D.E.M.O.N.S: Getting Summoned Weekly isn't so Bad

Chapter 2130: Chapter 2130 Advanced Alchemy Part 3

--- Kat ---

Things did not get easier from there as Appoline continued to introduce new ingredients. It showed that potion making could extend quite far and that the simple ’chuck in ingredients, break it down, ball it up’ idea Kat had of alchemy was horrifically wrong. Kat’s assumption had been that the difficulty came from needing to break increasingly complex ingredients down and separate the unwanted parts more delicately entwined with each other or something...

But while that was a factor you also had to ensure that the core you were building was solid, and that involved literally building around it. Sometimes including runic structures in the construction. Tweedle nearly lost her mind when Appoline considered this ’perfectly normal’ and ’not too hard’. Apparently it was meant to be the pinnacle of alchemy, something Appoline new was ludicrous. Putting on single rune in a layer really was the basics, even if Appoline couldn’t take it much further yet herself.

See, what you were doing was essentially turning the ingredients in the potion into a bit of a spell on their own. How that worked when you were smashing two cores together at the end Kat didn’t know but it did massively up the complexity of brewing. Creating the runes was one thing, but they were another push towards the essence ’exploding’ into some sort of magical effect and avoiding that was already a constant battle.

Even the very next step was annoying. It involved adding blood from an acidic beetle to one side, and blood from an axolotl monster that was called something weird for the other. The name was something like ’Endless Water Dragon’ for the axolotl, because it could regenerate forever and looked a little bit like a dragon. They weren’t all that scary though. Rank 2 but with some of the weakest attacks of the Rank and...

Kat shook her head, she was getting distracted with tangents. Ones that Appoline was mostly happy to indulge when she slowed down to process the ingredients. The double blood addition was rather swift, bother were added and converted to something reminiscent of chains around the cores, leaving clear gaps for other ingredients to latch onto later. It was the next step that took time.

Appoline pulled out an exploding crystal, something that wasn’t natural at all and was from a ’Gem Mite’. Dog sized crustacean adjacent things that lived underground and grew crystals over their back as a defence mechanism. They also exploded which was a real pain for miners that encountered them. Processing such a thing until it was usable in a potion was an exercise in patience.

You had to carefully grind down the crystal into a fine dust BUT if you put too much force into it? Explodes. Create a spark between the shaver and the crystal? Explodes. Sneeze and shake it too violently? Explodes. Use something softer then metal? That’s a risk of building up static electricity... and what happens when you build up a static charge on a volatile crystal thing? That’s right it explodes.

”Why are you doing this yourself?” asked Kat. ”Like, surely people have safe ways to grind those down and you’re just... risking it?” Appoline was after all, using a metal grater to grind down the crystal as it was more like a salt chunk then some kind of gemstone and reacted well to the shaving. For a given definition of ’well’ anyway. It seemed to flash violently on occasion.

”Oh that’s horrible dangerous as well. Like a flour explosion but MUCH worse,” explained Appoline. ”It’s much safer to transport in its crystal form.”

”It’s a crystal that explodes when you move it too much,” countered Kat.

”Yes, and in dust form it can crash into itself to catch fire and explode. You need to just about perfectly pack the jar you’re storing it in... but if you try to compress them down too much into it...” Appoline paused for jut a moment.

So Kat jumped in with a sigh. ”They explode?”

”Correct. The crystals at least can be stored somewhat safely,” Appoline pointed to the box she’d taken it out of. It was relatively small and lined with some sort of thick cotton material. ”Honestly the only reason I feel so safe doing this at the moment is that there isn’t really much wind ’outside’ considering we’re not really outside but under the city’s dome. Here it can float gently into the bowl, and the wind doesn’t move it around enough to spark it.

”Besides, I don’t need the full crystal for this one batch, might not even go through it all. So storing it back in the box is nice. I also don’t really trust people to give me the real dust. It’s hard to store, hard to grind, and really hard to differentiate from other ingredients in powder form without wasting it by setting it off. It can be especially bad if someone gives you a mixed batch to stretch their supply.” Appoline shook her head. ”Learnt that lesson the hard way,”

Once the grating was done, Appoline carefully placed a thin bit of cloth over the bowl to keep the dust inside and hopefully ensure it didn’t explode. Then she grabbed the second ingredient which looked to be a tongue of some kind... and just threw them both in. ”Wait where was the preparation?!” hissed Kat.

”That’s a hibiscus moth tongue and it dissolves in water,” explained Appoline.

”I feel like I have several more questions now... but I’m not going to ask,” sighed Kat.

”Good because the next step is a little complex. You have to guide the essence here to fill in the holes left in the previous step when adding it to the core... BUT you have to leave a spot open in each of the cardinal directions plus above and below. So six total should remain. If that’s all of the holes you left in your net in the previous step you didn’t listen properly and your potion is ruined,” explained Appoline as she did just that... probably.

Oh sure the potion was doing things. Reacting and changing with every ingredient added to the cauldron. The next few ingredients added interesting visual effects even if they were... simple enough in practice. The only note was that apparently you weren’t meant to cover those same six spots that had been marked out earlier. This continued for several ingredient steps, always adding both ingredients at the same time.

Usually, this meant that the liquid in the cauldron would react violently in two halves, with them sizzling a bit in the middle, but other times it all evened out and made it one colour like the brown earlier. Or when Appoline added some ’gunpowder’ which wasn’t really but that was the translation, along with northern great apple seeds and the entire thing lit up like a fireworks. Sparks started to fly all across the surface... and this was apparently part of the process.

Appoline indicated that you didn’t even need to do anything about it. This was simply the wasted and incompatible essences reacting against each other. Some of it burning out, while the rest transformed into useable stuff to fuse into the rest of the potion. Tweedle did ask multiple times if Appoline was using her insane control to influence the process, but Appoline denied it. ”No, this is one of the few things that has to be completely automatic. Influencing it at all seems to always decrease the quality in my testing. Annoying, and perhaps my control isn’t good enough... but even I can’t improve on the automatic response here,”

That was barely fathomable to... anyone there really. With a better understanding of how good Appoline’s mana control was, the idea that simply letting the potion do its thing was actually better barely made any sense... but perhaps it was simply a matter of everything else being set up so well? Once Kat voiced that idea it seemed to calm everyone down.

Next up Appoline added another interesting ingredient. It was the first time in the process that she was adding just the one ingredient... sort of. ”This is a popping poppy. What it does, is explode to fling its seeds all over the place... or when threatened. It can recover from this explosion despite not being immune to it. Adding it is also one of the more complicated parts of this process.

”You need to add the entire thing in all at once and start breaking it down.” Appoline gestured to the ’poppy’ in question. It looked almost like tumbleweed had been crossed with a pumpkin. It was covered in vines around the edges that seemingly dug into its skin, but the ’lines’ were slight gaps that revealed more vines inside of the thing. The main body was a slightly different red to the vines, and it had some char marks on it... which seemed to be an indicator that it had survived a few explosions already.

”If you try to separate these out before placing them in the pot they lose what makes them good for this potion. You need to take the essence from the vines and the body pulling that towards the regeneration side, while the seeds are pushed towards the destruction one. You also need to guide the essence to fill in the holes... IN THE DESTRUCTION SIDE. NOT the regeneration side. I want to be very clear about this.”