Chapter 22

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According to the logic of the detectives, I should have got up early in the morning, if not at night, and skipped off to meet the mysteries. I had to examine the crime scene, interview witnesses, scratch my chin thoughtfully, draw far-reaching conclusions, and make bold assumptions. Unfortunately, I am not a detective in a lady's novel, and so first thing in the morning heroically banned the night's suspicions, pushing them somewhere in the area of endless pantry called "I'll get to it later". After all, alchemy was waiting for me, and I had to get to it; I was itching to see the results of my work with the body parts of the epic monster.

After about three hours of trying, interspersed with foul language and wild anger, I understood why such reagents are placed in the hands of guilds. It's because it would be too difficult to do this crap alone! Let take for example the same wool, of which I had collected a great deal. To make a good mixture it would be enough to take just one small strand, just a pinch. But here the magic hidden in such a peculiar reagent came into play.

I could almost physically feel how I could use the power hidden in the wool - potions that strengthened, fortified, and even healed, or even negated magical influences of all kinds, and they were much stronger than my current tricks. Except that the material itself did not want to turn into a finished compound! In my hands was still the same ball of wool, only pretty chewed. Theoretically, the result could be put in your mouth and chew it like gum, but the thought of it made me sick. What am I, a cat, to chew lumps of hair and then vomit them up?

I could have gone the proper way, and instead of activating the composition, I could have put all the ingredients in a crucible, distilled over an alchemical cube, filtered, and poured into different flasks, leaving a precipitate in one, and a pure distillate in the other. It's long, laborious, but guaranteed to be successful. Although it would be desirable to have a larger laboratory and newer equipment for such a job. I even estimated the number of assistants - at least three, except for me, having at least the rank of journeyman alchemist and the appropriate class. And it is desirable to have one more master of my level so that there would be someone to back me up just in case.

It would be very difficult to develop such a resource in one person, which would mean long sleepless nights, guaranteeing me to work for months to come. It's too hard for one independent alchemist. Now I'll have to deal with decanted blood as the only perishable reagent, and I'll be as tired as a dog. And I'll deal with the lightly stored bones and wool much later when I'm grinded up to the right level.

I made a couple more attempts, although I am sure that if any of my colleagues saw me squandering a valuable reagent, they would have boiled me alive in my cauldron. Definitely would have tried.

Alas, all my attempts to create a potion in my own hands ended equally miserably, as if I were not a master alchemist with a mythical class, but a yesterday's apprentice who had broken into a storeroom with expensive ingredients. The same lumps of nauseating muck, oozing green goo. It's disgusting to even look at, let alone take such stuff.

Finally, I go out to the kitchen and look through the small window, simultaneously winding a strand of washed and therefore fluffy and soft hair of the dead monster on my finger. The tranquility is almost meditative - I detach myself from the realm of shadows, from fatigue and problems, from the whole world. There is only me and a gaze directed at the small rectangle of the sky, which I don't even need. In my hands, there is a light ringing of magic-filled matter that cannot be obtained.

I felt this power, a force bright and wild, like an extension of my hand, but I couldn't make it obey. Any attempt to mix this reagent with anything else would result in a partial transformation. The leaves and flowers will become part of the potion, but the wool will not decompose, remaining just a lump of fur. I'm not even trying to mix this power with something else, because I know it's useless.

Instead, I reach for it like a ripe apple on the highest branch. This can't be compared to the usual exposure to an ingredient, no. I'm not creating anything, on the contrary, I'm taking it for myself. My body feels like it's in a fever when I feel the power I'm releasing - the material is too heavy, too unyielding, too rigid.

But I keep pulling, feeling how important it is, how necessary it is to finish what I've started. The meditative peace begins to crumble, and I force myself back into it, trying not to let go of the inspiration I'd just caught, trying not to let it escape. An emptiness begins to pound in my chest, slowly creeping toward my heart, and all I can do is ignore it. I should have said something like, "I was about to give it all up when suddenly," but there was none of that. I knew I could handle it if I just held on if I didn't lose control.

