When Alchemy began in the Multiverse, lo those eons ago, nobody knew what they were doing.

People ate manticore dung, drank mercury smoothies, and did all kinds of other silly nonsense. Alchemists tended to be an eccentric, reclusive sort to begin with, and there were so few of them that knowledge of best practices was nonexistent.

Then a few had the bright idea to get together, pool results, and eat less dung. Alchemical communities formed. Tools and recipes and refinements became widely known. Information flowed freely, stress-tested.

Then a few communities had the bright idea to get together, pool results, and drink less mercury. At which point Alchemical councils and guilds formed across realms, connecting all the best Alchemists, codifying the practice into a true science.

Then a few world councils—across multiple planes—had the bright idea to get together, pool results, and not do all kinds of other silly nonsense. Hence the Multiversal Standard of Alchemy was born, a free-flowing network of innovation and enlightenment which stretched across all the Middle and Upper realms, with each invention systematized, disseminated, and peer-reviewed to death. What followed was several millennia of Alchemical boom; new tools invented, recipes found, means of brewing invented. This was Alchemy’s true breakthrough.

It was also completely absent in the Lower Realms.

Disconnected from that network, most Lower Realms, like Ylterra, were still rolling around in metaphorical dung. In these realms alchemy still largely tended toward insularity—master-apprenticeships were the norm, and they were mired in secretive guilds, and permits, and licenses, and cost restrictions.

In short, introducing modern Alchemical methods here would be a little like introducing carbon nanotubes to a civilization that’d just figured out the wheel. They were still on cauldrons and ladles, for hells’ sake! Dorian didn’t have half the equipment he needed to do anything complex.

He sighed as he stared out at Alchemist Hu’s tent, some thirty steps away. For now, he’d need to use the basics.

Emphasis on for now. He did need to up this body’s cultivation talent significantly, and the most efficient means was bloodline grafting—which would transplant another’s talent to his own body, preferably some great Spirit Beast’s. The methods of bloodline assimilation on this plane—mostly swallowing a Prime bone, then refining the pinprick of Beast blood within—were crude beyond measure. Low success-rate and diluted to boot. No; for full effect he'd need some more intricate instruments. He squinted, looking around at the giant spurs of bone sticking out of the sands. By the looks of all these corpse-parts, there were too many bloodlines buried here to count. It was just a matter of picking the right one…

He was getting ahead of himself. He hadn’t even a damn cauldron or stirring-stick yet! First things first.

Alchemist apprentice-bait.

He stood upright and shot Hu’s tent a final glance. You’d better be watching, old man! Then he picked up the elixir, ingredients and all, clasped both hands around them, and closed his eyes.

This next thing was the very first form of alchemy ever invented. Free-form brewing, or free-brewing, was simple; the cultivator’s will acts as the cauldron, and ladle, and brewing mechanism too. It was a very qi-intensive and finicky technique. Nowadays, only consummate masters ever tried it.

That, or idiot newbies who saw it in a reference book somewhere, tried it out, and wound up blowing four fingers off their hands.

Dorian breathed deep. He didn’t have much recollection of the finer details, which were all lost in the reincarnation process, but he had a general sense of what Free-brewing was. It’d come back to him as he got into it.

He remembered it was fiendish at first. He remembered many explosions trying it in past lives. But if there was one person most suited to getting it right first-try, it was also him.

He had just one shot at this. One set of ingredients. If he didn’t get it right now it’d set him back several days.

…Come to think of it, it also might set him back a limb, too.

Bah. It was just a Lower-realm potion, after all. How hard could it be?

Fun fact—across his many reincarnations, How hard could it be? were his most common last words.

Before he could think himself out of it, he began.

The first part was the easiest. It was also a hurdle most people never got over, and it took considerable mental talent to pull off. He split his mind in three. Not in the easy, multi-tasking sense, which is not truly multitasking but rather focus flitting between two things rapidly. No—each mind had its own strands of thought and its own task.

Stir. Hold. Direct.

Then he set it to work on the potion.

