…and with a single rallying cry, Raubok of Ahn cleaved the horde of bloodthirsty Demons in twain. The resplendent glory of the First Hero’s greatsword reflected the fear in the eyes of his enemies. And there, before the eyes of the assembled combined armies hailing from all realms of the (now-defunct) Reaglian Empire, the Demons that were once thought to never fear, never think, and never feel did the unthinkable.

They retreated from battle, misshapen limbs flailing around them as the lands hailed the name of Raubok the Hero.

In time, the First Hero would venture on to the lands claimed by the Demon Lord himself, facing him in single combat. The only remaining accounts of his battle are told in songs and legends, and though modern scholars doubt the veracity of all their words, it is without doubt that the Hero’s supernatural powers gifted by the Father and the Huntress triumphed over the Demon Lord.

In honour of his victory and valour, our ancient ancestors renamed the world into what it is today. Vergence: the site where the First Hero, and countless others after him, saved her denizens from the Demon hordes.

What next happened to the First Hero is unclear. Some scholars believed that he returned to the world of Ahn he spoke of fondly, while others argue that Emperor Niedel II of Reaglia was born of his blood, after the Hero settled into the world he worked so hard to save. Regardless, his deeds inspired generations of brave adventurers, who would go on to follow in his footsteps and quell unrest and injustice across the lands.

Peace, however, was not to last. For within the next two hundred years, in the waning age of the Reaglian Empire, the second Demon Lord would rise up to challenge Vergence once more. And thus began the rise and fall of the Demon Lords, and the legends of Heroes from worlds separated from Vergence by time and space who triumphed over them.

I stared at the page for a moment longer, before putting the copy of A Recount of the Early History of Vergence for Children I had taken from Aksal’s store aside. It detailed the story of Raubok, the first Hero summoned to a pre-Vergence world, during the first Demon incursion occurring over a thousand years ago in the early days of the former Raeglian Empire. He’d been an elf, but interestingly enough, the historian had made special care to mention that he had no prior experience with magic before being brought here, but then advanced rapidly through the ranks until his prowess dwarfed even the strongest warriors in the Reaglian Empire.

It seemed that the other summoned heroes over the subsequent centuries, too, didn’t come from a fantasy world of magic. Guess elves and beastmen weren’t all that magical after all. If Shinya didn’t break that trend, he should be well on his way to a meteoric rise to power as well.

The actual text was an extremely short introductory piece aimed at children. Apparently, it had been something Aksal had used to teach his nephew about history more than a decade ago, and was more a bunch of pages held together than an actual book. Society here hadn’t yet invented the printing press or the [Artificer] equivalent, and though [Scribes] worked to reproduce texts, the lack of concrete information surrounding Vergence’s early days meant that there simply wasn’t much to talk about. The time of working [Scribes] was better spent elsewhere on more practical works.

Unfortunately, my musings on how Vergence came to be in terms of planetary formation hadn’t been answered. Kind of expected, really, since they had no understanding of the scientific principles involved. Hell, even I barely knew anything about the underlying the physics and chemistry. Reading it hadn’t been a waste, though – I at least now knew why the denizens of this world had named it as such. Vergence, the confluence of a dozen worlds, was now home to humans carrying heavily diluted lineages of non-human races.

Still, I had no idea how races as physically different as lizardmen and humans could interbreed to give fully reproductively viable offspring, and therefore be classified as the same biological species. Some form of magic at work that would get a reproductive biologist frothing at the mouth, probably. Vergence was nuts.

Ah, if only I had the presence of mind to [Bio-analyse] that one [White Mage] in Shinya’s party back at Everach itself. I could have run a sequence alignment of her genetic material against my own to compare how different her part-elven lineage may be from a regular human’s. Alas, back then, I hadn’t had the foresight to do so.

It had been five days since my creation of the smallpox vaccine, and if my estimates were right, Arlett’s adaptive immune response should be kicking off in full swing right about now. After resting the night at Aksal’s store, I had told him where to find me once she recovered, and engrossed myself in the final stages of Project: Slime, and scaling up my production of the active ingredients of the Fire Eel exocrine glands as part of Project: Liquid Fire. It had taken some fiddling about, but I believed I found conditions reasonably close to optimal for growth of those cells.

