An exhalation as she pushed the lever all the way. Click. Boom. She slid across the cornstalks when the recoil pushed her backwards, the smoke clouding her vision and the thunderous noise drowning out all sound. As she had done every time before she didn’t wait for the smoke to dissipate, sprinting through it as she continued to breathe, trailing a heavy curtain of Fog.

She saw that it was indeed staggering, a gaping wound in its stomach from which there gushed a mixture of blood, half-digested human meat, and bone fragments. However, it only staggered for a second, not nearly long enough for her to wind up for a full swing. No choice but to use her own momentum as she ran by, cleaving its thigh wide open with the very tip of her cleaver just before she spun around into a full swing with the intent to bisect it.

The wound snapped it out of the haze, and she felt its claws dig into her side. Brilliant pain shot through her body, but it only served to elevate her focus. Breathe in, breathe out. It tried to hold onto her with its vice-like grip, its teeth chattering and any humanity gone from its eyes as it gurgled and gibbered in inhuman tongues. Its mouth stretched wide open in the moments before it would sink its teeth into her flesh, but she had dealt with this before.

Once more, gunmetal would be her armor. Once more, she rammed her left hand right into its mouth. It bit down with inhuman force, its teeth creaking, their enamel audibly cracking under the pressure, and just as its teeth strained, so did her gun’s trigger mechanism, struggling to keep the trigger lever locked in the fired position.

As useful as the Lover’s Breath was, she wasn’t yet accustomed to exploiting its advantages and compensating for its downsides. A deep breath in, she bore the pain of the beast’s fingers between her ribs as she filled her lungs. Halfway would need to be enough. A sharp exhalation, a shove using the cleaver to create some space, the beast’s fingers scoring gashes in her sides and shredding some of her chest bindings on the way out. As big an inhalation as she could to regain some lost breath.

Zelsys took hold of the cleaver with both hands, turning it to its push-saw side.

“Beheading Saw!”

A step forward and a thrust to meet the beast’s immediate lunge. The feathered teeth sang as they cleft through flesh and veins and bone, but she knew to heed the beast’s own warning. A kick to the chest to knock its confused, headless form even further back, to give her enough time to take another breath.

She had enough time to align the cleaver’s cutting edge for an upward swing, but by then it was already at her throat again, swiping and stabbing with its claws as blood gushed from its stump neck in a pattern of frantic pulses.

A left side kick, empowered only by a small exhalation. Its freakishly long arms allowed its talons to dig deeply into her back just as her ironclad boot connected, and she felt the fingers of its right hand snap off in her back when it flew to the ground. The wrenching pain that came with every breath did little to slow her down, but it did more than enough to rile her up.

The creature struggled to its feet, but it was exsanguinated, blinded, and deafened. Its body - covered in its own blood - glistened under the midday sun. It stumbled towards her with its freakish hands held out in a blind attempt to strike, broken ribs protruding from its chest where her side kick hit.

Zel kept her distance, stepping aside as it came at her and severing both its arms above the elbows with a clean upswing. When the cleaver reached the apex of its swing, she used the brief moment of weightlessness to flip it around, once more intending to make use of the push-saw side. “Heartbreaker,” she uttered, exhaling all at once. The technique’s unseen force guided her hands into a diagonal downward stab, the cleaver’s teeth chewing through the creature’s very human flesh and bones as if they were gelatin and soft wood.

A sharp yank freed her blade and allowed the beast’s form to slump to its knees. The upper half of its torso folded forward under its own weight, barely held on by connective tissues and the intact portions of its ribcage.

This didn’t feel like a fight. This felt like putting down a sick animal. Every breath brought with it a jolt of pain. Zelsys lifted her cleaver once again, unenthusiastically chopping at its chest until the top half fell to the ground, then holstered it. The Heartbreaker technique had indeed guided her hand in shredding the creature’s heart, but it brought little satisfaction - there was no Azoth inside.