And so I did, getting two important things at once: a gray-black, almost airy dust in my palm and a desperately blinking system message box, telling me that I had just done something good. I ignore the System and stare at the accumulated miracle in my hands, which I got at the cost of a bloody nose and a headache.

The strand, now black and smoky, lies on the table, and there is no magic in it at all. Now it's just slag, a spent material, useless for anything. But my palms contain everything that made the strand magical - the very essence of my prey, the concentrate of what it can be useful for. I do not doubt that this thick, almost weightless dust will react perfectly with anything, although it has never wanted to interact with anything before.

I could hardly stand on my feet, staggered to the rack with test tubes and, not risking to look for a small vial because of my trembling hands, poured (spilled?) the resulting substance into the nearest healthy flask. Then I almost crawl to my bed and go to sleep for the day. I hope the children and the clients do not need anything from me in the next couple of hours because I am slightly inadequate.

Choppers Choppers! Because of you damned ones, I had to restrain myself regularly at earthly drinks, but you bastards found me even in another world and didn't care about my endurance, level, and sense of pride. It's storming mercilessly, only miraculously not making me seasick. My head throbbed with the beat of my heart, and my breathing was intermittently caught by the lung cramps that went through my body. I would say the proverbial "why did I do it," but the massage hanging before my eyes showed me why.

Reagent breakdown: 3/5

Allows easy extraction of essences from alchemical reagents; difficulty depends on the rank of the reagent, its quantity, characteristics and skills of the user; allows to hold collected essences and limited manipulation; compositions created from pure essences are guaranteed to get higher quality; compositions created with essences have a slight chance to get a higher grade or additional effects (the effect depends on the original reagents).

Three.

Three fucking points from zero in one attempt! How I wasn't torn apart by the risk of grinding the same shadow steps two points at a time. The clairvoyance that I had worked out - just in time - causes another wave of headaches but leaves me with the clear understanding that with my characteristics and skills I could have started developing this skill a long time ago. If I had just thought to approach grinding from a slightly different angle. And now that I was older and more mature, my abilities began to develop really quickly, as if spurred on by the high stats.

The result is three points of class ability, increasing my current prospects as an alchemist not even threefold, but by an even greater number. Just think - I already have three points in the compounding ability, allowing me to replace the long and cumbersome work in the lab. Now I have three more points in the synergistic reagent splitting ability, which allows me to create potions from pure essence if I wish. With my bare fucking hands!

Essence is the magic materialized in reagents that alchemists (and not just them) use to create their creations. In fact, all that brewing, filtering, distilling, and other crap is a way to make the essence in the reagents react in the order that the alchemist needs. My ability allows this essence, charged with the right effects, to be drawn outward. And the creation of the compound allows me to mold it into whatever I see fit for myself personally. Serious, and I haven't even closed the first rank yet!

Separately pleased with two in the new skill, which seems to me very, well, just very promising. And the prospect of it lies in the name of this skill.

Essentialism: 2 (student)

If this thing improves my ability to work with the matter as essence, I don't know how cool it must be. It's about on the level of my clairvoyance if I get it right. Only if clairvoyance is unpredictable and difficult to control, then working with essence is another matter. It's just a gold mine, a diamond mine, and an oil well in one fucking bottle, literally. Even the scraps of understanding invested by the System are enough to freeze in horror at the prospects that opened before me.

I think I already know what I'm going to do in the next few days!

The night story about the mysterious death of the unlucky house painter was immediately forgotten for a considerable period of time. It would have been better if I had gone to check it out. I don't know that I would have found anything, but it would at least have calmed my conscience. However, I had many more reasons to look for information about this case, but much later.

My desire for "more and faster" was limited by my reserve and mental stamina. It took a second and not much strength to break apart a simple plantain leaf, but it was much harder to do the same thing with the body parts of an epic monster. I had to just sleep at night, forgetting about dream training and trying out new abilities from a grinded-up ability. The shadows weren't used for much of anything, either, except a couple of attempts to work with stolen shadows, which I quickly abandoned - too much work, too much [bleep] to worry about.