To my disappointment, though, attempting to subculture cells derived from primary cultures of the exocrine glands had been met with constant failure. Despite trying out several different conditions, they weren’t happy to be detached from their monolayers and transferred to new tanks, meaning that only the primary cultures taken straight from the glands survived. Unless I could get my hands on loads more Fire Eels (probably a long time away, since my breeding pair hadn’t done anything yet), upscaling my weapons manufacturing business to fund my research was out of the scope of my abilities.

Interestingly, placing a cheap mana stone inside the tank had greatly enhanced the growth rate and production of the exocrine products from the cultures compared to using Slime-broth alone. The same conditions hadn’t made any visible effect on Slime membranes, and I hadn’t yet reconciled exactly why mana would specifically interact with these tissues, or how a mana stone could interact with these Fire Eel cells without the use of my skills in the first place. I didn’t even have the right techniques to study that – [Bio-analysis] only worked with biological phenomena, and though I could see the final effect that mana incorporated unto the cells, I couldn’t tell exactly what it was about mana that caused it.

From what I knew about mana stones, they were found in larger magical creatures of this world, or in cavernous deposits that I assumed were remnants of creatures long since past, similar to fossils and oils back on Earth. Despite Fire Eel tissues being able to evoke heat on interaction with mana, that property alone was insufficient to crystallise a mana stone.

Why would a mana stone have affected the production rate from the two gland cultures? How did mana stones even work, outside of powering [Artificer] devices? How were they generated? Why were they found in magical creatures, but not in humans post-mortem?

Yet again, another active set of questions to consider, among dozens more.

“Slurrrp?”

I turned my attention to that low, curious-sounding growl that came from Slime-bro.

With the success of my latest experiment, Slime-bro had changed, and not just in size. I had no idea why his voice had changed to a marginally deeper tone following his incorporation of my culture-expanded membranes, but given that he didn’t have a larynx in the first place, it probably wasn’t for the best that I continued down that line of questioning.

That wasn’t the only oddity. Slime-bro had a limit on the absolute number of cells that made up his body, but not the thickness, which went against everything I knew about Fick’s law of diffusion and efficiency of solute exchange. Magic, too, had bypassed that normal limitation.

The thickened membrane layers had afforded his skin much greater resistance, and now he could swell up to the size of a human. For the time being, though, he favoured a smaller form with his multiple layers of his membrane stacked against each other, his size stretching up to about the height of my hip. In earlier trials he had been able to manipulate and reorganise them to become larger within a matter of seconds, although at the cost of having thinner skin as his cells redistributed. It was an unparalleled level of cell migration, far beyond what was possible of tissues from any form of biological life on Earth.

With Slime-bro no longer being able to incorporate any additional piece of membrane, and my work on Slimes mostly concluded until I found any further directions to take the research to, Project: Slime was effectively terminated. I had taken to maintaining only a single culture of his skin in case I needed to expand it and replenish what he had on him, disposing of the rest. With how ubiquitous Slimes were here on Vergence, I didn’t even need to freeze down cells in the way I might have back on Earth just in case they might be needed for further experiments, a pain that all Biologists knew well. That saved me loads of time compared to what I was used to each time I shut down a project before.

“Good timing.” I stood up, stretching my limbs after that bit of light reading, before making my way to the large tanks that served as my bootleg bioreactors containing cultures of cells derived from the Fire Eel glands. “I was just about to check on our progress.”

Much like a child whose behaviour changed as he grew up, Slime-bro no longer perched himself on my shoulder, instead eagerly following me and pelting me with questions I couldn’t understand, unversed in the language of Slimes as I was. Still, I tried my best.

“Looks like a decent concentration,” I said, swirling the liquid that had turned increasingly viscous overnight around in the tank. “We might be able to get a couple grams from this.”

I poured the liquid from the first tank into my distillation setup, starting the flame to get the liquid to dissolve, before refilling the cultures with fresh Slime-broth. The previous mana stone had lost its characteristic blue sheen, a sign that it no longer held its charge, and so I replaced that too.

On their own, each of the two products didn’t react with heat, and so I was safe to proceed with this method of concentrating them by distilling away the solvent. Already, I had a small amount of each ingredient for the Fire Eel grenades left behind as a solid residue after distillation of previous trials.

“Watch them for me, will you?” I asked Slime-bro, after I repeated the same with the second tank.

He barely hesitated, snapping into what I recognised as an expression of agreement, dutifully stretching himself vertically to see the distillation taking place with his Slime-eyes. I would never have thought it possible, but it seemed that he had become an assistant of sorts in the lab.