Zel reached to her back, forcefully yanking out the beast’s broken finger bones as she looked about, thinking where the Azoth on a formerly-human beast could be. Her eyes fell upon its antler-crowned head, eyes already milky-white and empty. Perhaps the brain.

“Only one way to find out,” she thought aloud.

Its skull gave under her bootheel after two good stomps. The brain inside was half-mush, half-pristine, but it wasn’t exactly easy to distinguish which parts were intact with the grey matter smeared on the ground. It wasn’t as if she had the scientific curiosity to care.

She did, however, care for the bulbous, foggy-red gemstone that glimmered amidst the pink slime, nestled between what were at one point the brain’s hemispheres. It was barely the size of an acorn. It clearly didn’t belong, so she picked it out of the goop and held it up against the sun. Just as she’d hoped, she saw mercurial silver glimmering inside.

Into Fog Storage it went. With the body high of Fog-breathing gone from her system, she became keenly aware of just how disgusting the maneater’s carcass smelled. Never before today did she think she would wish for the sickly-sweet stench of pure Nigredo. Even still, she took the time to gather the creature’s severed arms and split-open head next to its body, her eyes watering from the rancid fumes of its digestive juices.

“Rest in pieces,” Zel uttered before she made her way out of this disgusting corn field. Once she got far enough to no longer sense the stench, she took the time to step off the road and pick some of the nicer poppy flowers, placing them as well into Fog Storage. The bottles of Liquid Vigor still within her possession caught her eye in the list of stored items.

The pain that came with every breath and every step was bearable, but it was irritating, just intense enough that she couldn’t ignore it, and much the same could be said for how much her wounds bled. It helped that the blood just slid off the fabric of her trousers, but her chest wrappings had already become crusty by the time the wounds stopped bleeding.

Surely, Makhus wouldn’t be upset if she drank just half a small bottle to soothe her wounds. If he was, she’d just pay however much he asked.

Out of storage the seal-bottle came, and back onto the road she stepped, downing a third of its contents all at once before she even resumed walking. Soon enough, the effects of Viriditas had dampened her sense of pain to a point where she could walk at full speed without issue, and by the time she was within sight of the town gate, she had emptied the bottle halfway.

During her walk back, she mulled over what the beast said to her in that field. Assuming what it said about Quincy was true, she’d have words with the barkeep, and if nothing else, would strongarm as much money out of him as she could.

The guards didn’t even think to question the bloodied beast-slayer when she approached, and merely hurried to open the door for her before she could get restless. After all, they didn’t see what she had done or why she had done it, they only saw an annoyed-looking mountain of a woman, covered in blood and with a bottle of healing elixir in hand.

Even if they had known every detail of the contract, they wouldn’t have dared consider stopping her.

Zel made her way straight to Quincy’s inn, the townsfolk giving her a wide berth as she walked. Some looked upon her with fear, some with amazement, some with disgust, for she stunk to the high heavens of blood - both her own and the beast’s. The street performer was gone from his previous spot, but his belting still echoed through the streets as she walked them, approaching the inn.

It wasn’t all legible, the lines she could pick out were just as charged as those of the previous song.

“We could have never won this!” the singer’s sonorous voice thundered from afar.

“So hate us and see if we mind!” he challenged.

Zel decided to give the man a couple coins once she wrung her payment out of Quincy, if he even had that money on-hand. If he didn’t, she’d just have to extract payment some other way, whether by way of law or otherwise.

At last she had reached the inn, and she stepped in through the front door. The inn was relatively empty, but there were still perhaps a dozen patrons, all of whom immediately turned their gazes to her when she entered. She couldn’t blame them. There he was, behind the bar, smiling and cleaning a glass as he spoke to one of the patrons.

Quincy followed that very patron’s head turn, and at the very moment his eyes fell upon her, he briefly shrank back at the sight. Still, he didn’t seem particularly fearful or guilty.

