Fate Alchemist - A Regression Academy LitRPG

Wulf spent the next two days at sea working on his storage pendants. His main goal was to improve the interior space and allow a little ventilation. It turned out that if you boiled enough herbs and created enough poisonous fumes, or simply used a glassworking furnace too much, the sealed void pendant tended to get a little smokey.

Though he hadn't necessarily been trying to advance over summer break, he had been practicing his glassworking, and he'd acquired a few more tools to use. He hadn't graduated to true glassblowing yet, and with how much he'd improved at glass-smithing, he wasn't really sure if he wanted to. Steelglass ingots were useful, and the flasks didn't break anywhere near as easily as regular glass.

(He did, however, have plans to create other glass-like substances. He just didn't know how to do that, given glass' resistance to alchemical tampering.)

Likewise, despite his practice over the summer, he hadn't managed to create a flask that registered with the Field yet. That too was supposed to be more difficult, but he hoped that he'd get there some day.

Then again, the Field registered effort toward what you truly wanted. Wulf wanted to be skilled in alchemy, not to be a glass-smith. Therefore, he had to figure out a way to create these flasks through an alchemical process, and then perhaps the Field would recognize his efforts.

But that was a problem for the future, as always. He was getting ahead of himself—and getting distracted.

He and his friends had claimed a corner of the Sinta Velia's lowest deck. It was cramped, the perfect height for a halfling, but not for much else. However, there were a few halfling crew members who rolled the barrels around, managing the half-storey height below deck as best they could. Wulf and Kalee hunched over in the light of a lantern, surrounded on all sides by barrels of cured meat and hard biscuits.

But no one was looking, and it was the perfect place to work on his storage pendants.

"If I wanted to expand the interior space, how would I go about doing that?" Wulf asked. He activated his first pendant, the one where he kept his garden and his potion racks, and the majority of his tincture-brewing equipment.

To open it, he flooded it with a little mana from his enormous storage well, then drew a circle in the air, creating an opening in the air and revealing his alchemy space. It was absolutely cramped now. Terracotta pots that he'd borrowed from the Istalis Academy lined the edges, each growing a sample of grass which he watered with the non-toxic potions he brewed. It concentrated the mana inside them, improving them slowly and allowing him to brew better potions with the plants themselves.

But between the pots, his potion racks, and the old cabinet he'd stolen, there wasn't much room left to work.

"This is the limit I can do without overloading the runes," Wulf said. "I could put more mana in—I have more mana to spare—but it just won't make the pendant space larger."

"Pendants remember what's inside them," Kalee said. "They're a form of spatial storage, and it's not easily variable, otherwise you might lose your items into a plane of complete nonexistence. I highly suggest, though, if we're going to tamper with it, that you move all your equipment and items across to the other storage pendant. Don't need any accidents."

So Wulf spent the first day of the journey transferring his plants and potion-making equipment from one pendant to the other.

On the second day, Kalee explained, "Pendants have a limit of how much space they can naturally store without any help. You've reached the limit in size. That's the maximum size that those runes can sustain on their own with their residual mana before the space will collapse in on itself."

"So how do I stop it from doing that?"

"You have to feed it mana of your own, and you have to give it a charge. You'll need to give it enough mana that, when we add an additional script to it, you can keep it constantly active, thus fighting against the will of the Field. It wants to return to a state of rest, where there are no spatial anomalies. You'll have to fight against that."

Kalee opened her backpack and revealed a set of artificing tools. They weren't the large chisels that Seith used for Oronith artificing, but instead, smaller, more precise implements.

"Did you ever do any Oronith artificing in your past life?" Wulf asked quietly. There were others in the hold, and he didn't need anyone deciding that he was a lab experiment in need of rigorous study when they found out what he was. Or if they overheard.

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"I spent most of my time on smaller, human-scale equipment," Kalee replied. "It wasn't as lucrative, but when my vision began failing me, I couldn't exactly go climbing around on a moving Oronith."

"Fair enough, I suppose," Wulf replied.

She retrieved a tool that looked more like a quill, and an inkwell of copper solvent. "This will allow me to etch some new runes into the pendant. Now, I'm not an Artificer by Class anymore, so I can't fuel the runes and keep them permanently active."

"But I can fuel runes, and I'm not an Artificer," Wulf said.

