“Tell me the truth,” I said, pointing an iron skillet at Seraphina across the workshop table. “Do they actually feed you in the scholarship dormitory, or do they just lock you all in a basement with a sack of turnips and a dull spoon?”
Seraphina paused with a crusty wedge of buttered sourdough halfway to her mouth. Sitting on the wooden stool beside my alchemical workbench, with Tax Evasion curled into a heavy, purring cinnamon roll across her lap, she looked far less like the Empire’s future war god and much more like a stray wolf pup that had accidentally wandered into a bakery.
“The commissary serves mutton stew until seven,” she said defensively, though she didn’t lower the bread. “After seven, only the cold oat gruel is left. And if you stay at the training grounds until the curfew bell to use the heavy sandbags, you get the gruel.”
“Cold oat gruel,” I repeated with a shudder, turning back to the cast-iron stove where Pip was happily regulating a low, golden cooking flame beneath my skillet. “No wonder you were hunting Grade-3 ambush predators on a Tuesday night. You weren’t grinding for combat experience; you were hangry.”
“I wasn’t—” Seraphina started, before her stomach let out a traitorous, audible rumble at the smell of thick-cut smoked bacon, caramelized onions, and rosemary potatoes sizzling in the pan. Her ears turned faintly pink beneath her silver hair, and she took a fierce, silent bite of her bread to end the conversation.
I hid my smile and divided the skillet contents onto two chipped ceramic plates I had rescued from the upstairs cupboard.
Strictly speaking, Evelyn Vance had never boiled an egg in her life. Before Tuesday, her idea of culinary effort had been ringing a silver handbell when her tea dropped below seventy degrees. Fortunately, forty years of modern muscle memory from my previous life—combined with an alchemy skill that gave me instinctive down-to-the-second control over thermal browning and fat rendering—meant I could fry a mean skillet of campfire hash.
I set the fuller plate down in front of Seraphina, poured two mugs of hot apple cider spiced with a bruised stick of cinnamon, and pulled up the spare stool across from her.
For the first three minutes, there was no banter at all. Just the steady, methodical clink of Seraphina’s fork against the ceramic plate and the soft crackle of Pip eating leftover charcoal crusts in the firebox.
I ate at a more leisurely pace, resting my chin in my palm as I watched her. Even when practically inhaling her dinner, Seraphina had the tidy, economical posture of a career soldier—back straight, elbows tucked in, never taking her eyes completely off the door.
Yet every thirty seconds or so, her left hand would drop unconsciously to stroke the marmalade cat’s striped back, making sure she didn’t accidentally jostle him off her knees.
“You know,” I remarked around a sip of cider, “if Prince Julian walked in right now and saw the fierce, untouchable Lady Valerius serving as a heated cushion for a twenty-pound alley cat, I think his head would actually explode.”
Seraphina swallowed a bite of rosemary potato and looked down at the cat. “He was cold. The stone floor by the door has a draft.”
“He has three inches of winter fur and steals bacon off the counter when I’m not looking,” I pointed out. “He’s playing you, Seraphina. Next week he’ll have you carrying him to your morning sword drills in a velvet basket.”
“He’s polite,” she countered flatly, scratching Tax Evasion under the chin until his back leg thumped against her thigh. “He doesn’t talk during meals, and he didn’t charge me five silver for bleeding on the rug.”
“Touché,” I laughed, collecting our empty plates and dropping them into the washbasin. “Alright. Now that you have actual calories in your bloodstream instead of commissary wallpaper paste, let’s talk about the four-hundred-gold-crown elephant sitting in your canvas sack.”
I walked over to the workbench and lifted the massive, dinner-plate-sized Elder Hydro-Spirit Cap out of the damp fern fronds, setting it carefully onto a slab of clean white slate.
In the dim evening light of the glasshouse, the giant mushroom was mesmerizing. Its wide, fluted cap was translucent as blown glass, pulsing with slow, rhythmic waves of deep cerulean blue light that made the air around our fingers feel cool and crisp, like standing at the base of a mountain waterfall.
