Even after nine separate purification cycles and two finished batches of Philter, the solution just wouldn’t let go of its foundational Nigredo. He should’ve expected this, but in his eagerness to test his hypothesis he’d neglected this aspect of the process.

For the time being, Makhus filed it away in his mental cabinet and returned to other paths of work. This batch of the Philter was nearly done. Soon he would have time to find out for himself whether the Heart could just purify the Necrobeast Solution through brute alchemic force.

It was a mindless, semi-automatic cycle of work. Adjust the array, check for leaks, replace damaged seals or just add new ones overtop. Makhus was eternally thankfully to his predecessor for cataloguing his own glyph construction method instead of keeping it secret the way so many practitioners of the secret arts did. Sure, the method was a weird puzzle of poems written backwards in cypher, but that was downright clear-as-day by alchemist standards. Being able to break such codes was more of a qualifier to prove that one was intelligent enough to use the hidden knowledge.

In the absence of the appropriate glyphic glassware, he had to make do with seal arrays, quite literally sticking numerous seals onto a piece of glassware to form a more potent glyph. The individual seals didn’t fade the way they did when used to stabilize volatile elixirs, they just disintegrated into dust from the constant strain.

The reality of things wasn’t lost on him. Sigmund had gone from slightly overweight and half-crippled by his condition to an inexhaustible animus of vital energy, the bearded historian had even set up a small training area in the backyard for the sole purpose of exercising his newfound physical capabilities. He kept pestering Makhus to go train with him, and the swordsman-alchemist humored him in the brief windows of time that he had.

While Sigmund had gained control of his condition and in so doing became free, Makhus had grown more and more reclusive. Sure, it was only a few days - he’d gone into seclusion for longer periods before just to study or train, such methods were perfectly normal. But… This was intoxicating. He knew he could just stay like this and get used to it. Just do his work down here, exploring the endless tangled depths of alchemy without regard for the outside world.

Makhus knew that he couldn’t just spend his days on alchemy, or he’d begin withering away and grow addicted to the drugs that allowed him to work at his mental peak well beyond his normal limits.

And he didn’t like that. He didn’t want to become the stereotypical eccentric recluse alchemist, that wasn’t why he dove into the world of alchemy in the first place. He would need to find a way to reduce the time he spent down here, for his own sake.

Hiring people wasn’t really an option, so he’d need strong mainstay products to make up the bulk of Riverside Remedies’ income and devise methods for producing these products in bulk. The best Daytime Dust in the world was useless to a business if it couldn’t be produced in commercial quantities.

It would take a lot of space. Fortunately for him, he had that space - most of this huge lab was taken up by hyper-specialized alchemy arrays, many so specific in function that they were only really useful for one step in one particular process each. With the Philosopher’s Heart, he could compress an hours-long, elaborate ordeal into a slight setup change, a bit more prep work, and fifteen minutes of running the Heart. The space that this freed up could then be taken by more large-scale machines to perform the time-consuming tasks, much like the essentia distiller that was already here.

There was no point to wasting away down here when he could have machines do all the heavy lifting. With the Heart’s unworldly light to light his way, Makhus would be free of the alchemist’s dungeon.

The last step of the process came around. Myriad shades of otherworldly light pulsed through the Philosopher’s Heart as its Black Core transmuted the Philter’s protosolution. It was so simple, yet so impossible - the arcane object circulated the liquid much like an actual heart would, remaking it and fusing discordant components into a single unified whole that vastly superseded the sum of its parts. He’d once heard the process described as using the Heart to fool the laws of reality into mistaking a rough approximation with the real thing. The second dose of Philter done, he boxed it up and cleaned the Heart.

He picked out the correct glassware, filled in with seals for that which he didn’t have, and assembled a custom array with which he would purge the Necrobeast Solution of its impurities and galvanize its desirable traits beyond what he’d already done.

For now, this would be his Magnum Opus. He only hoped that Zelsys hadn’t sustained any injuries that would have her needing the Necrobeast’s self-reconstruction right when she got back.

It was a long couple hours before they got out of the Living Storm’s reach. Even well after it, Zel’s mind dwelt on Ubul. It had cost such desolation to merely wound him, to force him into that stone form, doubtlessly with the Living Storm constantly striking him throughout that battle back then.

She certainly didn’t expect to go up against him alone. The Emperor had strongly implied that this was to be the case, but that just meant that taking all possible measures to ensure victory would be a perfect way of spitting in his face.

Maybe they could just put seals on him, chain him up, slather him in that gold-coloured amalgam, and then blow him up apart with directed explosives. Can’t wake up if he’s in a hundred pieces, after all.

Her mulling over the so-called “Beast Mountain” was interrupted soon after. They’d been walking through the forest for a while now, and at last they saw past the edge of the treeline.

Finally, the fertile fields stretched out before them and Willowdale stood in the middle of it all.