"Yes, an artificer can keep runes permanently active if they choose. It's why Seith needed to make our dream sockets."

"Point taken. So we need a permanently active rune in this case?" Wulf asked.

"I can do the next best thing," Kalee said. "I'll make a tiny mana storage construct, like the one you used to expand your storage core greatly."

"Like the one you made for me."

"Exactly. But smaller."

"But smaller," Wulf echoed.

"You fuel the mana storage construct, and we feed that mana into the runes, keeping them permanently active. I create an additional script to expand the storage space." Kalee explained. "The runes will eventually bleed mana this way, and you'll eventually need to top up the storage construct, but it will work."

"You say that like you're unsure," Wulf said.

"Well, I'm lacking ingredients. I need some specific metals to make a storage construct, and I used up my supplies making consumable constructs for my own abilities."

Wulf grinned. "Kalee. You should've said so sooner. I can transmute what you need now." He reached for his scissors. "And I can make extra for your own projects. Hell, you've helped me a lot. If you need a fancy material for whatever, ask, and I'll see if I can figure out how to make it."

"How many potions will you need to steal the essences from?" she asked.

"Uh…good question. I'm going to be turning wood into metal, so I'll need order. Hence the scissors—none of my abilities can transmute objects into orderly materials without them. But potions are very chaotic."

"Your Grand Mark allows you to take essences from living creatures, right?" Kalee asked. "And spirits, especially?"

"Yeah."

"Then I think we need to go fishing."

~ ~ ~

On the fourth night, the fish came to them without any baiting. A storm raged, tossing the Sinta Velia about and turning the waves into mountains. With how cloudy the sky was, he couldn't pick out a single star, and rain and hail pounded the deck.

The lanterns had gone out long ago, but there was enough lightning flashing in the sky that it was almost a substitute for daytime.

Wulf climbed up on deck, unsure of how to help, but in a storm like this, there tended to be wild spirits raging around.

A spirit, being the soul of a monster. Most monsters had a soul, though it was twisted, and it fought against their flesh, giving them an eternal hunger. Some could fight it, and lived normal lives—like a regular animal. But others' souls broke free, becoming spirits.

They were more intelligent, and they often took on an element. Judging by how quickly the storm began, he suspected a spirit was responsible. A wind or lightning spirit, or better yet, a flock of them.

"Are these spirits…orderly?" Kalee yelled, climbing up on deck behind him. She had to shout over the rushing wind and the constant rolling boom of thunder.

The deck bobbed and swayed underfoot, and sheets of rain poured across it. The ship's prow tipped up, and they climbed a swell. The deck tilted nearly forty-five degrees up before, and Wulf caught the railing.

Sailors scrambled across the deck, gripping ropes and hauling on the sails, and Dr. Arnau stood on the quarterdeck—decked out in a golem. It was a dark magenta, polished granite golem, about seven feet tall, with a cloak of arcane-suspended gravel flowing behind it.

But where a Mage might have fared better against a storm, a pilot lacked. She had to wait until the spirits found their ship, and then of course, a Gold would have no trouble. Dr. Arnau had their backs.

The only question for Wulf was if he could get to the spirits in time, before Dr. Arnau crushed them and took away any chance Wulf had at gathering their essences.

He didn't have to wait long to find out. As they crested the next wave, the Sinta Velia's bow temporarily rising out of the waves, an enormous koi fish the size of a horse surged up onto the bow. It, however, wasn't flesh. Its entire form was a wireframe of lightning, giving it a general fish shape.

"There's our first one," Wulf said. He stretched his hand out toward it and, with the Field, assessed its strength.

[Lightning Spirit – Middle-Bronze]

Dr. Arnau noticed, surely, but there were also crew members at the bow, and they were just mortal non-Ascendants. There was no way these guys were taking down a lightning spirit, and they knew it. They backed away slowly, trying not to draw attention to themselves.

Wulf ducked below deck for a second and searched for Irmond and Seith. They stood near the stairs, looking up. "Get up here!" he whispered. "Can you two distract Dr. Arnau? We need to harvest some spirit essences."

"What?" Irmond exclaimed.

"Just do it! I promise I'll explain later!" Then, he turned to Kalee and asked, "You have the wood chips?"

"I'm all ready."

"Then let's go." He sprinted along the deck toward the lightning spirit.