Fate Alchemist - A Regression Academy LitRPG

Before he met Kalee at the dinner hall, Wulf spent his afternoon creating more potions. At the moment, they were his best sources of natural essences—being order and chaos.

Of course, he could always start harvesting the essences of his surroundings if he had to. Fate Cutters would work on anything, best he could tell. But for one thing, he didn't want to just take apart his dorm room at a fundamental level, and for another, it wouldn't give him enough essences to be meaningful anymore. He could take apart his wall and develop a bit of xerion, sure, maybe a fleck of it. It wouldn't do much good for him.

But potions, at least they had a decent amount of essences to harvest, even if they were mostly chaotic.

And he was going to need a lot of essences if he wanted to transmute a non-mana-permeable material.

He'd consulted a transmutation table in a book he'd retrieved from King Athem's library. The entire book was full of transmutation tables, and though some of it was written in elvish, he'd begun translating it with the help of a Basic-to-Elvish dictionary (also from the same library). Word order and grammar was off, but that didn't really matter when he was just looking at the tables.

The point remained: the lowest substance he could transmute using stable intermediates which was also non-mana-permeable was called osmodia. He planned a route of stable intermediates to transmute along the way, starting from a clay brick and moving up. The last transmutation step was going to require the entirety of the essences stored within his scissors.

At the moment, their description read:

Fate Cutters (Unique)

Xerion scissors crafted by an alchemist determined to change his fate. With an assertion of will, they can amplify the user's transmutation skills and store all chaotic and orderly essences drawn from materials, up to one thousand five hundred and sixty-two units of both. Essences will not jump from one side of the scissors to the other.

The storage limit increases with each living creature whose fate is permanently altered by these scissors.

Both blades of the scissors separate with an expenditure of mana, maintaining their storage.

They will only function for their bonded maker.

The storage capacity had increased a decent amount, which was perfect, because he needed precisely one thousand five hundred units of order to make the final transmutation leap.

Already, he'd transmuted his starting brick into an ingot of green gold, which was a stable intermediary, but nowhere near strong enough to resist mana leeching.

Though in the past, he'd started with wood, for crafting orderly substances, he found it more effective to start with bricks—they already had plenty of order in them to start with. The good news was that bricks just…existed. You could usually find one or two at the edge of a city, and though he hated to loot the rubble in the wake of demon attacks, crumbling buildings often left behind bricks. He had a stack of them sitting in the back of his storage pendant, waiting to be transmuted.

But green gold wasn't going to be enough. It was just green gold. Useful in some constructs, sure, but not this one.

Worse, he had three more intermediary stages to get through before he could even make the leap to osmodia, the sun was setting, and he just wasn't going to have enough essences in time.

Kalee was going to be so disappointed in him.

Still, he worked as quickly as he could on his last batch of potions, using the time-altering function of his storage pendant. It would've been perfect if he could run it forever, but at best, it gave him a few more hours before he had to let the storm core recover and regain its volume. At best.

He trimmed clippings from his garden, unconcerned about which plants he was taking from—he was aiming for random results anyway—and stuffed them into his Seven Cylinders set of vials.

Then the usual process: forming them into a tincture, topping them up with mana-water supplements that he'd accumulated over the year (as academy resources—third years were granted lots, which they were expected to use to expand their storage cores), boiling them and stirring them, then finally, adding a touch of his own aura to them.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He consumed a single silver-tier poison potion that he'd made earlier that evening, a nausea-inducing potion that he handily resisted, then flooded the aura into the rest of the potions on the rack, finishing them.

They climbed a tier, forming into Middle-Gold potions of random effects. Three were poisonous, and the rest had positive effects.

They steamed, sitting on their rack, and Wulf watched. Usually, he'd stopper them as soon as he could, but a few weeks ago, he'd corked one when it was too warm, and he'd nearly blown apart the academy guards' office while looking for summer missions to take when a pressurized cork flew out the neck of a flask.

He wasn't trying that again.

He sat, staring at the potions, tapping his foot inside his boot, waiting impatiently for them to be done steaming.