“Oh dear, messy hunt?” he asked her as she approached. “I take it you want your payment.”

A simple nod. He returned it, gesturing for her to follow him to the backroom.

The very moment they sat down, he began questioning, trying to figure out just how much she knew. He had no reason to suspect her, but she didn’t exactly try to hide that something was amiss.

“So how’d it go? I take it not as well as it could’ve, considering the ah… The wounds. And all the blood. And the stench.”

Zelsys wasn’t in the mood to play this social game.

“Don’t try to blow Fog up my ass, Quincy,” she growled. “I had a nice talk with your maneater friend before he begged me to end him. You’re paying me three hundred plus hazard pay or I let the governor know you sent beast-hunters to be eaten.”

Quincy grew quiet at that, his smile fading. She had expected him to try weaseling his way out of it, or to get angry, but… He didn’t. He just shrank in his seat, and where he had once exuded unparalleled positivity, he now radiated an equally intense aura of grief and remorse.

He gave a slow nod, tears welling up in his eyes, “I understand. Did… How much did he tell you?”

A sigh of resignation escaped her mouth.

“He said to tell you he’s sorry. He died quickly, if that helps at all.”

Quincy wiped his tears and put on a smile, but it was crooked and pitiful.

“Of course he did. Don’t show me his Azoth, I don’t want to see it. How’s five hundred gelt and you forget about all this?”

Zel reached out with a bloodied hand.

Quincy shook it without hesitation.

He stood from his seat and gestured for her to follow, leading her into the storeroom, and from there into the basement. Underneath the inn, in this quiet place, the fingerless barkeep seemed to live, and were it not for the lack of windows, the room wouldn’t be distinguishable from a very nice bedroom and office combination.

There was a large solid steel vault next to the bed that apparently pulled double duty as a nightstand, though it lacked any sort of dial. Quincy uttered an incomprehensible word, pressed his hand against the metal, and it clicked open. From within he retrieved two pouches - one bulging and one nearly empty - which he pressed into her hands.

“One’s got four hundred gelt in Cold-iron Sovereigns, the other’s got a hundred gelt in silvers,” he sighed, having already composed himself. If she hadn’t seen him on the verge of breaking down only moments prior, she wouldn’t have been able to notice the subtle sadness in his smiling face. Even still, he met her eyes with a steely gaze of his own, adding on “The room’s yours until sundown. A moment longer and it’s another eight gelt.”

Something felt off here. He didn’t seem angry or even upset that he’d been found out, but rather a mixture of relief and grief. Like he simultaneously wanted the beast to be slain, but had had a fondness for its human personality.

“One more question. Did you truly send people to be eaten by the beast, or was that…”

“Something I told him so he wouldn’t try to run away, yes,” Quincy admitted. “I only sent beast-slayers I truly believed could put him down, all others I either denied altogether or set on a wild goose chase. The fact their failures served to stave off his hunting sprees was an unintended benefit.”

He wasn’t lying, or if he was, she couldn’t tell. Zel opened the emptier pouch, retrieved two of the coins contained therein, and held them out in offer, “Two-hundred for the contract, two-hundred as hazard pay.”

The coins were heavy and ice-cold in her hand, but she knew better than to betray her ignorance of their nature by looking at them in curiosity.

Quincy looked at them, then back at her. A shake of his head.

“I don’t back out of a deal once I agree to it.” he said. “If you want to give it back, spend it. I’ll return the favor, though - I’ll let you know that the governor came looking for you while you were gone.”

“The governor? What would the governor have to do with me?” she raised an eyebrow, stowing the coins back into their pouch. The memory of what she heard the gate guards say when she left flashed through her mind just as Quincy confirmed it.

“You did challenge his son to an honor duel and proceed to beat his teeth in. You’re not Ikesian, so I wager you’ll be fine. Now, if you don’t mind...”