Seraphina gently lifted Tax Evasion onto the warm wool blanket covering my spare crate and stood up to join me at the table.
“I knew it was an old growth because the Bog-Lurkers had built their nest around the roots,” she said, looking down at the glowing blue fungus. “The third-years usually sell rare specimens like this to the Alchemy Guild branch in the Upper Quarter. How many bottles of bruise liniment can you make from it?”
“Bruise liniment?” I stared at her in mock horror. “Seraphina, using a fifty-year Elder Spirit Cap to make topical bruise oil is like melting down the Imperial Crown to make horseshoes. This isn't for the third-year meatheads. And it’s definitely not for the Rose Spire girls.”
I tapped my fingernail lightly against the glowing blue rim of the mushroom cap.
[Alchemist’s Appraisal (Lv. 3) — Active]
[Available Gold-Tier Recipe Unlocked: "Draught of the Abyssal Tide"]
[Primary Catalyst: 1x Elder Hydro-Spirit Cap + 3x Grade-3 Bog-Lurker Cores**]**
[Brewing Difficulty: Master (Requires dual-phase thermal extraction and live Aura grounding).]
[Effect: Permanently expands and reinforces the drinker’s secondary mana meridians by 18%. Permanently increases baseline Stamina Recovery by +25% and grants passive [Cold-Water Lung] resistance.]
[Note: Can only be consumed once per lifetime. Second doses yield simple mana restoration.]
In Crown of Thorns, permanent stat-boosting elixirs were the holy grail of character progression. Normally, you couldn't brew a Draught of the Abyssal Tide until late in Act Two, after bribing the Black Market Alchemist in the capital with three thousand gold crowns and a rare dungeon scroll.
And Seraphina had just casually dropped the exact raw materials onto my floor on Day Three of the first semester. New chapters come out on g.com first.
“This,” I said, pulling my heavy copper alembic toward the center of the workbench and uncorking a bottle of triple-distilled grain spirit, “is going to become two doses of a Gold-Tier Meridian Expansion Elixir. One for me, so my lungs don't collapse the next time I have to jog up Bramble Lane, and one for you.”
Seraphina frowned slightly. “My meridians don't need alchemy, Evelyn. The examiners said my vessel is already naturally wide. Sell both doses to the high nobles—you could buy out the deed to this entire street.”
“Your primary channels are wide,” I corrected, turning to face her and tapping two fingers lightly against the center of her breastbone, right above her solar plexus. “Which is why you can dump an absurd amount of raw kinetic aura into a single sword swing. Meanwhile, your secondary capillary channels—the little ones that circulate mana back into your muscles after a heavy strike—are starved and narrow from ten years of border-garrison malnutrition.”
Seraphina went very still, looking down at my fingers resting against her linen shirt.
“Have you ever noticed,” I continued quietly, dropping my hand back to the workbench, “that after fifteen minutes of high-intensity fighting, your lungs feel like you’re breathing broken glass and your fingers go ice-cold? Even when you still have plenty of aura left in your core?”
Her gray eyes widened by a fraction of an inch. She hadn't told anyone about that. In the game’s lore, it was Seraphina’s hidden debuff during all of Year One—[Vessel Overload]—a congenital bottleneck that caused her own immense power to tear at her internal organs whenever a boss fight dragged past ten turns. She didn't cure it in the original timeline until she nearly died during the Winter Catacomb raid.
“How do you know that?” she whispered.
“Because I’m a very good alchemist, and you’re a very bad liar when your hands are cold,” I said briskly, picking up a heavy silver scalpel to begin slicing the glowing Spirit Cap into paper-thin ribbons. “If I sell this mushroom to some duke’s son, I get four hundred gold crowns that I don't even need right now. If I feed it to my Head of Security, she stops slowly suffocating herself every time she fights a Grade-3 monster. From a purely corporate standpoint, fixing your lungs has a much higher return on investment.”
For a long beat, Seraphina didn't say a word. She just stood beside the stone table, watching the blue light of the sliced fungus reflect across my violet eyes and the focused set of my jaw.
