Damien’s return caused a temporary upheaval in the village. His mom wasn’t home; her the village shaman, and several others had gone searching for him in the forest. One of his neighbors let him stay over until she returned.

He was mentally exhausted, and never got to truly relax while he was lost. He had passed out and didn’t wake up until noon the next day when the search and rescue party finally returned. Elian was hysterical and was a mess even after finding out he was okay. After several hours of extreme coddling and injury treatment, she finally began calming down.

A few rules were changed after the Damien Incident. None of the kids were allowed in the forest without supervision, which Damien had to apologize for. His leash was also tightened and he couldn’t wander as far anymore. This wasn’t a concern for him, the mildly traumatic injuries quelled his wanderlust a lot. Besides he also realized he needed to get into shape if he wanted to avoid death while in dangerous areas. Due to this one of the things Damien picked up was an exercise regime.

He ran around the village as many times as possible a day and did things like practice climbing on buildings and such to train his muscles. He also renewed his natura channeling truly taking it seriously. When he was lost that ability was the difference between life and death. He also managed to convince his mother to let him keep the horns under the flimsy pretext of study, and then switched the topic to learning alchemy.

He knew that his mom occasionally helped sick villagers and such with alchemy, but didn’t inquire beforehand. He realized the foolishness and sought to mend that knowledge gap. First, he needed to learn to read.

Damien had neglected to learn to read and it wasn’t something that the village bothered to teach. Most people learned to read apparently, but elves typically wouldn’t learn this early unless they were going to a school in a city. The next few months were focused on this effort.

The language was extremely similar to English in grammar and sentence structure. These similarities were extremely helpful in learning to read and write.

The next several months were spent with a lot of studying and training. The repetitive nature caused the time to fly by. But he would finally get a bit of reprieve. He had constantly been looking through his mother's alchemy books trying to gauge how close he was to possessing the ability to read it. A lot of the language was specialized so it took quite a bit longer than he expected but he finally was able to read enough of the book to intuit the words he didn't know.

The first book he started to read was for the foundations of herbal alchemy.

Alchemy seemed to consist of subschools, based on the ingredients used. He saw some books based on other schools too. He wasn't sure if this was based on an incompatibility or common practice between the different schools but it didn't make too much a difference for him currently.

There seemed to be two types of components referred to as the reactant, the catalyst, modifiers. The reactant is what would undergo the change. The catalyst could speed up the rate of the change. Modifiers would modify the effect. This struck Damien as odd, from what he recalled in chemistry both modifiers and catalyst would fall under the group of a catalyst, but he assumed the definition was slightly different. The book's information was extremely jumbled, jumping back and forth between topics and the definitions made less and less sense to him as he powered on.

One example of this is how one recipe for a potion of fatigue, which caused one to sleep required two reactants and nothing else. Wouldn’t one just have functioned as a modifier in this case? Damien decided to try to build his own system the moment he had enough information to do so.

After another hour of frustrating reading, he decided, for now, he was just going to memorize some recipes, test them out, and extrapolate any new information from there. One immediately stuck out to him. One would create a minute pearl, one with the diameter of roughly a dime, that held concentrated fae energy. It required a small object that was “attuned” to the energy. Damien wasn’t quite sure what that meant until he remembered the horn stored under his bed up in his room. It had extreme ease absorbing natura so that may be what he needed. He also needed a bottle of fairy's breath, which after some flipping through the book he realized was basically fae holy water. All he needed for this was water and a binding agent. He had the perfect one in mind. He immediately grabbed his waterskin, he then took one of the few glass containers he has seen in his house he poured his water inside. Then after running upstairs and grabbing one of the horns, he poked his finger with it. Letting his blood drip into the water he then picked up the glass and swirled it, making the two liquids intermingle.

He now had… bloody water. He couldn't see anything special about it. Going back to the book he didn't see any steps. What went wrong? He went over the ingredients and this recipe provided no steps. It was supposed to be a liquid that was imbued with fae energy.

‘Wait, imbued!’ Damien thought with an epiphany. There was a small amount of passive fae energy in the area but what if the liquid needed more? He started channeling the fae energy nearby into the jar and noticed the change. With his sense for natura which had only grown stronger, he could easily feel the concentration of energy inside of the jar. The liquid visibly cleared, though still retaining a hint of red from its origin.

Damien felt this… draw to the liquid. He dipped his finger inside and pulled and the natura into and found it extremely easy to do so. It felt like circulating it through his body.

But this wasn't his end goal. Making sure not to drain too much of the energy drain from within the jar, he spent a few minutes breaking off a piece of the surprisingly hard horn. Taking the fragment he dropped it in the liquid. The change was immediate. The liquid started to subtly glow as the fragment disappeared. In the center of the jar, a small smooth sphere slowly appeared, expanding outward. As the liquid slowly darkened, which Damien believed was it returning to water and blood, the ball slowly floated downwards hitting the bottom of the glass. Damien reached in and grabbed the orb out. It was oddly smooth and to his fae senses, it was like a flashlight pointed at him. Damien smiled feeling accomplished.

After taking a drink and relaxing for a while Damien returned and tried to absorb the energy in the pearl and the pearl shrunk as the energy rushed into him. Recently he noticed instead of all the power radiating off of him he noticed it was starting to be stored into him. A lot of it was still given off but the amount was being reduced. He also noticed something similar in the other kids. They weren't glowing as brightly to him anymore, and Saria was completely invisible to his extra sense. He knew something was changing as they aged but wasn't quite sure what.

A lot of the energy would have dissipated if he didn't absorb it into his body giving him a moment of clarity and energy. Spending a moment to revel in his success, Damien stretched. These could useful by storing energy for an emergency until his body could handle more.

His mom had him help others with her work since he could now understand it healing to him learning a bunch of healing and restorative items and herbs. All of the potions utilized fae energy. This made Damien realize that all of his mother's books were not just for nature and herb focused alchemy, but also for elves. Thinking about this Damien also wondered why he didn't see anyone practicing arcane magic. Holy magic wasn't something that could be done for most races without a God and infernal magic was generally frowned upon so no one knowing these two made sense, but what about arcane magic?

Damien brought these curiosities to his mom, the most magically inclined of the village, excluding the shaman whom Damien has rarely seen. His mom started to explain some of the differences between the two types of magic in question. Apparently Fae magic was far more intuitive than arcane magic and easier to wield. Arcana required a lot of practice to build up energy for most species, where those of fae descent would accrue natura naturally. Arcane also required the practitioner to be more learned. While basic effects like a fireball were easy in theory, to build up the energy for one of a significant size required large amounts of training and learning different techniques. Damien was enamoured with the pseudo lecture, as Elian then talked about the advantages of Arcana. it was better for rituals and enchantments. First, she had his curiosity, now she had his attention.

Damien Immediately asked he could learn it. Elian had an inscrutable look on her face. She rain checked that conversation saying she needed to look into something.

Damien was up late that night thinking about his new life. So far he didn't have many complaints. Sanitation could be better, but his mother knew all sorts of cleaning concoctions and was the reason the village had soap. His old life wasn't better, just different. He had stopped missing most of his friends and such years ago, though still tried not to think too hard about it. Overall Damien was relatively happy. He had magic which made up for the loss of technology, though he did miss the wealth of knowledge provided by the internet. As he drifted to sleep he was excited to see what the world had in store.