But the result of my labors also manifested itself without any surprises. First of all, alchemy had finally taken the fiftieth level, making me a great master. Rumor had it that only two people from the alchemists' guild and one freelancer working for adventurers possessed such a title in the whole Region. All others are masters at most, and more often than not they are at the bottom of the rank than at the top. And this in the Krai is still a very high density of our brethren. In Ostmark, there are only a couple of masters. What can you do if all those who can properly use the goods supplied by adventurers come here?

Second, I was pleased with my increasing essentialism skill, which was growing by leaps and bounds. Not surprising, considering that I hadn't trained it on plantain, but on epic reagents. I even suspended the creation of potions by extracting essences from the same blood, which a prolonged stay outside the host's body simply spoils. Essences, on the other hand, can be stored for a very long time, especially if out of the air. Ideally, of course, one would buy special enchanted containers, but they are still very expensive and very rare. So much so that trying to buy one is tantamount to drawing a target on yourself, even if they sell. So we write on plain paper if we don't have stamped paper for this purpose.

By the way, about the paper! I managed to buy a rather large blank book, and it was made of normal paper, for which they charged hardly more than the weight in silver. I also bought a good steel quill, so as not to be tortured with goose feathers. Thief, kill, fuck geese and all that, but that's not my way!

Thief, kill, fuck geese. It's a meme from the Russian equivalent of 4chan. Which means do what you want.

In general, I began to fill the book with my recipes and other notes, heroically struggling to turn it into a diary. When I think of the price, it makes me want to not write. For that kind of money, it would be easier to tattoo those recipes on human skin. And then take it off, yeah.

A special case about the local writing. I really knew, as soon as I picked up a pen, how to write in the local "common" language. It was as if I had been learning it all my life, but nevertheless, I felt a certain weirdness in the knowledge that had been invested in me. That's when the question of what language to write in came up. Russian and English, which I knew quite well, would easily pass for cipher or dead language. It would secure my secrets if I somehow lost the book. On the other hand, what if someone identifies the same Russian. No, I understand that not all Heroes were drafted from Earth, but what if they were? How can I justify myself, and where can I run to?

In the end, I decided to use a mixed style of writing. I wrote the usual recipes and other crap in common and wrote my notes, the most intimate "secrets" in Russian or English. I trusted my memory, but at a point when even my high concentration was no longer enough to remember all of my collected recipes and notes. I had to sacrifice complete anonymity in order not to forget my hard-won knowledge. The main thing is not to leave my book as a trophy, or else it will be sad for me and fun for them.

I glanced at the small vial that held a dark red potion that gave a temporary gain in endurance and strength of twenty points. The blood of Bigfoot was very rich with his primal power. It wasn't my most successful creation yet - there were more classy ones, including my masterpiece. The clairvoyance told me that there was only one person in the whole Krai who could do such a thing and that with a lot more time and reagents. And the intoxication from it would be even worse than mine.

What did I brew?

Three vials of a dark blue, almost black potion that increases strength by two. Permanently, fucked in the ass, boosting it. The local aristocracy would pay huge sums of money for such potions, just to grind themselves up without risking their skins. There are very few alchemists who can make this stuff, so orders are booked up for years to come.

Why haven't I drunk this miracle yet? And why haven't the local moneybags drank such elixirs until they've all turned into Marty Sue?

Because this substance worked only on those whose strength did not exceed twenty points. Also, you could only drink it once in a lifetime, otherwise, it would be a deadly poison, not an enhancer. In theory, I could make the same thing, but with a completely different formulation, which would allow me to get someone drunk on two of those potions at once. Moreover, I could even try to raise the upper bar of the amplification, so that it would help even me with a guarantee. And the number of added characteristics can be increased.

But that's all in the distant future, for even the crap I got was the result of luck rather than real skill. I would need, at the very least, to develop my primary abilities to the limit, and I would need to get a good deal of my second-rate offerings, though I could only speculate about them. Whatever! I'm good enough as it is, considering the amount of all kinds of compounds I've accumulated. All that was left of the body I'd grabbed was a sack of fur and some fangs and claws, and the rest was put to work. I don't even want to talk about the fact that I bought almost a year's worth of glass containers and two large chests for storing alchemical concoctions.