Zel was more than satisfied with the outcome. Both because of her payment, and because it had turned out Quincy was not quite as guilty as she had thought.

Had he sent people to their deaths at the maneater’s talons? Yes.

Had he done it with the intention of their deaths? No, if his word was to be believed, and Zel’s gut told her he was telling the truth. There was clearly more nuance to his relationship with the beast, but she wasn’t so curious as to pry into such private matters.

With the money safely in Fog Storage, she decided to make one last use of room four to clean her wounds. The room was empty when she entered, a note written in pencil on the nightstand. It read:

I went to Riverside Remedies.

Turn left when you exit the inn,

turn left again at the street corner,

then walk straight.

Zef

A smile quirked her lips when she read it, and she stowed the note into Fog Storage for safekeeping. Finally, she stepped into the bathroom to begin washing out her wounds, but… No water came out when she turned the valve.

“What the hell?” a frustrated exclamation slipped out, followed by a long sigh. She’d already stored the half-empty seal-bottle, but this made her seriously consider retrieving it and downing the whole thing. Deep breath in, deep breath out…

The pain was still decidedly there, but was it really intense enough for her to let this ruin her day? No, it wasn’t.

Perhaps the pipes had somehow become clogged, or far more likely, the bath’s source of water was depleted, if it did indeed run on an Aqua crystal like the sink in the transport.

The stench of blood had dulled slightly after it had all dried, and so, she chose to just go to Riverside Remedies and hope it had a functional bath. Off she went, handing her key to Quincy on the way out. She followed the directions on the note, and as it turned out, the corner that Quincy’s inn was on was still rather far from the riverside promenade.

It was a short while before she reached the promenade, finding herself at a crossroads with a busy bridge across the river at the other side of it. She had no reason to go that way, and didn’t have the mind to take in its wondrous architecture, instead hurrying in the supposed direction of Riverside Remedies. She took notice of two things, though - the river was likely not particularly fast considering the lack of noise, and sight of its other side was significantly obscured by the great number of willow trees that grew within the canal.

Riverside Remedies was everything Makhus had hoped and more. It had been left in pristine condition when its owner left to fight in the war, and all they had to do to get it into reopening-worthy condition was some minor cleanup and restocking. About half of the first floor was taken up by the store itself, with a few supplemental rooms in the second half - a secondary storeroom, a supply closet, a toilet. The lab proper and the main storeroom took up the building’s expansive basement, and Makhus held off on even stepping foot into the lab until everything else had been taken care of - he knew he wouldn’t step foot out of there for hours, if not days, were it as well-equipped as he thought it was.

The upper floor had living quarters for a full family of four, including two bedrooms, a bathroom and a small but decently-equipped kitchen. The household alchemic devices had decently-sized essentia crystals and were in full working condition as far as he could tell, though it would take some actual use to determine whether any malfunctions were present.

The main storeroom was mostly untouched, if a little empty, mostly stocked with rudimentary goods that wouldn’t spoil and weren’t easy to transport - chiefly, a massive butt cask barrel that turned out to be full of Liquid Vigor.

So it was that the two men took to cleaning the store, waiting for Zefaris to arrive and join them. Both of them knew what had transpired the night before, but neither of them knew that the other knew, and so they spent a short while pretending to be annoyed at the markswoman for sleeping in before Makhus slipped.

“Swear I heard some weird moaning from their room last night…” he absent-mindedly remarked, his mind entirely too focused on sorting the empty seal-bottles that the previous owner had left behind to filter what he said.

He realized his mistake well before he heard Sigmund chuckling into his beard and remarking, “Let me guess, you saw the Fog leaking from under the door and popped your auditory enhancement? Was that why you were singing in the bathroom, waiting for it to wear off like an upstanding non-pervert?”

“I thought they were fighting!”