With the set-up that I had right now, I could make about one or two potent grenades a day, that on activation would release an immense amount of heat and a shockwave of pressure. I could dilute them out a little in my preparations if necessary to give a milder effect. Once Aksal was ready, I would get him to appraise them, and see how their properties (if any) could be used as part of an alchemical product.

They really needed proper names for me to refer them by, and so I thought back to standard scientific naming conventions. Given their nature as products derived from vestigial organs of the Fire Eel, my thoughts naturally turned toward a field notorious for the nomenclature that stemmed from it.

Developmental biologists were infamous for coming up with simultaneously atrocious and amazing names like Sonic Hedgehog, Patched, Frizzled, Dunce, Noggin, ELMO, Hunchback, Ken and Barbie, and hundreds of others like them for their favourite genes and proteins encoded by them. I couldn’t blame them, really, since anyone would be driven to insanity after spending decades doing nothing but making observations and dissecting the fine molecular details involved as their flies, zebrafish, or worms grew. Their way of life had started to infect other fields, too: Pikachurin had come from the minds of retinal neurobiologists.

At one point, Pokemon had been a thing as well, until a lawsuit was threatened. The scientists had to rename their gene to the much more boring-sounding and unremarkable Zbtb7. Shame, that.

And, well, let’s be honest – didn’t all biologists wish they could let loose and name their favourite genes and proteins in any way they wished?

Here, on Vergence, I was the only [Biologist] around, which meant that there was no one around to stop me. All that power could get to anyone’s head.

“Boom and Bang?” I suggested aloud. Slime-bro mewled, but didn’t shirk from his task of watching the purification process taking place. “Ah, sorry – I was just thinking about how to name them.”

It was between that, or magi-TNT and magi-dynamite. Terrible names, I know. In my defence, I never claimed to be a particularly creative person, as my chosen name for Slime-bro bore evidence to.

“Boom and Bang it is,” I decided. The pitch-black powder for Boom, and the deep green one for Bang. With that matter settled, I turned to my next task on the workflow.

A grenade needed a trigger mechanism. Activating those products needed heat, and I wasn’t stupid enough to keep both highly potent products mixed together in a world where a stray [Firebolt] could activate their reaction and blow me – and more importantly, my lab – to kingdom come.

I didn’t know the slightest thing about weapons development or how the internal mechanisms of a grenade actually worked, but with Slime-bro’s staggering advancements in control over his membranes and some tinkering with lab reagents, I had begun conceptualising a solution that I was now going to begin testing.

The design was simple: a three-chambered bag made up of Slime-bro’s shed skin, with a fourth larger and multi-layered sheet encapsulating the three. With [Manipulate Protein], I could artificially create and seal off tight junctions between cells over a span of several seconds, allowing me to fill up the interior of each compartment before sealing them shut. Within two chambers on either end were placed a modest amount of Bang and Boom, while the middle chamber held the work of my latest experimenting.

I wouldn’t claim to have a decent knowledge of chemistry past high school level, but I knew enough to understand how a heating pad worked. There were several methods to create one, but in the end, they all fundamentally relied on an exothermic chemical reaction. Vergence didn’t seem to have the capability of producing powdered magnesium, and so I couldn’t go for what was used in most ration heaters.

What they did have was baking powder and vinegar, or sodium bicarbonate and acetic acid. Mixing the two would give me a solution of sodium acetate, alongside the evolution of carbon dioxide.

Sodium acetate had particularly interesting chemistry for something so easily synthesised: their crystals melted at somewhere in the range of 50 to 60 degrees Celsius, and in the process, would dissolve in the water of crystallisation previously incorporated in their crystalline structure. When heated over, say, my magical Bunsen burner created by an [Artificer], the crystals would melt to give an aqueous solution. As they cooled down, a supersaturated solution would be obtained.

If a nucleation disc was presented to the solution, and a force applied to the setup, the solution would begin to crystallise against the nucleation centre. As bonds formed between the constituent ions of the crystal, energy would be released as heat – an exothermic reaction in the form of the lattice energy of the salt subtracted by the enthalpy of solution, something that was taught in chemistry education beginning early on in high school, if not before that.

That property was commonly exploited for use in reusable hand-warmers, but I would now be repurposing it for my trigger mechanism for a quite literally home-made bomb. Thankfully, there weren’t any watchlists over here in Vergence.

In my improvised contraption, the middle compartment contained a supersaturated solution with a single small piece of metal, that would force crystallisation of the salt once it impacted against the ground after being thrown. That same force would rupture the internal dividers made of Slime-bro’s membranes that kept the chambers apart, allowing for all three contents to be mixed together.

