And yet, when he put either of the samples through any of the tests he knew, there was no reaction. From simple reaction paper to complete alkahestry breakdown, it all painted the samples as normal.

“Wait… The Pariah’s Exception, of course,” the alchemist mumbled to himself, looking up from his notes and rushing over to his predecessor’s writing table. There was a book that covered this subject on it, he remembered seeing it when he was working on decoding the journal. Yes, there it was - bound in cracked, reddened leather and creased to hell, just as well-worn study material should be.

Our testing methods are imperfect. We have no means of detecting assimilated traits through blood, we can only look for the usual mutation signatures. Out of the known Azoth-assimilators we have tested, there were a few notable exceptions.

Members of particular hermetic orders, solitary hermits, independent mercenaries and martial artists. Universally, those who do not associate with contemporary cultivation methods are able to avoid the repercussions of standard assimilation methods. Disappointingly, they exhibit inferior performance to match… In most cases.

At a certain point, these alternative cultivation methods appear to outpace those of the noble houses. So far, our only clues towards the underlying methodology have led us to a small collection of fragmentary texts from the Three Kings Era.

Copies of the texts followed, covering the next five and a half pages. It was… Pointless. Just iconography of four concentric circles and constellations that even at a glance didn’t belong anywhere on the night sky. The most promising images were greatly damaged - part of a hand oozing some sort of black sludge, and a partial cross-section of a human head depicting a cracked egg inside a highly stylized representation of the brain.

Before he could lead himself on a wild goose chase, Makhus’ gaze drifted over the homunculus in a jar and a cascade of realizations sparked a chain reaction. A theory galvanized in his mind into a belief. Considering that Zelsys showed results that would suggest someone well outside normal, her mish-mashed appearance, the fact she herself admitted to waking up in a tank of Viriditas with no concrete memory of previous events… There was absolutely positively no way she wasn’t a homunculus. It would even explain the fact she seemed to have general knowledge with holes in apparently arbitrary places - whoever made her must’ve paid particular attention to ensuring that she could function and integrate into society, but much less to things that she could learn without coming across as strange.

The nomenclature of alchemy, the circumstances of the war, new technologies - it was all easily brushed under the perfectly believable excuse of being a foreigner, especially for someone as outlandish-looking as her.

Makhus felt like he had known for a while, that the pieces had always been there and he had just been hesitant to put them together lest he make misguided or even malicious assumptions. It never even once occurred to him whether she might not have free will - the massive ego, the insufferably smug demeanor, the veritable aura of individualism that she radiated.

Those being controlled through alchemic means were always either subdued and dehumanized to the point of resembling automatons, or rabid and aggressively vocal about their forced allegiance. She could be under a geas, but they couldn’t alter memories and if her story was true, it was functionally impossible for her to have been placed under a geas between the moment she left that bunker and the moment she first met them in the Maze of Dead Trees.

Had he not read that journal over and over and over again, he could believe that they’d intentionally made her like this, that she was supposed to be this larger than life weirdo whose individualism would naturally place her in opposition to the Pateirian state.

Unfortunately for his optimistic side, Makhus had read that journal thoroughly and he knew that Zel’s existence was most likely just a confluence of chance. The more he decoded between the beginning and the entry that mentioned creating a composite being from many different samples, the more desperate and frustrated the entries became. At some point it devolved into a long list of test logs detailing weeks of trial and error attempts at making a functional homunculus soldier. Every time, a new and unforeseen crippling defect rendered the homunculus useless at best, or horrendously dangerous at worst.

Indeed, the alchemist’s penchant for theory had led him to the conclusion that Zelsys was likely as she was due to the types of people that these nebulous “samples” were taken from. The journal mentioned none by name, but there was a general type her could extrapolate - martial artists, promising aethermancers, veteran soldiers, those of noble blood who had somehow fallen upon hard times. Nowhere did the book detail the method of sample extraction, but Makhus had an inkling of what it entailed - he’d seen one of the most promising trainees go in for some sort of test with the promise of a tidy payout.

Next thing he’d heard of him, the guy had developed inexplicable psychosis to go with the gaping blackened scar in his side.

Months later, the squad Makhus had been assigned to had delivered supplies to an outpost captained by that very same man. He came across as… Healthy enough, and apparently quite capable if the Captain’s Cleaver on his back was to go by. Sure, he looked like he’d aged a decade in a couple months, but with the type of stress commanders were under it was to be expected.

Either the Sage of Fog himself or one of his inner circle must’ve wanted to mass-produce homunculus soldiers to contend with the other nations’ beyond-human warriors, and when that failed, his subordinates turned to blending their samples together.

How ironic it was that when one looked at the result, “Ikesian” was the last thing that came to mind.

The sonic maelstrom of a ringing alarm blew away the metaphorical spider web of mental connections in his mind. It was time to stabilize this batch of Philter for completion later, and then he could put the finishing touches on the Necrobeast Serum.