Sigmund only answered with a hearty chuckle, continuing to sweep the floor. They continued to work in silence for some time, until a few minutes past noon the doorbell rang when Zefaris arrived, radiating an uncharacteristic sense of positivity. It was as if she was rid of the ever-present quiet tension that she had possessed for as long as they’d been in the Exclusion Zone.

Neither of them had the mind to question her in regards to this, and she joined them in cleaning the store without more than a few words to ask what needed doing and where to find the tools. A rag, a bucket, some water, and off she went, cleaning dust off the many countertops and shelves.

They had heard the distant, sonorous singing of some unknown street performer, but a short while after Zef arrived, he went silent. A few minutes later they heard him noodling away far closer, just across the river, before he broke out into that sonorous war-cry of a singing voice. None of the three brought it up, but they all took some solace in the existence of someone with the gall to express such patriotism even after the war. Zefaris made her approval of the singer’s provocative lyrics most evident, quietly humming along as she scrubbed away at the shelves under the counter.

It had been almost an hour since she began cleaning the store alongside her comrades, and Zef’s mind continued to wander while her body did all the hard work. Of all lessons she had learned in the military, it was the ability to mentally check out for long stretches of menial labor that she valued most. Her marksmanship was her pride and joy, but it was something she had cultivated since long before she got snatched up in the cogs of industrialized warfare.

She liked the street performer’s music, she liked it quite a lot, even if his lyrics were a little too political for her liking. There was genuine feeling to every song, every word. From songs about how Ikesia could have never won the war, to songs promising ruination to all those who would seek to kick her homeland while it was down, the distant bellowing of the man’s voice and strumming of his instrument served to help pass the time.

At one point she heard him strumming a completely uncharacteristic rhythm, accompanied by the sound of a phonograph replaying a recording of his own voice as backing vocals. What a curious solution to the issue of being a lone performer. “How did he get his hands on a phonograph anyway?” she wondered. Her train of thought was rammed off its rails by the doorbell’s upbeat chime sounding through the store again.

But… They weren’t expecting anyone. Zef was the closest to the door, her mind still dwelt on her towering lover, a small voice in her head telling her that perhaps it was her back from the hunt. She poked her head above the counter, and much to her surprise, there she was. Standing in the doorway, covered in gashes and dry blood, her chest-bindings shredded at the bottom and only held on by the reddish-brown crust.

Zefaris was fully aware of the risks beast-slaying entailed, of how common grievous injury and even death were in the business - these and many more were the factors that kept the profession almost exclusive for those capable of Fog-breathing. She had fully expected Zel to come back at least scratched up and with a couple bites, and though her rational mind was not surprised at all, she still felt dread wash over her as she leapt from behind the counter.

“W-what the hell happened?! Are you okay? Can you move alright?” flooded forth a flurry of questions, attracting both Sig’s and Makhus’ attention.

“I’m fine,” Zel reassured. “I downed half a bottle of Liquid Vigor on the way back, breathing barely hurts at all. Just need to wash all this blood off… Please tell me this place has a working bath.”

Before Zef could muster up any real response beyond panicked ogling, Makhus had already leaned into the doorway and given Zel a once-over, offhandedly remarking, “Boy, talk ‘bout gettin’ bloodied. Lots of surface wounds, doesn’t look like anything serious. Yeah, I’m pretty sure the bath’s good. If it’s outta juice, you do still have both the Aqua and Ignis crystals in Fog Storage.”

Without speaking so much as another word, the alchemist returned to his menial work of sorting seal-bottles, leaving the two of them standing there. The door’s self-closing mechanism made it ring the bell again, starting Zef out of her concerned state of hyper-attentiveness.

Zelsys felt a tinge of annoyance at herself for not thinking of using her wounds as a means of initiating something earlier. It was all too easy to just nudge the markswoman in the right direction.

“It got me a couple times on my back,” she brought up, raising her arm to make visible the huge bloodstain that had spread underneath her armpit. “Mind helping me clean the wounds?”