“You have a very strange definition of corporate,” she murmured finally.
“Keep talking and I’ll leave out the peppermint,” I warned, dropping the translucent blue ribbons into the glass boiling flask of the copper alembic. “Now take off your sword and roll up your right sleeve. This isn't a beginner’s boil—I need your aura to keep the Bog-Lurker cores from shattering the glass.”
Brewing a Gold-Tier elixir in a makeshift glasshouse at nine o'clock at night was less like cooking and more like defusing an arcane bomb.
While ordinary herbs released their properties under simple heat, Grade-3 monster cores hated being dissolved. The moment I dropped the three crystalline purple Bog-Lurker Cores into the flask alongside the glowing mushroom ribbons, the liquid inside began to thrash violently, slamming against the thick borosilicate glass with the force of trapped thunder.
“Pip, hold the firebox at exactly four hundred degrees—do not let the flame flicker!” I ordered, my hands braced on the brass condenser valves as the copper pipes above the flask began to groan and vibrate. “Seraphina, now! Press your palm against the copper cooling jacket and feed it a steady pulse of uncompressed aura. Imagine you’re holding down a bucking horse!”
Seraphina didn't hesitate. Stepping up right behind my left shoulder, she planted her bare right palm flat against the vibrating copper cylinder of the condenser coil.
A sharp, silver-white halo of kinetic aura flared around her forearm.
Instead of slashing or crushing, she used her energy like a heavy, immovable iron weight, wrapping her aura around the trembling copper pipes to contain the chaotic pressure of the dissolving monster cores.
I was standing so close to her front that I could feel the sudden spike in her body heat against my shoulder blades, and hear the low, steady rhythm of her breathing right beside my ear.
“Too much pressure on the upper valve!” I called out over the high-pitched whine of pressurized steam, reaching up with my left hand to grab her wrist and guide her palm two inches lower on the copper cylinder. “Soften it by ten percent—let the vapour rise into the spiral coil, just don't let it expand!”
Beneath my fingers, the tendons in Seraphina’s wrist were taut as bowstrings, humming with raw, terrifying power. Yet at the touch of my hand, she adjusted her output instantly, matching the tiny, guiding thread of my fire mana with seamless, instinctual precision.
For six excruciating minutes, we stood locked together at the workbench—my fire mana heating the base flask to the exact molecular boiling point, her silver aura caging the upper condenser so the volatile Liquid Ether had nowhere to go except down the spiral cooling tube.
Drop by agonizing drop, a thick, luminescent liquid the colour of midnight sapphire began to trickle from the end of the copper spout into two waiting crystal vials.
With each drop that fell, the air in the workshop grew heavier and sweeter, smelling of ozone, crushed pine needles, and deep ocean rain.
When the final drop cleared the spout and the three monster cores inside the boiling flask dissolved into harmless white chalk dust, I yanked the pressure release lever and killed my mana flow.
“Clear!” I gasped, my knees sagging slightly as the acute mental strain of holding a Master-rank transmutation hit me all at once.
I didn't hit the stone edge of the table. Before I could even stumble half an inch backward, Seraphina’s left arm came securely around my waist, catching my weight against her side as effortlessly as she had caught the fifty-pound crate that morning.
For a few seconds, neither of us moved.
The workshop was dead quiet save for the gentle ticking of cooling copper pipes and the soft patter of night mist against the glass roof above us. My back was pressed squarely against her front; I could feel the rapid, solid thud of her heartbeat through my linen shirt, and her hand resting warm and steady against my hip where that awful whalebone corset had been forty-eight hours ago.
[Masterpiece Alchemy Success!]
[Item Crafted: Draught of the Abyssal Tide (2 Doses)]
[Quality: Gold-Tier (97% Purity — Dual-Resonance Bonus Applied)]
[Bonus Effect Unlocked: Because this elixir was stabilized using combined Fire Mana and Martial Aura, the harsh metabolic fever normally caused by Meridian Expansion has been completely eliminated.]
