On the first day of pure lab work, I spent most of my time studying magic fuel to learn more about its physical properties, a task that necessitated creating a chamber that allowed me to extract it in solid form. I had tried extraction underwater during my first attempt, but magic fuel seemed to disintegrate in water as readily as air, necessitating a low-oxygen environment. Thankfully force magic and wax allowed me to create one easily: I used a rectangular glass dish with a depth of around five centimeters and another plate of glass to form an air-sealed chamber, using wax to plug the holes along the seam between the two parts. Removing the oxygen was a matter of burning oil inside the chamber until the flame would no longer ignite while using cold water to keep the wax seal intact. Then, after waiting a few minutes for the smoke inside to settle, I began my tests.

Using around twenty-five rats in total and re-sealing the chamber a dozen times, I built up a store of magic fuel inside a sealed tube inside the sealed chamber, just in case of a breach. Moving tools around behind the glass with force magic got easier as I did it, and also confirmed a fact for me: Magic didn’t need to pass through the air to manifest an effect. I was fairly sure of that fact before testing it, but knowing it for sure eliminated the “gaseous emission” mechanism for delivery of magic fuel I had been working on in the back of my mind. Out of curiosity, I tried to create a gaseous form of magic fuel in a test tube using one of the extracted solid fuel chunks, but oxygen seemed to entirely denature the material, leaving nothing behind.

After re-sealing the chamber again with some rat corpses inside, I carefully tilted it so it was near-vertical and then began filling tubes with rat blood. Once I had ten tubes of blood I started dropping magic fuel chunks into them, creating blood with different magic concentrations. The most concentrated blood had ten cores added, and the least had just one. The next order of business was to use the snake teeth Aavspeyjh had given me with the mixture tubes to make a number of primitive hypodermic needle syringes. I sealed each tube with wax then pushed a single tooth through the seal, then blocked off its thicker inside edge with yet more wax. The end result was a sealed tube that could be inserted into a vein and then unsealed with magic, allowing the mixture inside to be injected.

Since it was late by the time I had finished with the syringes, I went to eat and then get some rest. Before going to sleep, I tried to speed my healing again, to mixed results. Though my upper arm had extended to almost full size, the bone appeared to have warped, and the muscles were all wrong. Even moving it up and down felt strange, as though the anchor points for my shoulder muscles were unbalanced somehow. It took almost the entire rest of my magic to convince my body to fix the shoulder structure, after which I went to bed and fell asleep almost immediately from exhaustion.

The next day I injected my first live rat, which squeaked like it was being burned alive for about five seconds before dropping dead. Okay, the strongest mixture is lethal as expected, at least that justifies my caution, I thought as I tossed the body into the growing pile and grabbed a new living subject from my nearby pile. Grabbing the next strongest mixture, I found my new subject’s femoral artery and inserted the snake tooth. As I unsealed the hole on the inside of the tube, I used more restraint than I had with the first rat, pushing the mixture in slowly so I could watch the results. Like before, my subject began squealing in pain, but then something strange happened.

An obstruction? I thought, noticing that the flow rate of the blood had slowed to nothing. I had checked all the teeth beforehand to ensure they were of sufficient quality, but it wasn’t entirely impossible that some stray wax had gotten into the tooth’s hole. Heat magic didn’t seem to want to unseal it so I tried forcing the blood harder, which turned out to be a bad choice. The tooth ruptured from the internal pressure, splitting in half and spilling blood everywhere. With a sigh, I looked at my furry test subject, then put him back in the pile and exchanged him for a new one.

Vial eight, the mixture with eight cores in it, became similarly obstructed as I was injecting it, though I managed to get enough into the rat to kill it. It’s not wax, I thought, that’s far too much of a coincidence. Maybe it has something to do with the concentration of the mixture? I had found it strange that blood didn’t seem to have an upper limit on how much magic fuel would dissolve into it, so it was possible that the tooth was giving the magic fuel a crystallization point that it didn’t have in the glass. But if that was the case, wouldn’t it have crystallized on the new cores once it reached the supersaturation point? I wondered.

