Holding a tin funnel steady should not have required the intense, narrow-eyed focus of a master duellist facing down a cavalry charge, yet Seraphina treated the task like a matter of imperial security.
She sat on the tall wooden stool across from me at the stone workbench, her posture board-straight, holding the small tin cone over the mouth of an amber glass bottle with her left hand. Despite the three four-inch gashes beneath her linen bandage, her fingers didn't tremor by a hair’s breadth.
“You can blink, you know,” I murmured, using a glass pipette to draw a single, glistening black drop of Distilled Shadow-Palsy Extract from the mason jar. “If your eyes dry out and you sneeze into the carrier oil, we’ll both spend the afternoon numbly staring at the ceiling while Pip draws moustaches on our faces.”
From the mouth of the furnace, Pip let out an indignant squeak and held up a piece of birch charcoal as if to prove he only used it for professional heating purposes.
“I don’t sneeze on duty,” Seraphina replied quietly, her slate-gray eyes tracking the pipette as I positioned it above the large beaker of warmed sweet almond oil and crushed wintergreen leaves. “How can something that smells like candied mint paralyze a Wyvern?”
“The mint is just to keep the combat cadets from drinking it,” I said, squeezing the rubber bulb at the top of the pipette.
A single drop of midnight-black venom fell into the golden almond oil.
The moment it broke the surface, I tapped the side of the glass beaker with my silver stirring rod and pulsed a tiny, controlled spark of fire mana into the base. The black droplet fractured into a million microscopic threads, turning the warm oil a rich, translucent amethyst purple.
[Alchemy Success!]
[Item Crafted: Velvet-Numb Field Liniment (Batch of 20)]
[Quality: Silver-Tier (89% Purity)]
[Effects:
Topical application only. Absorbs through the skin in 10 seconds.
Reduces deep tissue bruising, bone-shock, and muscle tearing by 70%.
Grants the user [Iron Grip] for 2 hours: prevents weapon disarmament caused by nerve shock or wrist sprains.]
I carefully poured the warm purple oil down Seraphina’s funnel, filling the first amber bottle up to the neck before moving smoothly to the second.
By the time we corked and wax-sealed the twentieth bottle, the late-morning bell was chiming across the campus, marking the ten-minute break between morning physical conditioning and first-year magical theory.
“Don’t you have Introductory Mana Circulation in the East Hall?” I asked, wiping a smear of purple wax off my thumb with a rag.
“Exempted,” Seraphina said, setting the tin funnel down into the washbasin. “The combat examiners tested my core capacity during the scholarship trials. My internal channels are wide enough for physical reinforcement, not external spellcasting. Sitting in a lecture hall listening to nobles recite incantations in High Asterian is a waste of time.”
She was underselling it, of course. In Crown of Thorns, Seraphina possessed the congenital trait [Heavenly Martial Vessel]. She couldn't cast a simple fireball to save her life, which led the Academy professors to label her a magical dud during the first half of Year One. In reality, her body naturally compressed every drop of ambient mana she breathed into pure kinetic aura. Once she unlocked a weapon capable of conducting that aura, she could cleave through an enchanted castle gate in a single swing.
Speaking of her weapon.
My gaze drifted down to the standard-issue iron longsword leaning against the leg of her stool. Even nestled inside its cheap leather scabbard, my upgraded passive skill was practically screaming at me in tiny, irritating red letters.
[Alchemist’s Appraisal (Lv. 2) — Active]
[Item: Mass-Produced Academy Iron Longsword]
[Condition: 31% Durability (CRITICAL).] This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
[Structural Flaw: Forged from high-slag bog iron with zero mana conductivity. Three hairline stress fractures run horizontally across the tang beneath the leather hilt wrap. If subjected to one more high-impact Aura strike, the blade will snap at the crossguard.]
I frowned, wiping my hands dry on my apron and reaching down before I could stop myself. “May I?”
Seraphina blinked, looking down at my hand hovering over her hilt. For any front-line knight, letting someone else—especially a noblewoman who had technically been her enemy until yesterday evening—touch their blade was a massive breach of instinct.