Finally, when the white steam—water vapour—faded, there was a different kind of steam.

He hadn't noticed it before, and certainly not with his low-tier potions, but the potions were leaking vapour, almost like steam, but the same shade as the liquid of the potion. And, in the dim lighting of the storage construct, they glowed.

For a second, his first wonder was about breathing the fumes—if it would be bad for him, or better yet, if it would be beneficial.

But then they began condensing.

They swirled together, taking on a greenish brown hue. First, the lengthened into tendrils, then they formed a wireframe of a hovering, airborne fish.

A spirit. A weak one, with no intelligence, but a spirit nonetheless.

For good measure, he held out his arm and assessed it with the Field. His bracer read:

[Earth Spirit – Low-Iron]

"Earth?" he muttered.

But if he didn't do anything, it was going to escape. Knowing how much he'd enhanced his Marks, and with how effective he'd become at harvesting essences from substances…if he harvested the spirit now, he'd overfill his scissors.

Instead, he grabbed up two of the glass cauldrons he'd crafted over the summer (using the Crowns they'd earned from missions, he'd bought more steelglass to work with) and quickly clamped them around the spirit before it could get wise and try to break out.

It fluttered through the air and flapped against the glass walls, almost like he'd caught a moth in a cup. He carried it to the ground and leaned on it, so the spirit couldn't break out. It was already pushing against its bonds, and though Wulf was stronger than the average Middle-Iron, the thrashing spirit still managed to push the upper lid up dangerously close to breaking free.

Wulf reached for a rope he kept in the bottom shelf of his drawer setup, then wound it around the cauldrons, fastening them tight together and holding the spirit inside.

He leaned against it, panting, then turned back to the potion setup. "Potion vapours create…spirits?"

He tilted his head, unsure how to process that information. A spirit could form a few ways. A monster got strong enough that its soul decided to shed away its fleshy form, or there was simply a patch of powerful ambient mana which a spirit could form in.

He'd created a patch of ambient mana? Or, energy of some kind…

As for why it was an earth spirit? That was probably because of the initial ingredients. The Field could automatically transmute the potion, but the leftover vapours were probably from the plants he'd used in his potions initially.

He placed a cork stopper in each of the potions, then glanced over at the spirit. "Sorry 'bout this, but you're going to make an excellent source of order." Being an earth spirit, it'd be better for gathering order than anything else he could come up with.

It wasn't like an animal yet. It didn't have a mind. It was simply a spirit, an element of the world, and harvesting its essences was no different than cutting down a tree.

Sighing with relief, he sheathed his scissors on his back, and stepped out of the storage pendant. He'd have more than enough to help Kalee out, now.

He shut his pendant, deactivated the time-altering storm-core, then stowed it away in his haversack.

In his hurry, he almost forgot to close the dorm room door. He ran out, took the stairs down a few flights, passing a few straggling students, before running through the main hallways of the academy. He created a gale as he ran, making the cork boards on the walls sway and the numerous papers on them ripple—guild recruitment posters, Association advertisements, and student's union election ads.

To this day, he still didn't know what the student's union ever accomplished, but Terrence—their old floor watcher—was a part of it.

When he reached the main thoroughfare, he slowed down and joined the flow of other students returning from their evening activities. The first years still looked around the halls with wide eyes, and professors strode among them just trying to get around the academy.

Finally, when Wulf reached the Artificers' Lab complex, he turned into it. He took a set of stairs to the basement, dodging a non-Ascendant janitor, and walked a loop, looking for Kalee.

They were in the basement of the complex, and there weren't many windows. Dim lanterns lit the halls, and the labs themselves only had a few windows. Kalee stood outside a lab at the end of the hallway, leaning on its doorframe while looking around.

"What's our excuse if we get caught?" Wulf whispered.

"We thought we saw someone coming down here," she replied. "And we followed to make sure they weren't doing any harm to Seith's experiments."

"This is her lab?"

"Yep," Kalee said. "Which is why I know where to find the stuff we need—she told me."

"Well, then. Let's do this." Wulf pushed open the door and stepped into the lab.