When vial seven obstructed itself, I kept constant pressure on the liquid and began withdrawing the needle from the rat. The instant it was no longer in the vein, the obstruction cleared, and once again I ended up spilling blood everywhere. That’s too fast for it to have been the air, I knew, there was probably at least half a centimeter of blood in between the air and the obstruction, it would take a while for gaseous oxygen to- I paused, realizing something. How does the fuel even diffuse out of blood into the air? I wondered.

An hour later, after thinking entirely too hard about the potential chemical properties of the material, I made my decision for the next test. I’ll use vial one on myself, I thought, there’s no way it would seriously hurt me, even if it is rat blood. These aren’t corpse rats and healing magic should take care of anything harmful quickly. The only thing that makes sense is that the rats themselves were somehow stopping the injection, or… actually, I have no idea.

After removing the dead rat from the table, I sat down and leaned over it, extending my right arm stump. Vial one was triple-checked once I retrieved it, levitated in my left hand and viewed from every angle to ensure the seal was intact and the tooth pathway was clear. Then, using a bit of light magic, I found the vein on my right bicep and deftly slipped the snake tooth into it. Slowly and carefully, I pulled the wax seal from the tooth with magic, then waited until a bit of my blood washed back before starting the injection.

As I pushed the liquid into my vein with force magic, I felt a strange sensation that was similar to magic oversaturation, albeit sharper and less comfortable. Looking at my heads-up display, I couldn’t see any change on my blue bars, which was strange. The sensation of pins and needles in my arm shrunk in size and grew in intensity, moving upward and inward into my chest. Wait a minute, what if- my thoughts were cut off by a horrible stabbing feeling in my heart that then moved out to my left lung. One coughing fit later, a blood-covered yellow shard of magic fuel popped out into my hand, and then vanished as if to spite me.

“Okay, stupid idea,” I admitted out loud in English. “Good thing I started with the weakest one.”

It’s incompatible, I concluded sometime later. I had read in Magical Phenomena that consuming some types of blood and meat was dangerous because it raised blood magic saturation too quickly, but that wasn’t what happened to me. Instead, the most logical explanation for what had happened when I injected myself with the rat blood was that my blood couldn’t dissolve the rat’s magic fuel, so as the rat blood diffused the rat's fuel precipitated out rapidly, forming a single mass in my vein. I didn’t learn anything about what was happening with the rats, and now I have another question, I sighed, At least I know this magic fuel isn’t human-compatible, so I can address that problem. Maybe I’ll learn more with a better test subject. I should get some materials for saline as well, and maybe a centrifuge…

“Little npoytz are everywhere,” Aavspeyjh swore under his breath, crushing an insect that was crawling across his desk. “I don’t think I heard you correctly, so I’m going to let you rephrase that,” he said louder, to me. I was standing across from him in his office, my clothing still a bit bloody despite my freshly-cleaned hands.

“I need a human test subject, ideally one that won’t be missed if they die,” I repeated. “I’ve reached a point where rats probably won’t be sufficient, and I don’t suppose you have any particularly compliant bears sitting around, so a human is what I need.”

“Yuwniht,” Aavspeyjh began in an authoritative tone, “I know I said I would get you whatever you needed, but unfortunately that does not include people who you can kill in my house. I mean no disrespect by asking this, but why in the names of all the gods would you think I could give you such a thing?”

“I murdered four people in this city and you covered it up,” I replied. “I don’t see how this is different, aside from the difficulty of capturing the subject alive.”

“Then I will explain my reasoning,” Aavspeyjh sighed, stroking his beard. “Essentially, opportunity cost is too high. While I stand to make a large amount of money if I can monetize this research you are performing, I am not sufficiently confident that what you are asking for will lead to any useful result that justifies the risks.”

“And if I assured you that it will?” I asked.

“Do you understand the ‘risks’ I was referring to?” Aavspeyjh asked back.

“Obviously, murder is a crime,” I replied.

“Not just that,” Aavspeyjh explained. “Killing people in the street is very different, legally speaking, than doing it in a private residence. The street is the property of the city, and the royal guard is responsible for it. If the royal guard fails to prevent a crime there is a theoretical punishment they may endure if found negligent, but otherwise, that is the end of it. In a residence, however, the master of the house is responsible for local lawfulness.”

