It had only been a day since Zel and Zef left on their first major beast-slaying contract, but to Makhus it had felt far longer than that. Not because they were gone - because of all the work it had taken to get the store ready for opening. By the time Riverside Remedies finally opened, a furious storm had passed over the entire valley. Sig had become extremely useful in running the store, as people were for some reason more eager to trust the bald, bearded, alchemically scarred veteran with recommendations of elixirs than him - being that he constantly wore a war-knife and a five ‘o clock shadow.

The process of distilling the Necrobeast’s Azoth was… Well, complete. It was done. Makhus had stayed up throughout the entire storm to ensure nothing went wrong, and even though he dozed off at one point, it had worked! As far as he could discern without imbibing the elixir, he’d successfully extracted both the beast’s self-reconstitution and essentia breath traits, and now had them sealed as shimmering liquid inside an alchemic flask so thick that not even a direct hit from Zel’s arm-cannon could crack it. Sure, there were impurities, but that was to be expected - there would likely be very minor side-effects to either trait, but what those would be couldn’t be predicted.

During his time watching over the very end of the process, Makhus took to reading some of the other material on the dead alchemist’s desk. One of the stapled-together note compilations was entirely unencoded and seemed to mostly pertain to the true nature of deities like the Dead Gods, which Makhus found to be just intriguing enough to pass the time without drawing him in too deeply.

It spoke of the nature of gods as not individual entities, but as vestiges of will within the Sea of Fog that are naturally grasped and wielded by anyone and anything that has the will and aptitude to do so. It claimed that the entities now known as the Dead Gods were just three mortal rulers who had become so powerful that they were only equaled by one another, and how their power ultimately led to corruption proportional to their strength.

Being a stapled-together collection of notes, it quickly devolved into ramblings, from which point he moved back to the tedious work of decoding the journal. More journal entries. More travel logs. It was all. So. Pointless. He took to skipping pages and only deciphering small portions to get an idea of what the page read, frustration getting the better of the training that told him to be thorough and detail-oriented.

Driven by this very frustration, Makhus eventually flipped all the way to the end to try and find something that didn’t look like a gods-forsaken diary entry. The last page was a note in noticeably different handwriting, stapled in place of a page’s torn-off bottom half.

The top half was two-thirds jargon by volume even after he deciphered it, though what little he managed to make out seemed to be the author lamenting the fact that despite possessing fully-formed bodies, even the best of their subjects lacked any higher mental functions beyond the capacity to regurgitate information. This was all in line with previous homunculus research, but the note was what really interested him.

It is vital that we do not suffer the pitfalls that our northern colleagues have. All Type-1s are to be recycled for their constituent essentia; the solution to our problem lies in a different method. No matter how lacking our resources are, we must stop attempting to iterate on existing methods and attempt something truly innovative.

With how little time we’ve left until the bunker sinks, our best option is using our remaining material for a composite. Yes, all of it - with that many layers in the base template, the nascent homunculus will have more to work off of than any natural embryo.

With some luck, the composite will be more than able to get by on its own.

Makhus’ fascination with the implications of this one note was only matched by his frustration in how few answers it really held. There wasn’t time to spend any substantial time ruminating on it, as the very end of the distilling process was rather attention-demanding - he had to purge the contaminants into a separate flask and seal the shimmering elixir in its vessel.

Once the distillation was done, Makhus was finally free to begin several more alchemical processes using the supplies available to him in this very lab, ones that didn’t need to be constantly watched over. Riverside Remedies needed a restock, and blessing though it was, Riverside Remedies also was the only establishment with the means to produce specific elixirs in any quantity approaching bulk.

The four of them woke early in the morning, at the very break of dawn. Zelsys was first to wake, her mouth dry, her muscles stiff, and her stomach empty. Alas, she was feeling rather well, with most of the pain gone and even her minor wounds having sealed shut over the night’s course.

She did her usual morning stretches and retrieved four dental hygiene kits from Fog Storage, using the mead-like elixir to wet her toothbrush before she leaned out the window and brushed her teeth. Bitter peppermint and sweet honey wasn’t a combination she’d expected to work together, but it could’ve been worse.

While she was busy with this small ritual, she listened to the others waking. To her slight surprise, the Inquisitor woke almost immediately after her, whilst Zef of course took almost until she was done with brushing her teeth. Strolvath… Strolvath took a while.

The three women were halfway through their short breakfast when the singer woke, upon which the first thing he did was blindly reach into his pack for a bottle of Vitamax and down the whole thing in one go.

A long burp full of green Fog later he seemed to be fit as a fiddle, ravenously downing one of his rations alongside half a bottle’s worth of mead elixir.