NOVEL NEXT Chapter 53: Snailsalt
The mouse-girl TA met Wulf outside the locker room and handed him a small pouch of silver. "Your cut of tonight's winnings," she said.
"Thanks." Wulf tossed the pouch up and caught it a few times. It wasn't as heavy as last time, and there were only a few gold pieces sparkling near the top, but money was money, and in the higher brackets, he'd earn more.
After claiming his winnings, he cleaned off in the bathhouse, then returned to the dorms. Ján wasn't back, and there was still plenty of time to practice alchemy.
He needed to try forming xerion.
The first problem was that he had no primal material available. Inside his storage pendant, he laid out a bunch of half finished potions that he'd started that morning. They all clung to his holding rack. Beside it, he placed down a chunk of wood, which he would use to store his extracted chaos.
First, he completed the potions, simply drawing from his own well of free available mana. It barely made a dent in his storage core, now, even though all ten potions formed into Middle-Copper tier potions. He didn't assess their functions because he wasn't planning on keeping them, anyway. They were material for the next crafting step.
Once all the potions had finished changing colour, he drew the chaos out of them with [Chaotic Alteration]. One at a time, they condensed down into tiny crystals of primal material. Better yet, he transferred all the chaos into the wooden block, first transmuting it to spongewood, then compressed loam, then whitewood, then coal. The last phase took nearly all the remaining chaos from the potions.
Finally, the brick of coal transmuted into a faint iridescent powder. Snailsalt, if he read the transmutation tables correctly.
He sighed. That'd be the problem of trying to transmute an entire structure phase-by-phase. Eventually, he'd reach a material that couldn't hold together, like snailsalt, and it'd just crumble to dust. If he wanted to get past it, he'd need to move more chaos into an object all at once, outright skipping over a transmutation phase.
But if he tried to hold more than three units of chaos at once, his hand really started to hurt. Twinges of pain danced along the surface of his skin, prickles dove into his muscles, and it felt like his tendons were trying to rearrange themselves.
As the old alchemy textbook explained in its transmutation section, an alchemist may seek to enhance his chaos or order resistance. Trying to absorb too much chaos from an object would transmute his own hand to something chaotic, trying to take too much order would turn it eventually to stone, then…beyond.
Both would be bad. Both would destroy his hand. He liked his hand.
The good news was that an alchemist could obtain Marks that enhanced his chaos or order resistance by completing feats related to transmutation.
Wulf knew well enough that you couldn't game the Field. You couldn't force it to give you a Mark. The best way to get a Mark was by trying to do what you needed it for, by pushing yourself, and by simply showing the Field that you wanted it.
So Wulf took a pinch of snailsalt. He held it up to the candle. Snailsalt was naturally poisonous, and he could still use [Chaotic Alteration] on it, and draw out all the chaos he'd put into it at once. Why? Experimentation. Making a little more primal material. It might sting, but if he went fast, he could move the chaos before it did any lasting damage.
He just needed something to put the chaos back into…
"What if I put it back into the primal material?" he whispered. "In theory, it turns back to snailsalt…"
But only if he could control exactly how much chaos was absorbed. He snatched up an ingot of steelglass and scooped the snailsalt onto it, so the primal material wouldn't react with anything. Steelglass was largely inert.
Then, he used [Chaotic Alteration] once more, but this time, targeted the snailsalt. He drew out a burst of chaos. For a moment, the remains of the salt tried to form into a small glob of primal material, but Wulf quickly launched the chaos back into it halfway through its crystallization process. It formed up into a single enormous crystal of snailsalt—an iridescent cube with six perfectly flat sides.
Wulf hissed and shook out his hand, cursing himself for even thinking of that, then turned it over. That was too much. Already, a couple bruises were forming, and there were cuts where his skin and flesh had tried to separate.
"Damn it!" he spat through clenched teeth. But it had worked.
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He grabbed the old bandage that he'd wrapped around his neck when he'd implanted his dream socket, found a clean segment, then wrapped it around the palm of his hand to protect the cuts.
Immediately, his bracer and enchanted paper flared to life. The sheet read:
[Mark unlocked: Don't Touch That.]
Wulf chuckled, then concentrated on the description and read it.
