Chapter 76 – Deals and Promises

Chapter 76 – Deals and Promises

The next day, Emily heads to the training hall slightly early, hoping to run into Agnes before the class starts. Luckily, Agnes is there when Emily walks in, doing some warm-up before classes.

“Emily! I hear you’ve become stronger?” Agnes calls the moment she sees her enter, forcefully halting her heavy sword mid swing.

Emily pauses for a second, confused by her words.

“What have you heard?” she questions.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Agnes says with an excited grin. “Just that you basically fought an expedition into The Glade alone, and used double casting while doing so.”

Huh. I guess some information has spread from the expedition. She didn’t say anything about my passive cultivation, so it seems Enzo didn’t give me away.

Emily’s lips part into a matching grin as she drops her robes to the floor and starts warming up.

“You could say I’ve learned a few tricks. Wanna test them out?” she taunts.

“Of course. You have five minutes.”

Emily takes five minutes to get her joints loosened, an action she does more out of habit than necessity. She found during the expedition that she never had issues bursting into high octane combat from a completely relaxed state, but she still follows the habitual motions ingrained from months of sparring in lessons.

As her five minutes come to an end, Emily faces Agnes, waiting for the tall woman to spring into action the moment her time’s up. Agnes doesn’t disappoint, drawing her oversized greatsword and levelling it at Emily. She quickly approaches before driving her foot into the floor, a glowing brown magic circle appearing at her feet.

Her sword falls towards Emily with oppressive force. Emily predicts her attack, lowering herself and springing sideways to avoid the blade, knowing better than to try blocking it.

The sword slams into the ground with a thunderous impact, leaving a small crater where Emily just stood. Emily smirks as a green magic circle appears at her own feet, conjuring a swirling gale around her legs. She bursts forwards, thrusting a Claw towards Agnes’ right shoulder.

Agnes manages to get the hilt of her sword between Emily’s fast extending hidden-blade a fraction of a second before it bites her, knocking it aside. She leaps back a few steps, appraising the spell on Emily’s legs.

“Speed enhancement. How interesting.”

She spins her sword in her hands, taking the hilt in both and driving the blade into the ground. Unwilling to give her time to prepare, Emily speeds forward, quickly closing the gap between them. As her blade approaches Agnes again, she suddenly feels heavy weight pushing down on her shoulders, slowing her approach back to normal.

Agnes pulls her sword out of the new magic circle on the floor and slashes it wide at Emily. She’s forced to back off, abandoning her stab to escape the wide swipe.

She quickly chooses another spell and starts weaving her hands together in a complicated twisting pattern while sidestepping another vertical slash. A blistering sword of fire appears from a bright orange and white magic circle, and Emily grabs the handle instantly.

I hope she’s only using a practice sword.

As Agnes’ sword approaches again, Emily raises the flaming sword to clash with it. The swords collide, the metal one sliding through the fire and meeting only a little resistance. Agnes frowns at the lack of impact, watching Emily herself sliding under the slash. She draws back, confused by Emily’s new spell until she glances at her sword.

She sees the orange flame clinging to it still, eating away at the metal until the edge starts to lose shape.

“Ha,” Agnes laughs, tossing her sword aside and raising her fists. “Nice spell. What else have you got?”

Emily follows her lead, retracting the Claws and cancelling her flaming blade. Agnes cancels the spell increasing Emily’s weight, a dark silver circle forming behind her, pouring out a silver light that wraps her closely. Emily flies forward, weaving more hand signs and forming a crackling blue magic circle around her fists.

She drops low as she approaches, sliding closely under a punch from Agnes and driving her fist into her stomach. However, the outcome is not what she expects

Emily’s spell, lightning punch, an uninspiringly named second circle spell she bought, crackles across Agnes’ skin, failing to disable her. Agnes takes a single step back from the impact and closes her arm around Emily’s, trapping her in a close-quarters engagement and destroying her speed advantage.

Emily drops her speed enhancing spell, wind rush, and quickly casts rock body, an earth spell for increasing sturdiness. Her body is enveloped in a brown glow as Agnes’ free fist drives into her side. Emily lets out a grunt and lifts both her feet, wrapping them around Agnes’ throat and pulling her to the ground.

She tries to constrict her legs around Agnes’ windpipe, but finds her neck as hard as steel.

Shit, it’s a metal version of rock body. Let’s see if my fire works on it.

A few days later, Emily and Ivor have an alchemy lesson, which sparks an idea in Emily’s mind about their current analysis of the shadow boa.

I need to create a new potion to complete Alchemical Aspirations. The shadow boa is a creature never seen before on this planet. Surely if I make a potion using it, it will be a new recipe.