In short: explosion on contact.

There was a risk, of course, that the membrane would simply break apart while I held it in my hands, despite Slime-bro’s best efforts to reinforce it with as many tight junctions as he could, and the presence of an outermost sheet surrounding the three inner chambers for protection against external shocks. As a precaution, I would need to maintain [Bio-analysis] of the makeshift biological grenade while holding it, but if it did somehow rupture, I had no idea what the proper method was to safely get away from the blast.

Stop, drop, and roll? Wait, no – that was for fires, wasn’t it?

Well, hopefully it wouldn’t come to that. My first field test would begin with a similar absolute amount of Boom and Bang in their powdered forms to what I had extracted from the gland.

I glanced at Slime-bro, who was still watching the solution evaporate with utmost focus. I suspected that I could order him to watch paint dry, and he’d fulfil that request with all the vigour and energy of a dog playing fetch.

“I’m beginning testing now,” I said, grabbing the prototype grenade I had prepared the night before, after the last batch of Boom and Bang had been purified from the culture supernatant. “Good job, Slime-bro. Keep it up.”

He squealed in delight, and I felt a brief, bizarre burst of shame for setting him up to such a boring task. I shrugged off that feeling – scientists had no room for shame, as my experiences in begging for reagents back on Earth told me – and made my way out of the laboratory, holding the prototype with utmost care, [Bio-analysis] checking on the state of the membranes that constituted it all the while.

I looked around briefly for a suitable testing ground. I was reasonably far away from civilisation and the rest of the village, but I still didn’t want to accidentally start a fire I couldn’t deal with. A patch of rocks and dirt – that would do.

After placing the grenade (gently!) down on the ground, I rearranged the rocks slightly, creating a little empty patch in the middle where I would aim my invention. In the worst case scenario, the rocks should absorb the brunt of the blast wave, although it was unlikely given how little of Bang and Boom I had put into this first test.

I gingerly picked up the grenade, reared my hand back, braced myself, and –

…was someone calling me?

I squinted in the direction of the path leading to my laboratory-home. Sure enough, there was a figure running there, and as he grew closer, I could see Aksal’s face flush with excitement.

“Eric! ERIC!” he shouted, panting as he finally came to a stop along the road, close to where I had set up my testing ground. “Arlett! The Marks of the Curse – they’re gone!”

Oooh, excellent news! At long last, the secrets of Aksal’s alchemy were mine for the taking!

Before that, though, there was a more important matter to attend to. I didn’t want to keep this squiggly and fleshy bag of blazing doom in my hands for longer than was strictly necessary.

“Perfect timing.” I gestured for him to move aside, a safe distance away from the artificial rock formation, that even with my clumsy aim there shouldn’t be any harm that could come to either of us. “Aksal, you help take notes, too.”

“You – what?”

Sweat was building up on my palms, a clear sign of my nerves, but the unyielding demands of science pushed me onward.

I threw the home-made bomb, watching as it arced through the air. The Slime-membranes wobbled throughout, and it landed slightly off-mark but still within the stone circle itself. The membrane ruptured as it bounced an inch off the gravel, and in the next instant –

BOOM!

A wave of heat and a rush of air, alongside a loud thunderclap and a brilliant flash of sparks. I stumbled backward on pure reflex, even though I hadn’t incurred any harm from the testing. Back in the lab, I hadn’t had to deal with anything much more hazardous than the possibility of accidentally injecting myself with diphteria toxin or the risk of carcinogenesis from skin-contact with ethidium bromide. Now, seeing and feeling the effects of my creation first-hand was startling, especially when so much of molecular biology was about things that couldn’t be seen.

The ground where the grenade had landed was now scorched, the rocks immediately adjacent to it charred black, and a small crater had been left at the point of impact. There were remnants of embers left there, but thankfully there hadn’t been much plant-life there to fuel the flames.

If this was what I could do with a reduced amount of Boom and Bang, I really wanted to know what I could do by loading more of it, possibility of incurring harm to myself be damned. Whatever had originally been making use of these two products in its everyday life had to be a rather formidable creature, and as much as I wanted to study it, it probably wasn’t healthy for my self-preservation to immediately drop everything and pursue it, as weak and poorly equipped as I was now.

“Pretty successful, if I do say so myself,” I said cheerfully, as the last dancing sparks from the bright flash created by the reaction of Boom and Bang faded from my vision. I glanced at Aksal. “What do you think?”