During the next two days Nick didn’t meet neither grand elder nor elder Agnes. On the afternoon of the third day grand elder showed up in library with deep bloody bite marks on his face and cold smirk on his lips … things seemed to be going well.

Elder Agnes, or rather what was left of her, appeared half a month later. With disheveled hair and blank look on her face she sat in the corner of the library with a book on her lap. She kept staring at the wall until late afternoon when she helplessly followed grand elder back to her quarters.

Nick, on the other hand, found it hilarious. He had neutralized two murderers, even if it was for a period of time.

His laughter stopped after another twenty odd days, when elder Agnes brought him a glass of milk, mumbled ‘thank you, Lord Baal!’, and ran away with a red face like a teenage girl.

Since that day he got his glass of free milk every day while both elders were behaving like high school sweethearts. It was a disturbing sight not only to him, but to apprentices and other elders of the sect as well. It looked like Nick had made a grave mistake and helped the both old freaks in the end after all.

He finally got an opportunity to make it stop for at least three hours a day when his cold resistance treatment was over.

The first fifteen lectures on alchemy were all theoretical. According to Nick’s wish, they were sitting on the balcony, while grand elder was explaining the basics.

There were two ways to look at this science. First: it was very simple and practical – according to existing recipe, alchemist by using fire and his own Qi creates mixtures, pastes, powders or in some cases, pills. Second: the alchemy was endless field of study and experiments, there were no boundaries to the composition of ingredients and ways to process or refine them using different temperatures and Qi techniques.

Obviously Nick could only use the first option since the second required years and years of practice and experience. Also, he did not intend to become an alchemist. Although the concept itself was interesting, he found it to be boring – it would be more fun to go out and explore this medieval world than to sit in a dark and smelly workshop. The plan was to use alchemy to understand the possible side effects of the steroids he kept consuming daily and figure out ways to negate and solve those side effects. In addition, nice bonus would be if alchemy knowledge in some way could help him get out of this damned place.

They did not delve much into memorizing the ingredient lists and effects. It would be simply impossible – each plant, mineral or animal part had multiple effects that could be brought out by different processing methods. The combinations were too many and, after all, there were books where he could find this information.

Grand elder was a good teacher. He explained everything by systematic approach, categorizing lessons step by step. Thus Nick learned types of ingredients, types of their effects, main methods of processing and preservation.

Later they went a bit deeper and he learned how mixtures, pastes, powders and pills differ, how removal of moisture and change of structure increased or in some cases decreased the effectiveness of the end product.

Nick picked out few subjects he was particularly interested in, so he could pay more attention to anything related to ingredients and products with cleansing properties, poisons and tranquilizers.

He didn’t loose patience despite a lot of information was regarding other things. In fact, he found many being interesting, for example, how Qi techniques were used in refining process. The fresh news for him where that the beast cores were used to replenish alchemist’s Qi faster and more effectively, sometimes even during the refinement process.

“So you extract the Qi form beast cores only during alchemy refinements, because of the scarcity and costs, correct? Otherwise why would you have Qi gathering techniques.” Nick inquired.

“You are almost correct, Lord Baal. The cores from level two and three beasts are relatively common, but the amount of Qi is not enough for a serious alchemy practice. Near the station I have already put a couple boxes of beast cores for you to fool around.” Grand elder explained, “The high quality beast cores are much rarer, especially those from level five beasts. Therefore we prefer to use them in creating rune formations. For example multiple rank five beast cores were used in formation to summon the part of your soul and that formation was worth almost the price of a country! Well … that’s one of the reasons we will switch to rank four next time. Just remember to use the cores in the way I will show you later and don’t try to create any rune formations by mistake. For a newbie it is difficult and core might simply become unstable. We don’t need fireworks in here, hahaha!”

Both of them heartily laughed out loud while Nick was thinking on how to get a method to create an unstable beast core to make a controlled explosion. There was another term in his previous world for such object – ‘a bomb’!

Later in the evening, while lying in the bed, he was still thinking on how to make a bomb, big enough to blow this place up.

“Elsa!” Nick looked at his guard “Which elder is your master?”

“Elder … elder Jan.” She stuttered bashfully.

Actually Nick had figured it out long ago from the whispers between Elsa and other apprentices. But only now was the right time to use her and he had no reservations regarding this. There were no ‘clean hands’ in the Holy Order – all were covered in blood. Apprentices like Elsa were completing tasks of kidnapping people from all over the continent and bringing them here and performing experiments on them – who knows, may be she was the one who kidnapped his second mother, although looking at her appearance it seemed very unlikely.

“Tell me about your latest studies, achievements and problems!”

“My Lord, I know you started to study alchemy, but I mostly study runes. I don’t think I will be much of a help.” Elsa was upset she could not be useful to her favorite demon lord, since her subject was different.