She spends the rest of the lesson ignoring Mrs Myrtle’s lecture and filling her notes with ideas and calculations to form new potions. After the lesson has come to an end, Ivor starts to make his way towards the lab that they’ve paid for together, a small room with all the utilities they need for potion preparations, just down the corridor from the lesson labs, but Emily parts ways with him to grab materials.

She rushes back to her room, an excited skip in her step, and collects all the beast materials from the expedition into a small spatial storage item she’s made. It’s a simple drawstring pouch with a unique spatial array woven into the fabric, allowing only Emily to open it. It isn’t quite the same as summoning the items to her hand, but she has to be satisfied for now since she couldn’t glean the full workings of holder-locked storage.

Emily smiles warmly at the woven runes completed after Juliana’s tutelage. It had been a fun evening learning to wind thread through the fabric in secure, visually pleasing patterns. It only took a little instruction for her dexterous fingers to take over and dance a nimble rhythm of creation.

I think I can see why you like sewing, Anna.

She next grabs her market token and opens to browse the beast materials section. She scrolls through, searching for a few materials she theorised have high compatibility with the shadow boa and winces at the prices.

Seventy points for a single dawn moth wing? Fifty for amerax livers? Ouch. No wonder it takes normal alchemists so long to work out a single recipe.

She buys up as many materials as her points will allow before heading for the hub to collect them. Finally, she joins Ivor in the lab, her spatial pouch heavy with materials.

“Hey,” she calls as she steps in. “I’m gonna try creating a new recipe from the snake.”

Ivor looks at her with surprise, before glancing at the harvested jars of bones, flesh, and organs in the centre of their workstation with concern.

“Are you sure we have enough materials on this corpse to succeed? There’s a high chance we waste all of it,” he signs at her, a serious expression on his face.

Emily smiles at his caution.

He’s less timid when alchemy is involved.

“Don’t worry. I’m confident we’ll succeed,” she reassures him with a confident smirk. “Besides. Even if we don’t, we’ll gather a lot of useful data from the failed experiments.”

Ivor relents under her reasoning and agrees to help her. She unloads her storage pouch across an empty work surface in the small lab and Ivor starts in surprise. Emily simply begins dividing them into different collections for different recipe attempts, mixing elements, creatures, and plants in different quantities.

She assigns some of the collections to Ivor to prepare while taking over the rest, cutting, pulverising, and powdering magic crystals to add to the mix. Various containers quickly fill the surfaces of the room, and by the end of the day, they have almost everything they can prepared in advance.

Ignoring the late hour, they both continue into the next day with their first experiment. They stand on either side of a cauldron, several measuring instruments laid out within arm’s reach for keeping track of the material within once the lid is closed. Emily starts by pouring in a jug of water and bringing it to a boil. The moment the calm of the water’s surface is shattered, she adds in a few drops of the snake’s venom and a small measure of nymph’s blood. Ivor quickly closes the lid, and Emily raises a small handheld magical instrument for detecting unstable mana fluctuations close to the cauldron.

The golden crystal at the end of the instrument stays silent for forty seconds before sparking to life. At forty-two seconds, the cauldron starts to shake and the glow from the instrument becomes blinding. Half a second later, the cauldron spews dark, foul-smelling gas from the top, and Emily places down the scanning instrument.

“Add catalyst between forty and forty-two seconds,” Emily states clearly for Ivor, making a note for herself in her system notebook.

They wait for the unpleasant gas to dissipate before pouring out the cauldron and starting again. This time, exactly forty-one seconds after adding the venom and blood to the mix, Ivor lifts the lid and Emily tosses in two untouched dawn moth wings and a sprinkling of light crystal powder. They shut the lid again, and Emily places her hands on top of the cauldron, sending two strands of mana down into the mixture and slowly stirring it.

She starts to sense impurities forming as the reaction within kicks into motion, but they spread so quickly that she doesn’t have time to eliminate more than a few before the concoction fails. A burst of foul mana spews from the lid again, marking another failure.

“The reaction failed too fast. We need a stronger light to counteract the volatility of the venom.”

Failure after failure, they work through the day, tirelessly working towards a goal that feels hopeless the more their stocks of shadow boa parts dwindle. As they approach twenty four hours from the end of their alchemy lesson, they run out of materials.

“At least we got some data,” Ivor signs, his shoulders slumping in exhaustion and disappointment. “If only we had enough to keep going for a few more days. Some of those looked promising.”

Emily nods, reviewing their results with a calm smile.

“You’re right. We should succeed soon.”

She activates The Clock, so they can try again.