She hesitated for less than a heartbeat before nodding once. “It’s clean. I oiled the edge after the rain.”
“It’s not the edge I’m worried about,” I muttered, lifting the heavy scabbard onto the stone workbench and drawing the blade three inches out of the throat.
Up close, the metal was dull, pitted grey iron, stamped with the serial number of the Academy quartermaster’s bulk bin. The leather wrapping around the grip was frayed where her palm pressed hardest, stained dark from weeks of sweat and sewer-tunnel blood.
I pressed my thumb against the flat of the crossguard and sent a tiny, harmless vibration of mana down into the tang.
A faint, hollow tick echoed from inside the wooden handle—the unmistakable sound of cracked metal grating against metal.
“Seraphina,” I said slowly, looking up at her across the workbench. “When were you planning on replacing this?”
“After the October rankings,” she answered, though she avoided my eyes slightly, looking over at the shelf where the marmalade cat was batting at a dried bundle of lavender. “The top ten students in the mid-autumn combat trials receive a voucher for the Academy Armoury. Until then, it holds an edge.”
“It’s not going to make it to October,” I said flatly, sliding the blade back into its sheath with a soft click. “It’s not going to make it to next Tuesday. You have three horizontal stress fractures running straight through the tang under the leather wrap. The only reason this thing didn't snap off in that Rift-Stalker’s skull last night is because you used a thrusting lunge instead of an overhead cleave.”
Seraphina’s expression went very still. “You can tell that just by looking at the crossguard?”
“I have an eye for structural integrity,” I lied smoothly, tapping my temple. “And basic physics. You’re channelling mid-tier combat aura through fifty-copper pig iron that has zero mana conductivity. Every time you reinforce this blade, your own energy is rebounding inside the handle and cooking the metal from the inside out. Next time you block a heavy weapon, the blade is going to shear right off the hilt and take your fingers with it.”
Silence settled over the workshop, broken only by the gentle bubble of rainwater simmering in the leftover glass beaker.
Seraphina looked down at the worn sword. Her right hand rose, her calloused fingertips resting lightly against the battered pommel. There was a quiet, stubborn bleakness in the curve of her shoulders that never showed up in the game’s third-person camera angles. In the RPG, when your starter weapon broke, a little red icon popped up and you clicked Repair for ten gold. You didn't have to watch an eighteen-year-old girl calculate whether she could afford both dinner and a piece of steel that wouldn't maim her.
“A mana-conductive steel broadsword from the Lower Quarter smithy costs thirty-five gold crowns,” Seraphina said quietly. “Even if I hunt every night after curfew, the Wardens only pay silver for Rift cores. I’ll adjust my fighting style. Less aura reinforcement, more footwork.”
“Right. Because fighting noble third-years who wear enchanted plate armour using pure footwork and a broken iron stick sounds like a great way to keep my only crate-carrier alive,” I sighed, turning away from the workbench to walk toward the dark, dusty storage alcove at the very back of the glasshouse.
When I had done my initial sweep of the property yesterday afternoon, I had noticed a tall, narrow oak wardrobe shoved behind three bags of petrified potting soil and a broken wheelbarrow. According to the game’s item map, the eccentric herbologist who used to rent Property 14-B hadn't just collected explosive amphibians; he had also hoarded oddities from the Southern Woods that he couldn't figure out how to distil.
I shoved the broken wheelbarrow aside with my boot, grabbed the brass handles of the wardrobe, and yanked the doors open.
Inside, buried beneath a moth-eaten wool cloak and six jars of pickled beetles, stood a long, unwrapped stave of pale, bone-white wood.
It wasn't a metal sword. It was a heavy, single-edged wooden training bokken—or rather, what looked like a wooden training sword carved from a single, seamless branch of petrified white ash, complete with a natural knot of twisted root forming a basket-like guard around the hilt.