“I- Yes, of course! There’s a bathroom upstairs,” Zef responded without missing a beat, immediately turning to lead her there. She was all too swept up in concern for another’s health to consider any less than platonic implications.

When he heard the two of them walking up the stairs, Makhus let out an annoyed sigh and stood from the neat little regiments of various bottles he had arranged across the floor. “Bottles are sorted. I’ll go check out the lab,” he responded to Sig’s amused glance. “Fill a couple and let me know if there’s any evaporation issues with the seals.

Down the stairs and to the massive door, which swung open without making so much as a sound and sealed when he closed it much in the same manner. He felt a sense of childish wonder overtake him, with a grand laboratory easily comparable to those of state-sanctioned alchemists stretching out before him. Were he to wager, he’d be able to confidently guess that many alchemy colleges didn’t have labs such as this one, and that at least one other building on this street didn’t have a basement at all because of the lab’s sheer size.

It held many closets and tables, both up against the walls and in the center of the room. There were two separate sinks at opposite ends of the room, both connected to their own easily accessible water synthesizers with the Aqua crystals clearly visible inside cages on the wall. Makhus walked through the lab, trying to decide which apparatus he wanted to test first.

The rational side of his mind told him to ensure the floor-to-ceiling column-type Viriditas still in the corner would need a lot of use relatively soon. He knew he should go check the Ignis crystal, to make sure the burners all work properly, to clean out what was most likely months and months worth of desiccated plant matter inside the distillation chamber.

But he didn’t. That wouldn’t be engaging enough to take his mind off the real reason he was down here, why he wasn’t contently sorting through seal-bottles and copying the seal designs to improve his own. Makhus instead chose to flit from one table to the next, examining all the near-pristine alchemical apparatuses until the initial sense of intrigue wore off, only to move on to the next jumble of glyph-etched tempered glass.

He was fully aware of the childishness of his visceral discomfort with the implication of a sapphic relationship between one of his comrades and the person who got them across the border. But that was Makhus the man, Makhus the Alchemist. The source of such insecurity was far deeper than his conscious self, it was an insufferable little boy that couldn’t get over his inability to woo a woman into bed, it was a mental vestige of his past self that he had done all he could to exterminate.

Makhus had killed a dozen Grekurian soldiers in a single evening using nothing but his sword, he had bedded women that wouldn’t give most men even a passing glance, he had achieved feats of alchemical engineering few ever would, all for the sake of building his own sense of self-worth… But it remained shaky, for it had rotten foundations.

So it was that he retreated to a lab that rightfully belonged to a dead man, surrendering himself to childlike wonder at the sight of a life’s fortune that also rightfully belonged to a dead man. His trail betwixt the lab’s equipment led him towards a writing desk situated amidst two large closets, each containing many flasks and jars full of reagents, from colorless chemicals to preserved organs. There was even…

“A homunculus! A real fuckin’ homunculus!” he exclaimed, staring at a malformed blob of flesh that floated in off-green, Viriditas-based preservation solution. It was a tiny, vaguely humanoid thing, barely bigger than someone’s head in its entirety, its pallid skin clung to its bones so tightly one could see each individual rib even through the cloudy liquid. Its right arm and left leg were little more than nubs, but its other two limbs were fully-formed, if miniature and distended, while its head was so fully proportional and recognizable it could be mistaken for a wax miniature of a real person’s head.

Its vacant stare followed his every movement, just like the textbooks described a correctly-grown homunculus would. Unlike the textbooks described, however, it slowly raised a hand, and pointed towards the writing table. Its expression was dead-serious as it went on to write out a few words on the inside of its jar using the sediment that had collected on the glass.

BURN IT

OR

USE IT

It rubbed them away and did a breathing motion, causing the layer of sediment to reform before it wrote something again.

ALBEDO

SHOWS

THE

WAY

Another breathing motion. It raised its stubby little hand to its mouth and did a zipper-closing motion, gave a knowing nod, and just like that, the spark of sentience vanished, its eyes once more absently following Makhus’ every movement.