[Skill Level Up! Alchemist’s Appraisal (Lv. 3 -> Lv. 4)]
[Permanent Stat Increase Available upon Consumption.]
I cleared my throat softly, reaching out with a slightly unsteady hand to pick up the two glowing sapphire vials from the collection rack.
“Ninety-seven percent purity,” I said, tilting my head back slightly to look up at her from the circle of her arm. “Not bad for a disgraced noblewoman and a security guard who works for tea.”
Seraphina looked down at me. Up close, in the deep blue glow of the twin vials, her slate-gray eyes looked almost silver. Slowly, reluctantly, she loosened her hold around my waist, though she stayed standing close enough that our sleeves brushed.
“Is it supposed to glow like that?” she asked quietly.
“Only when you do it right,” I said, pulling the corks from both vials and handing one to her. “Bottoms up, Lady Valerius. Let’s see what eighteen percent more breathing room feels like.”
I tapped the rim of my crystal vial against hers with a tiny, musical clink, and drank mine in a single swallow.
Beside me, Seraphina tipped her head back and drained hers to the last drop.
It didn't taste like peppermint this time. It felt like swallowing a mouthful of liquid starlight—freezing cold on the tongue, then blooming into a deep, resonant warmth the moment it hit my chest.
I closed my eyes, letting out a long, shivering breath as the uncompressed Liquid Ether flooded through my tight, sedentary noblewoman’s meridians. I could literally feel the narrow, dormant channels along my ribs and lungs opening up like dry riverbeds meeting the spring thaw, washing away the lingering sluggishness of Evelyn Vance’s neglected body.
Beside me, Seraphina let out a soft, startled gasp.
A faint, shimmering wave of pure silver mist rose from the collar of her shirt and the tips of her hair as ten years of microscopic internal scarring and mana-channel constriction dissolved in less than five heartbeats. When she inhaled again, the breath went all the way down—deep, silent, and completely effortless.
She opened her eyes and looked down at her hands, turning her palms over in the lantern light. The perpetual, icy pallor around her knuckles was gone, replaced by a steady, healthy warmth.
“My chest,” Seraphina whispered, pressing a hand lightly over her breastbone in quiet astonishment. “The pressure... it’s always been there since I was twelve. I thought everyone felt like they were breathing through iron mesh when they channelled aura.”
“Not anymore,” I said, leaning my hip against the workbench and smiling warmly at her as the distant ten-o'clock curfew bell began to toll across the dark campus. “Though since it’s officially past curfew and the Wardens double their patrols on Thursday nights, I’m afraid you’re stuck sleeping on the spare cot in the conservatory storage room tonight.”
Seraphina blinked, tearing her gaze away from her warm hands to look toward the window, as if realizing for the first time that it was pitch black outside.
“I can slip past the second-year Wardens,” she offered, though there was zero urgency in her posture.
“You just expanded your secondary meridians by nearly twenty percent,” I said firmly, tossing a clean wool blanket and a spare pillow from the shelf straight into her arms. “If you run half a mile in the damp cold before the ether finishes settling by morning, you’ll get meridian cramps. The cot’s behind the rosemary pots, Pip keeps the glasshouse at a steady seventy degrees all night, and Tax Evasion already claimed the foot of the bed anyway.”
Seraphina looked down at the folded wool blanket in her arms, then over at the cozy, lantern-lit conservatory where the fat orange cat was already kneading the corner of the canvas cot.
For a girl who had spent the last five years sleeping on cold barracks floorboards with one hand on her sword hilt, the warm, herb-scented glasshouse might as well have been a royal palace.
“Thank you, Evelyn,” she said softly—and this time, the quiet warmth in her eyes didn't look like a rusty hinge at all. “Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, Seraphina,” I replied, picking up my ledger book as I headed toward the wooden stairs leading up to my loft bedroom. “Rest up. Once Lady Clara’s face clears up at breakfast tomorrow, half the noble girls in the Rose Spire are going to be banging on our front door by ten o'clock, and I’m going to need my bouncer in top form.”