[Alchemist’s Appraisal (Lv. 2) — Active]
[Category: Alchemical Catalyst / Exotic Weapon Blank]
[Lore: Carved by a wandering craftsman from a lightning-struck Ironwood tree deep in the Elder Rift. Left behind as firewood because conventional forge flames cannot burn or shape it.]
[Hidden Property: Currently brittle due to 40 years of dehydration. However, if soaked for 1 hour in boiling Linseed Oil infused with crushed Cinder-Berry seeds and Ash-Crest sap, the wood fibres petrify into Living Mythril-Grain—a material lighter than pine, harder than dwarf-forged steel, and possessing 98% Aura Conductivity.]
In Crown of Thorns, the Pale Ironwood Blade was a secret Act One Easter-egg weapon. Because it looked like a wooden practice sword, it bypassed the Academy’s strict rule forbidding first-year students from carrying live steel into standard duelling classes—while hitting with the raw kinetic force of a warhammer.
I pulled the pale wooden blade out of the wardrobe, blew forty years of dust off the smooth, bone-white grain, and carried it back over to the stone workbench.
“What is that?” Seraphina asked, her brow furrowing as I laid it down next to her chipped iron sword. “A sparring stick?”
“It’s Pale Ironwood,” I said, already reaching under the counter for my two-gallon cast-iron cauldron and a jug of raw linseed oil left behind by the previous tenant. “Right now, it’s a very dry, very expensive club. Give me forty-five minutes with the cauldron, two handfuls of green Cinder-Berries, and Pip on high heat, and it’ll cut your pig-iron sword in half without taking a scratch.”
Seraphina picked up the wooden blade by the twisted root-hilt. Even dry and dormant, the balance was extraordinary. She gave it a tiny, experimental flick of her wrist, her slate-gray eyes widening slightly as the pale wood hummed with a faint, hungry resonance against her natural aura.
“Ironwood from the Elder Rift costs more than a carriage,” she said, immediately setting it back down on the stone table as if it might burn her. “Evelyn, I already owe you forty gold on the ledger. I can’t pay for a relic like this.”
“Good thing I’m not selling it to you,” I said briskly, pouring half a gallon of amber linseed oil into the deep iron trough and nodding for Pip to ramp up the right-side burner. “I’m loaning it to you as mandatory company safety equipment. Wait until you see who just turned the corner onto Bramble Lane.”
Seraphina turned her head sharply toward the front shop window.
Coming down the drying cobblestones of the cul-de-sac was a brisk procession of seven combat cadets in dark blue training tunics, walking with the stiff, bow-legged gait of boys whose knees and shoulders had been thoroughly battered during morning drills. And marching right at the front of the pack, pointing enthusiastically toward my porch like a tour guide leading pilgrims to a holy shrine, was Lord Henrik of House Sterling—walking without a hint of a limp.
“Henrik told the entire third-year vanguard squad about the potion,” Seraphina murmured, her hand instinctively dropping back to her belt.
“Which means we’re about to sell twenty bottles of Velvet-Numb Field Liniment at five gold crowns a pop in the next fifteen minutes,” I said, uncorking a jar of crushed Cinder-Berry seeds and dumping them into the heating oil with a fragrant, nutty sizzle. “And since half of these noble muscle-heads don’t know how to take 'no refunds' for an answer without seeing an armed guard behind the counter, you just got promoted from Crate Carrier to Head of Store Security.”
I picked up the pale wooden sword, submerged it completely in the trough of simmering, mana-rich oil, and looked up at Seraphina with a crooked smile.
“Still think two silver an hour is a fair wage, Lady Valerius? Or should we renegotiate your sword lease once the customers clear out?”
Seraphina looked out the window at the approaching squad of upperclassmen, then down at the pale blade drinking in the glowing golden oil in the trough, and finally back to me.
Slowly, she stepped out from the back workshop, took up a relaxed, unshakeable guard stance right beside my cash box, and folded her arms across her chest.
“Keep the two silver,” Seraphina said, the faintest trace of amusement warming her cool gray eyes. “Just make sure the tea kettle stays full.”