The Swordsman turned his gaze to the desk, to the many notes and notebooks strewn about it. He took a seat and began reading. The word length and sentence structure made sense, as did the alchemic diagrams, but… It was all letter soup. It was…

A substitution cipher. Just like he’d been taught back in training. It only took a moment of looking to find a clean piece of paper and a sharp-enough pencil, both buried under the topmost layer of clutter. Now all he needed to do was figure out what the cipher’s key was and follow his training, and if he did everything right, he should be able to decode the dead man’s notes.

No particular word came to mind, until he looked to the homunculus again, its eyes still vacantly staring at him. “Albedo shows the way, huh…” he ruminated, and just like that, he realized his mistake. The homunculus had outright told him the key to the cipher.

Makhus took hold of the journal that most grabbed his attention, a leather-bound thing whose outer binding was clearly worn down and whose clasp had clearly been ripped off and replaced at least once. The very first page was filled to the brim with neat and practiced handwriting, and he tried it on the first sentence of that very page.

What came out of the decoding process wasn’t modern Ikesian. It was an old dialect that was almost exclusively understood by the many old families that lived in southern Ikesia before the unification, whose cultural legacy made up the backbone of the union as it became under the Sage of Fog. In other words, it was an antiquated tongue almost exclusively spoken by people very likely to be patriotic for Ikesia.

Makhus was not from one of these families, but he felt himself fortunate, for the very man who he had named himself after was also the man thanks to whom he understood this dialect. This man he so deeply respected was a nobody, just a lower middle-class librarian that liked his home city-state very much, as people of his generation did.

But he had taught him to read and write Old Ikesian, so that little Makhus could read the old alchemy textbooks that were still written in this dialect.

And so it was that he could now read this encoded journal, which spoke of such things that he risked execution just by reading it.

Whosoever reads this journal, know that I hold no regrets for my actions, that I was of sound mind throughout all my life, and that I have never so much as considered suicide. If you are reading this, I have either been slain in defense of my homeland or by the treacherous hands of anti-Ikesian operatives.

Three years before the unification, I took part in an alchemist’s convention at which I met a man who I believe later became known as the Sage of Fog. He revealed to me no secrets of the Fog, no grand design of alchemy, but he planted in my mind a seed which has sprouted into a grand design of its own.

Within these pages, I intend to detail the process of creating a homunculus capable of surpassing the greatest heroic bloodlines of the old powers.

For hours that, to him, felt like mere minutes, Makhus continued to feverishly decode page after page of the journal. He quickly ran out of paper, and digging through the writing desk’s many drawers led him to use a spare clear journal he found therein for his decoding efforts.

Therefore, I believe that the contemporary understanding of Azoth as a concept is flawed. The primordial mercury of life occurs naturally contained within gemstones because the bodies and souls of its bearers are incapable of truly becoming as one with the substance, and thus create a secondary shell of solid essentia around the mercurial essence - both as a means of separating from it and allowing them to interface with it as necessary.

I propose a theory that to fully become as one with Azoth, an individual must be made anew with the purpose of such a feat. I propose that not only is the cultivation of a supreme Azoth unnecessary for transcendence of human limitations, but that it is a hazardous endeavor that will inevitably lead one to hubris and self-destruction, as has been shown time and time again by the heroic lineages of the old powers. The more refined they are, the further back they stretch, the more debaucherous and degenerate their lifestyles become, and the more disdainful of the common man they grow.

I believe that this is the reason behind the superiority of the Divine Emperor of Pateiria, and that his voyage into the Sea of Fog in fact resulted in his ability to directly consume primordial mercury as fuel for his vast capabilities. Therefore, the conclusion is obvious - the Divine Emperor lied about his methods of self-cultivation in order to prevent others from achieving a higher state of existence.