The antidote was, in theory, simple. Low-level. It was a simple merging process; dissolve the ingredients into the potion proper with qi, infuse it in a simple holding pattern, and done.

But theory and practice were the same in theory, not in practice.

The instant he began, he regretted it.

AGH! It felt, in those first five seconds, like he was an arthritic man with cerebral palsy trying to hold onto a squirming snake that was also covered in lube. Four times he nearly let his hold slip. Qi penetrated into the three herbs soaking within the flask, slowly unwinding their properties, releasing their qi. Little qi-shockwaves fizzled out of them in all directions. It all felt a millisecond’s lapse in concentration away from utter implosion. Dorian gritted his teeth. HOLD!!

[Level up!]

[Free-brewing] Lvl. 1

He breathed out just a tad. It was coming back to him, bit by bit, like he was returning to a game he’d mastered in youth, but had since long forgotten. Sweat beaded his brows instantly. The flask was heating up fast, almost scalding, as the herbs within let loose their energies, fusing like stars into the mixture.

His arms quivered, his teeth gritted, his muscles all locked up, but he was getting ahold of it now. It no longer teetered on a knife’s edge.

Now came the hard part.

Every alchemy neophyte, at least in any civilized realm, learned that the best sorts of brews did more than one thing at once. This potion wouldn’t just clear the poison... Dorian also expected a boost in power.

Was this necessary? No. Risky? Perhaps. Worth it? He shrugged. He was stuck in this hellscape of a lower realm; he was playing catch-up! Risks were a part of the game.

There was also a small part of him that always got itchy when he was in settings where he was too far outmatched. And here, forget the Chief—all manner of Spirit Beasts could stomp him with a big toe, not to mention rival clans. He dallied at his own risk.

So he went for it.

A fourth part of his mind split off, and now he was entrenched in an insane juggling act; while keeping the other three going, he started weaving the qi in the environment into the potion slowly, surely, like he was operating a loom in his mind.

As he clenched and sweated, he felt all of it slowly coming together…

***

Hu stormed out of his tent the way a very fat man storms out of a tent. He scanned around, squinting for the culprit.

“Show yourself!” He cried. No answer.

Growling, he reached out with his spirit and felt the qi in a twang, coming behind his tent, around a small patch of cacti and meager shrubbery, and around a dune.

He saw a boy in mid-brew. Pale, thin. He looked sunken-in, like he’d been wrung dry; indeed, beads of sweat seemed to be fleeing his body like refugees from a warzone.

The little idiot was still hard at work free-brewing. Or rather, what he thought was free-brewing; any moment now Hu was sure something would blow.

Then he blinked again. It was a little hard to tell under the night skylights—the moons and the Lightway made for a perplexing mixture at this hour—but was this that kid from earlier? The one who’d suggested he fix his Heart-Quickening Draught!

He rubbed his eyes. Still the same kid, still hard at work at his brew. Hu hazily recalled the kid’s saying something about his sister’s alchemy book… the little shit really thought he’d pull an ancient alchemical technique, then sneak out here in the dead of night to try it out?!

It took incredible mental control to even try such a thing! Hells, Hu’s success rate was only one in three. The kid probably couldn’t even tell Hu was here—if Hu spoke, he doubted it’d register. The kid was too far gone.

….but nothing had blown up. Yet.

Hu blinked. There were no sharp fluctuations of qi. No boiling-over tensions. It almost seemed… under control.

Like the kid knew what he was doing.

But the kid couldn’t possibly know what he was doing. This was a high-level technique!

But it was under control.

The two facts swirled around Hu’s head, crashing into each other, unable to resolve. So he just stood there with a half-constipated, half-incredulous stare. What was happening? Had he put the wrong mushrooms in his soup?

“Uh? Whuh?” Hu hypothesized.

Should he intervene? If he broke in, the kid might lose the rhythm. That might really screw things up. But if he didn’t intervene and the thing blew up anyway, he just ran all this way to stick his face closer to an explosion.