Well, how did I buy it? I stole and left them the mid-market price for such happiness. Very mid-market. Well, maybe a little lower. Definitely above cost, so they made a profit. And anyway, they shouldn't leave the warehouses unlocked, even if there's a signal amulet and a watchman! The watchman might as well take a shit, and the alarm only evoked sincere sympathy for other people's greed. Shit, you guys! Are you fucking selling alchemical equipment or pies? Don't skimp on the alarm!

I had no fear of a sudden inspection by the guards, which would frequently comb through all the private alchemists. By the time they were counting the profits, by the time they realized what had been stolen from them (and the money they had slipped into the coffers would only confuse them more), by the time they had taken an inventory, it would be too late. And clairvoyance vaguely indicated that they would not look for it. They would rather think of one of their own, who had received a kickback from the goods, than of a mysterious alchemist thief.

But the picture of me, plowing a heavy trunk in the stealth, and then coming back for another and dragging them one by one until I got home will give me a nostalgic chuckle for a long time to come.

This weekend I didn't go into the woods, just sent Ygra a message and an instruction through the dream. I wanted a rest, a normal rest, or at least a change of activity to something relatively unfamiliar. Otherwise, at this rate, I would start talking to my retorts, not to mention the walls and ceilings.

After sending my subordinates to rest, I decided to wander around the city, or someone might suspect that I did not leave the house at all. So I quietly got ready, set the traps again, locked the door with a pretty decent lock (only if regarding shit), and staggered toward the center of town.

After a few hours of wandering through the noisy streets, a couple more hours of waiting out the heat in the shade, six apricot pies (I reflexively expected a trick, but they were not cherry), and a quick snack at the nearest tavern, I began to think about all sorts of things and daydream. I wandered around until sunset and even well after, wandering in concealment through the rapidly emptying dark streets and soaking up the romance of the Middle Ages. The romance reeked of slop, but it was perfectly acceptable to my unsophisticated eye. I don't know when I got the idea, but at some point, I realized that I was heading toward the same neighborhood as the painter who had died under unexplained circumstances.

Why not?

The painter himself could not afford a full house, renting two rooms in a large building. He actually came from some village, and here he was not living but earning, gradually saving up money to get married. All this was learned from clairvoyance, which worked pretty well on this character's long past. Alas, but only over the long past, because everything connected with his death was still firmly closed by an invisible and insensible barrier of unclear nature.

The bedroom, as well as the painter's studio, were... ordinary? Almost everything had already been removed. Personal items, bedding, and his tools had been sold, and he hadn't even bothered to clean the place properly. One day it will probably be rented out. I'm surprised they haven't already done so. Looking for evidence in such circumstances is useless - clairvoyance will show nothing, and the usual material evidence of the unknown has long since been trampled down. Gradually I realizes that I came here just for the sake of interest, not for the cause.

I was about to leave when I decided to activate the Gaze. It's a peculiar gesture of desperation, since the shadows don't feel anything at all, but I force myself to try. I glanced around the room lazily, heading for the door at the same time, when my gaze caught a discrepancy.

Trails.

Traces are left directly in the shadow spectrum, even though they shouldn't be here. The black and white image seemed cold and flat, but these footprints... they were superfluous, out of place in the landscape, wrong. The chain of black drops and someone else's boot prints didn't fit the color scheme. I can't explain with what sense I realized it, but this black was not as black as it should have been. It sounds like nonsense, I agree, but it was.

These marks, this color was alive, even breathing. It was as if some kind of slime, or even oil, had been spilled on the floor and then forgotten here. I shed my drowsiness, proceeding to scrutinize all the surfaces, trying not to miss a single detail. And I find enough to consider the situation interesting.

I am a shitty investigator, but even my purely theoretical knowledge and trivial logic are enough to estimate the relative picture of events.

So.

Someone had entered the workshop, leaving some black stuff on the lock, presumably by picking it. With each step this person left more and more black droplets, gradually approaching one of the corners. There, apparently, a terrified painter had crawled to his death, pulled out of his hiding place, and pressed against the wall with his back (there is slight chipping and cracking in that spot). Then the poor guy was left around the room like a rag and finally dragged to another corner, where there was a whole puddle of black muck. Nothing good happened to him here, I suppose. Another fact to add to the piggy bank is that not a single bastard heard anything, or didn't see fit to come to the rescue.