[Don't Touch That] You touched a very chaotic object, and perhaps even pure chaotic essence. You held too much of it for your body to handle and, in your idiocy, nearly injured yourself permanently. Your resistance to poisons and chaotic energies has increased. But don't get the wrong idea: you should not do that again.
Wulf shook his arm out awkwardly and looked up. He'd never gotten a Mark that was basically an insult before.
"You can almost guarantee that I'd do it again," he muttered.
But he was curious. His resistance to chaos had increased, so in theory, if he did the exact same thing again…
He held out his hand, targeting the perfect cube of snailsalt, and triggered [Chaotic Alteration]. He drew out all the chaos, then held it for a few seconds. There was a tingle in the palm of his hand, but it wasn't nearly as bad as it had been before. It still looked chaotic, what with the air turning into a shattered mirror where the chaos swirled, but his hand was unharmed.
As the primal material began to form into a crystal, Wulf flooded it back into the cube and turned it back into snailsalt—again, a single cohesive and massive crystal.
If nothing else, it'd make an excellent poisonous potion.
But he reeling his mind in and assessed the damage. The chaos hadn't done anything but make his hand tingle.
"Sorry, Field, but I think you just convinced me to do that more," he whispered. "Also, thank you."
With that out of the way, he turned back to his ten vials. The primal material within had completely condensed and crystalized. He shook it all into one vial, filling it about a quarter inch with the tiny material.
Not enough to make a weapon out of, but then again, a weapon of primal material was pretty useless. His dart had only worked once. No, he needed a weapon made out of xerion.
He held the vial up, then flipped through his second textbook some more, hunting for more mentions of xerion. There was a chapter about halfway through dedicated entirely to the formation and use of xerion. Mainly, the elves considered it as a tool in crafting, which allowed them to transmute substances easier, and a rite of passage for all crafters was to develop your own xerion lump.
To do so, an elven crafter would draw out the chaos and order of an object, turning it to primal material, then feed the material back some essences.
In the process of returning chaos or order to the primal material, the textbook explained, one may find something that seems much like primal material, but is in fact, non-absorbent. At first, it does not bend to your will. It does not accept the chaos or order in return; it simply waits. However, it will not interact with the surrounding world, either. This is unclaimed xerion.
The crafter will, over time, bend the xerion to their will. Repeated attempts to fill the xerion with essences will attune it to the craft's will, and better yet, attune the crafter to the will of the universe. The xerion is outside the realm of the Field, ungoverned by anything but the basic laws of the universe, and the crafter must sense the ebb and flow of the vast cosmos and Ways beneath.
Wulf scrunched his eyebrows, then looked back at his cube of snailsalt. It was simply a cube, nothing more. None of it had converted to xerion.
But, then again, he hadn't exactly let all of the primal material even condense into a small crystal. He hadn't really let the primal material sort itself out. He turned back to his vials. There, he had plenty of primal material.
With the nine remaining vials, he quickly brewed a random potion to fill them all, drawing on his garden and not bothering with tinctures. They were only High-Coal, but he just needed the chaos from them.
With [Chaotic Alteration], he pulled the chaos out and held it in his hand. It barely even tingled, and he didn't register its presence. Then, he plucked out his vial of primal material and tapped it out onto the steelglass ingot. Chaos in-hand, he forced it right back into the pile of void-like crystals.
They condensed into faefur, a material of pure chaos, but weak. It was white, like really fluffy snow, with long strings and spires, and when he tried to touch it, it leaned away from his fingers.
Probably useful in a potion, but he'd have to read up on that a little more. He was more interested in the xerion.
There was a faint fleck of dust, about the size of a grain of salt, left behind near the edge of the ingot. It hadn't responded at all to his chaos. When he looked closer, it wasn't like the other primal material. Instead of a speckled indigo void, the xerion was deep black, with hints of red and crimson along the outer edges.
He didn't need to bend it to his will right away, though. Not when there was only a grain of it.
It would take him a long time, but he'd eventually have enough to make a weapon out of.
He reached out and hesitantly touched the xerion with his finger. It felt completely normal, like a grain of salt would. For safekeeping, he placed it in a vial and stoppered it, then labelled the vial.
Leaning back, he was about to rest, but his bracer tingled, and the paper shuddered. Words leapt across it:
[By transmuting a substance of significance, you have increased your mana. Advancement progress: 101%]
[You have increased your Tier to Middle-Coal.]
[Please select a new Skill.]