“Don’t worry, I just need some bedtime stories. From this day on you will sleep with me!” Nick commanded.

“B… but my Lord …” Her mind went blank. The person she was supposed to guard requested her to accompany him in bed. And it was even a child!

“What are you stuttering for? It is not like I can take your virginity – this is a body of a kid, you know. Go and wash yourself. I want you to tell me a story so I can fall asleep in half an hour!”

The event was, of course, immediately reported to the grand elder, who ordered to comply with Nick’s request. He ‘knew’ Primeval demon just needed the girl’s yin to stabilize himself and he himself will be doing same thing, except more effective, in a bit.

Starting that evening Nick got to hear stories about Elsa’s life and studies every night. He knew he could not just make her talk on the subject he was interested in – she definitely was reporting everything to the elders. But as a girl she would very soon cry about all her fails and embarrassments – he looked like a small child and was easy to open up to.

Another thing was – grand elder was practically living in elder Agnes’s room, his bedroom was empty and it was time for Nick to explore it. And since he started to practice alchemy, he soon will find some ways to knock Elsa out so he could freely move unnoticed during the night. At the same time she was a convenient test subject – there will definitely be some paralysis poisons he would like to test.

Despite the fact that Elsa was only studying runes and not formations yet, these ‘night stories’ turned out to be quite informative – when she started talking it was hard to stop her. And Nick, of course, wanted to squeeze the information on rune formations out of her.

The only formations Nick knew were the football formations, so this was a whole new world to him. Runes that were formed in specific patterns and fueled by Qi could bring amazing results. For example, those shining stones he saw on the walls in the grand hall and library turned out to be rank two beast cores in a special lighting formation. Up until now he thought those were some peculiar minerals that could be mined somewhere within these mountains. There were restrictive formations, trapping formations, and even some really mystical – like soul guiding formations. This science seemed to be as endless as alchemy.

‘Thank God I got her into my bed!’ Nick joked to himself, ‘Otherwise I would just bumped into some formation in the grand elder’s bedroom. No wonder he leaves the door open – he does not care if someone comes in! There are definitely formations guarding the place!’

Thus the project ‘explore the bedroom’ was put on hold and Nick concentrated on other things.

Alchemy practice was quite fun. They started to create simple mixtures until Nick managed to blow up the crucible. Needless to say, the only one who got bruised was him. At the beginning the grand elder laughed off the ‘tiny’ explosion, but then noticed that Nick has blown up all the fragile hourglasses that were used to measure time during the refinement process. They were smaller, more precise, but at the same time more fragile than the common ones people used to tell time.

Be as it may, the grand elder swallowed his loss and now there was a need to create a healing paste. Nick, fully bandaged, with a serious expression and standing on boxes at the workshop table was mixing different herbs and grinding them with the mortar and pestle. Then, with the help from grand elder, heated the paste and infused it with his puny amount of Qi to separate impurities. In the end he put the disgusting looking foul smelling substance on his wounds with a proud look on his face.

Couple days later Nick asked to test out his own poison resistance. They boiled up a pot stinky paste made of purple jellyfish essence, dipped a needle in it and poked Nick and an unlucky apprentice. As the result, of course, Nick just watched how apprentice fell on the floor and stayed there for ten or fifteen minutes.

Apart from studies, reading and physical practices, during his ‘free time’, Nick started to frequent elder Jan’s laboratory. The latter was not happy about it until Lord Baal answered a question that elder Jan had already for few decades. Of course, the answer was some random stuff that consisted of theories about gene technology and cancer treatment that Nick heard back home in San Francisco at the dining table during the meals. Elder Jan allowed him to ‘do anything he wanted’ and disappeared for few days with a fire in his eyes.

The male apprentices mostly ignored Nick, but the existing few female ones loved him. The blue eyes and blond hair on his dark body looked exotic and adorable. In addition he was smart, funny and mostly just asked for a glass of milk if anyone wanted something from him. Nick himself did not pay much attention to his dark body, he thought it was some barbarian thing since his second mother was a barbarian princess. What delighted him was that he had Olle’s eyes and hair. He was often reminiscing about his parents, and his father’s teachings helped him out in this place a lot.

Another nostalgic event took place when one of the apprentices offered to make him robes with some simple runes. He thought about it and asked for a simple robe, all in white with red belt and red hood. There should be no runes, only big demonic symbol that looked like Arabic number ‘74’ drawn on the back and similar, but smaller, on the left side in front.

Of course, that was his own number back in the football team. It was not some ‘cool’ or ‘fancy’ single digit number or something like ‘69’ or ‘88’, but it was his own and he liked it.

When he got this robe, he ran the whole day around the balcony from one side to another, till he fell down from exhaustion, then replenished his powers and ran again. It felt so good to wear Stanford’s colors once again! Of course, it was no football equipment and he missed his teammates, but the pleasant bittersweet nostalgic feeling was there.