“So if I kill someone here, you get blamed?” I asked.

“I would immediately be charged with failure to uphold the jhowt’s law,” Aavspeyjh said. I thought about the royal title for a moment, then decided it was something like “duke”. “If I was found guilty, that would be the end of me,” Aavspeyjh continued. “My assets would be seized and I would be jailed for a period of… well for murder it would be fifty years most likely.”

“But you managed to cover up four murders,” I countered.

“Four murders in the poorest parts of town with no witnesses who came forward,” Aavspeyjh said. “Covering up something like that is one thing, trying to tell the guard that a body found in my home was there without my knowledge is quite another. In fact, I would be presumed to be guilty from the outset and have to prove my innocence if such a situation occurred.”

“That seems… counter-intuitive,” I said. Proving innocence is nearly impossible without constant surveillance, I thought, that’s why creator human justice systems eventually evolved to include the presumption of innocence, at least until constant surveillance was practical. It was also why post-information-technology-collapse warbreed justice systems were something I was always explicitly instructed to avoid. Warbreed presumed guilt even long after they lost the ability to reasonably prove innocence, trials were often more of a formality.

“Regardless, that is the law,” Aavspeyjh said. “If you require human body parts, you will need to source them yourself and destroy them after use. Should you choose to do this, do not tell me about it, and do not allow yourself to be caught doing it. If you are caught, I most likely will not be able to help you, as you are officially dead. If I catch you leaving this mansion, you will no longer be under my care officially, as per my deal with the royal guard.”

“So if I just-” I began.

“Did you not hear me?” Aavspeyjh asked, raising a hand to silence me. “As far as I am concerned, you will remain in this residence until you are healed. Do not give me any reason to believe you will do otherwise, please, for both of our sakes.”

That night, after eating a meal, I got help from a servant to find some dark clothing with a hood on it. I also picked out a scarf to wrap around my face, which caused a raised eyebrow but no comment. Then I stopped by my laboratory and grabbed a few tubes and some wax. Human magic cores weren’t much larger than the end of a thumb, I recalled from the time I ripped a piece out of the yihzhae’s head in Owsahlk, I should be able to store some in here if I fill it with blood to slow the degradation. Once I found a spot where the tubes wouldn’t be crushed by my movement, I went over to my room and got my sword, strapping it on the opposite hip to where it was normally, then opened and jumped out of the nearest window.

It had been a while since I was outside, and the rank air of the city shocked me. It smells so much cleaner in the mansion, I thought, I wonder how they keep this stench out. I didn’t make much effort to hide as I crossed the lawn and walked up to the wall around the property, keeping my hood up by my face uncovered. Since the wall was only about two and a half meters high, I managed to use force magic to jump up and grab the top with my left hand, then pulled myself so I could peer over it. Once nobody on the other side was looking, I quickly vaulted over it and landed in the street, then crossed into an alley.

They weren’t kidding about the extra guards, I thought, looking out at the foot traffic. Even though it had been more than a week since the attack, there were still groups of three guards patrolling around the main streets, along with heavily-armored figures in bucket-like helmets that I assumed were the kehpveht warriors I had been told about. That’s going to make this a lot more annoying than it needs to be, I sighed, To the slums I go, I suppose, but how? The roofs above me beckoned, but with one arm there was no way I was going to be able to climb six meters straight up.

I spent a few minutes in the alley considering alternate ways of climbing before my mind went back to something I had thought about while working. The Rehvite assassin had walked on a wall, clearly using force magic to secure himself, and at the time I had no idea how he did it. Now, however, I was pretty sure he was using some kind of core control to increase his immediately-available power and enable such a display. My magic stores were hovering around fifty percent, not spectacular, but enough to play with.

Pressing myself up against the wall, I used force magic to pull my hand and feet towards it and felt the three points secure themselves. Once I was sure I was using enough power to avoid slipping, I lifted my right leg, briefly detaching it and then grabbing on again once my foot was about sixty centimeters in the air. I then let go with my left foot and tried to use my right and my left hand to push myself up, which went well right up until the point where the two secured points broke from the wall when I was forty centimeters up, sending me tumbling to the ground painfully.