Hm...

I finished my examination and even poked the tip of my dagger into the spot where the stain was located. Nothing happened, as if it wasn't there at all. There was no trace of it on the dagger, either. I pulled the mouse from its hole in the wall with a shadow and threw it into the puddle visible in my Gaze. The mouse squealed indignantly and ran away without picking up a single drop of the strange thing.

The crap itself, I note, evokes the same feelings as the creature that drove my dead patient mad. It is also a fact, even if I do not understand it at all, but it is a fact!

I temporarily leave the apartment alone, turn off the Gaze, and move to the next apartment (or is it a room?), quickly sprinkling the sleeping man and woman with sleeping powder. I look around with my Gaze, find nothing, lie down on the floor, fall asleep, and sneak into their dreams, where I start replaying the last weeks of their lives.

This is where it all gets very confusing.

You see, the thing is... By the time I took on the cure for Dajua (that was the painter's name), he could not even remember his name well enough, let alone his ability to conduct his work or hold a coherent conversation. But in the memory of my interviewees, he behaved as before, even a little friendlier. No, there were a couple of weeks when he got quiet and frowny, complaining about sleep deprivation and all that, but he hadn't been much of a company man before. And during his illness, he'd become even more of a companionable fellow. He didn't mind a drink, for instance.

That... changes a lot of things. I was thinking illness or a curse, but it was something else, more like an obsession. Not only was it erasing the poor man's memories, but it was taking them for itself, gradually replacing the victim with himself. And I don't like this at all!

I woke up quickly and looked around in my gaze, fortunately not finding anything. I stepped in and out of The Shadow a couple of times, just to make sure I got rid of any bad stuff I might have picked up during the investigation. After calming my panic a bit, I went back to the dreams and replayed their memories right up to the present moment.

After my cure, the master himself drank heavily, shaking with fear and trembling at every rustle. He had no communication with his neighbors, and he was strange in general. Everybody thought that the man had borrowed money from the wrong person, and that was that. They gossiped, of course, but the usual gossip brought nothing but new gossip.

On the day, or rather the night, that he was found hanged, everyone in the house was asleep. They slept too soundly, given the traces of Dajoie's being pinned to the wall, but there was no proof of that. But the fact that every one of them had nightmares that night and woke up tired and broken was a significant detail. They put it down to a dead man in the house and other superstitions (at least, in my humble opinion, superstitions), and no one paid much attention to the matter.

Well.

"Let's look elsewhere."

I left this particular dream and began to shuffle through the dreams and nightmares of those around me, looking for anything, anyone, who might have witnessed strange movements that night, or just anything out of the ordinary. There were none in this house - whatever put people to sleep was a very reliable thing, it seemed to me.

No one in the other houses was attentive enough to notice anything strange. No one seemed to be looking in the windows in the middle of the night, just out of curiosity. Well, almost no one was looking.

The kid, a regular local naughty boy who wasn't even twelve, liked to look up at night at the sky and the empty streets. There would have been some terrible secret to discover, but no - all he saw were two inconspicuous figures, quietly entering the house at about the same time that the dreams of all the building's inhabitants had given way to nightmares. He would have thought of thieves, but they came through the doors, clearly opening them with their keys. Ordinary clothes of a townsman, ordinary gait, ordinary everything. The moment they walked out, he didn't wait, just drifted off to sleep.

That was the end of all my leads, and I found myself right back where I started. Only with a lot of new questions, to which I somehow do not see any simple answers. I would have to check the deceased's place of work this weekend, and ask his acquaintances, he did not work alone, indeed!

Already leaving, I cast a glance at the lock of the front door to the common building. The lock, too, was smeared in black.

You know, I think I'm going to get a good night's sleep before I start worrying about this crap.

When I got home and went to bed, I didn't do another dream practice, just slept until morning. The problems, as usual, came much later, ruining my impression of the city and my stay there. Had I known, I would have run away on the first day and not been involved with this crap!

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