going to stain the grain, and I’m adding a five-silver cleaning fee to your tab. Second of all, your left deltoid is completely paralyzed, so if you try to lunge from that stance, you’re going to face-plant into my counter.”
Seraphina yanked the towel down around her neck with her good hand, her gray eyes wide and fierce, like a cornered wolf that couldn't figure out why the hunter wasn't shooting.
“This is an abandoned building,” she panted, her back pressed hard against the locked oak door as her knees visibly buckled an inch lower. “Why are you here?”
“Because I live here now. It’s an apothecary,” I said, reaching into my apron pocket and setting the glowing silver vial of Moon-Drop Restorative onto the counter with a crisp clink. “And you have about ninety seconds before that neurotoxin reaches your phrenic nerve and stops your lungs. So you can either stand by the door and suffocate to death out of noble pride, or you can sit on that stool, drink this, and argue with me once you can feel your toes again.”
Seraphina stared at the swirling silver liquid inside the crystal vial.
“Poison?” she whispered, though her chin was already dropping toward her chest as her stamina hit zero.
“Peppermint and ginger,” I corrected, walking around the edge of the counter.
Before she could muster the strength to swing the heavy iron blade, I stepped inside her guard, pressed two fingers gently against the flat of her sword to guide the tip down toward the floor, and caught her under her good arm just as her legs finally gave out completely.
She was heavier than she looked—all dense muscle and wet wool—and smelled like ozone, pine needles, and iron.
“Honestly, Lady Valerius,” I muttered, hauling the Empire’s future savior three steps across the room and dropping her onto the wooden stool beside the warm hearth. “Hunting Grade-3 ambush predators on the first night of term without a single antidote in your pouch? If I were still your rival, I’d be insulted by how easy you’re making this.”
“Shut... up,” Seraphina breathed, her head lolling sideways against the warm brick chimney as her fingers finally went slack around her sword hilt.
I uncorked the silver vial and held the rim to her pale, trembling lips. “Drink. And don't bite the glass, those vials cost me two copper each.”