He kept standing. He kept staring. The ingredients within were building in color and temperature, flushed with qi, reaching a critical state. Three more lines creased the kid’s forehead and he gasped, biting down hard, stirring harder.

Then shockwaves of qi spiked and dropped precipitously, like a pulse gone haywire.

Hu’s eyes bulged. No. He’s lost it!

The waves were turning to riptides, and Hu scrambled back, swallowing, watching them build. Qi tingled like lightning on his skin. The waves built and crashed with fervent, manic energy, spiraling out, and his blood thumped loud as a drumbeat in his ears.

Yelping, Hu hunched in and braced himself. A mana technique gathered in his palms, ready to stave off the blast. He chewed on his lips, his face scrunched in concentration. Here it comes…!

Blip. Wink. Fizz.

Hu gaped.

In the boy’s hands, a potion swirled blue-white, like a thunderstorm trapped under glass. Qi swirled happily within, stable. It glowed with a light not of this world.

Brew… complete….?

Hu’s brain felt like all its juices had been squeezed out.

Before he had time to unpack all of that, though, the boy blacked out.

It was like all his strings had been cut. Slowly he fell, sagging onto his joints, his arms limp and weak, hands unspooling. His face hit the sands first.

It wasn’t that, though, that caught Hu’s eye.

The potion. Unlike any he’d ever seen. Slipping between failed fingers, about to spill into the sands. Lost forever.

Hu’s breath choked in his throat. There were only two things he took seriously: food, and Alchemy, and it ate at his overworked heart to have either go to waste.

What followed was the most athletic thing Hu had ever done. Which wasn’t saying much, really, but Hu would still milk it as a tale around campfires for years to come.

With a shrill shriek that would put a pre-pubescent girl to shame, he leaped.

Time seemed to slow. His sausage fingers splayed out. His eyes became like a Vordor’s, sharp, focused, for the first time in his life. His body took flight the way a very fat man’s body takes flight: that is, not very well. And he dove for all he was worth, hand grasping for the neck of the flask.

He missed by about five feet.

For the second time that hour, he face-planted into the sand.

He only heard the flask hitting the sand—a dulled thump. “BLUH!!” Scrambling, spitting sand out of his mouth, he got to his knees and rubbed at his eyes, his heart hammering.

The flask was…perfectly fine. The sands swaddled it like a cushion; it was a little off-angle, but the liquid within lay preserved. For a second Hu stared at it, disbelieving.

Then he got to shaky feet, panting, and walked up to it. When he told this story to the fellows tomorrow it'd definitely end with him heroically catching the flask a second from impact, he decided.

The boy, meanwhile, still showed no sign of consciousness.

“Boy!” He croaked. The boy didn’t move.

His eyes flitted between the boy and the flask. He was very confused. Frowning, he picked up the flask, eyeballed its contents, and still had not a clue what it was. Was it just some kind of happy accident? It must be. It was quite pretty, though, and seemed infused a plethora of fascinating aspects. The Alchemist geek in him demanded he take it back to his lab and study it.

So he did.

“Sorry, kid,” he said cheerfully to the boy’s prostrate form. Then he walked off, flask in hand, humming a tune. Today was shaping up to be quite a strange day.

Then a thought tugged at him, and he paused halfway back.

It might be a tad improper to rob a kid of his elixir, then leave him baking facedown in the sand… And the kid did seem pretty out of it when he fell…

Besides, he was at a loss as to how in the nine hells had the kid done all that. Luck was the obvious reason—it was definitely luck—but a part of him suspected something deeper. Maybe now was his chance to get some answers...

He hemmed and hawed for a good thirty seconds. Then, groaning, he walked back.

“Bah. You’re lucky I’m so generous,” he sighed. He grabbed the boy by an ankle and started dragging him along like a plow. The boy’s face made a thick line in the sand as they went.

“Come along, then,” Hu groused, grunting.

He didn’t know it then, but the boy whose nostrils were currently filling up with sand would change his life forever.

Time Elapsed: 17 hours