That’s about what I expected for not injecting any extra magic fuel, I thought, checking my blood saturation in my heads-up display and expecting to see it recovering. Instead, it looked as though it hadn’t even gone down much, still sitting above ninety percent. That’s… odd, I thought, so I didn’t run out of power, but the effect broke? Why would that happen? I secured my hand to the wall again, watching the bar, then began pulling it away using only my muscles. The drain increased as expected when I pulled harder, so I decided to pull as hard as I could in an attempt to break the effect, and succeeded in throwing myself onto my rear again as my combined arm strength and core movement overcame the attractive force in around a second.

It broke again, I thought as I got back up, and again, it didn’t consume a huge amount of power, it just broke. My task temporarily forgotten, I stood in the alley and rubbed my chin with my hand, trying to figure out what was going on. I had used force magic to catch and slow incoming strikes before that had about as much energy as I had exerted to break my own hold, far beyond what I was using to lift myself in my climbing attempts, so what I had just seen appeared counter-intuitive. Wait a minute, I thought, it took about a second though, it wasn’t instant, what if… Putting my hand to the wall again, I leaned away, allowing my weight to pull on the magic, and in around ten seconds the connection snapped as predicted.

Magic range, I thought with a victorious smile, the fuel to manifest an effect isn’t drawn from the whole body, but the blood near the target site. The reactive process to keep the blood’s magic levels constant isn’t like a three-term controller with per-part resolution, it just reacts to the immediate overall state it senses. That means if I’m drawing too much power from one area of the body, it will briefly reach zero in that area because the cores aren’t raising the magic level in the blood to compensate. Several things, like why I could sometimes break force magic shields and sometimes couldn’t, suddenly had a good explanation for them, and the question of how to climb the wall now had an answer.

Attaching myself to the wall by my feet and hands again, I pushed on my cores slightly, releasing just a bit more magic than they normally would. Testing with my right foot, I increased the saturation until I found a level where I could maintain stability even when shoving against the grip with my muscles, more than enough to support climbing. The rest of the maneuver was simple, I just climbed the wall using magic in place of a traditional grip, and I was on the roof within a minute. It cost me almost ten percent of my total magic reserves, probably from healing the oversaturation damage, but it worked.

I can probably make it more efficient with practice, I thought, just like how I concentrated the magic fuel into my arm when regenerating it. I’m not sure how I did that, but in cases like this, it would be very useful. I’ll need to try this out more later after I find what I’m looking for.

A few blocks from the mansion, as I was jumping between rooftops, I heard some shouting that drew my attention. Taking a small detour to my right, I quickly found myself looking down from a three-story building onto a man and a woman in an alley, having a fight of some sort. Correction, that boy is barely an adolescent, I thought, and the woman is almost twice his overall mass. From what I could see, the woman was dressed in deliberately revealing attire, and the boy was dressed in rags.

“You little nayraym,” the woman snarled, using a new curse word and swinging a heavy blow into the boy’s jaw. “You think you can just sneak in and have your way with my girls?”

“I didn’t sneak in!” the boy protested. “They let me in-”

“Zhowvgey did nothing of the sort you nayraymoyjh little npoyt!” the woman cursed back. “You’re broke just like your father, and we don’t play if you don’t pay!” In a fit of rage, the boy let out a roar and pulled out a thirty-centimeter-long knife from under his rags, leaping at the woman before she could react. He went for the throat first, cutting it to keep her from screaming, then stabbed her numerous times in the chest, puncturing her lungs and spilling blood all over the alley. I looked around to the streets nearby for guards, but it looked like none of them heard or cared about the encounter. Convenient for me, I thought.

“Eat shit you old shehp,” the boy spat, drawing my attention back to the scene just as he dashed off covered in blood. The woman, still alive, lay in the alley heaving breaths as her body slowly knitted itself back together. Before she could get to her feet, I dropped from my vantage point and landed beside her with my weapon drawn.

“W-who are-?” she tried to ask, but before she could finish her sentence her head found itself disconnected from the rest of her. Sheathing my sword, I pulled out the tube I brought with me and filled it with blood. Good, I thought, now I just have to get the cores out of her. When they find the body, they’ll assume it was the kid who did it. I couldn’t have asked for a better cover.