Chapter Three Hundred And Forty One – 341"Drink this, Pit."
Felix tilted a blue-stone carafe into his Companion's open beak. The tenku choked on it, warbling in agony.
"It doesn't taste that bad," Felix chided. He stroked the chimera's feathered throat, encouraging him to swallow the mixture and grimaced as the smell wafted back up at him. "Okay, it's...not the best. But it's good for you."
Pit drank it all while his tail lashed angrily into a stack of half-empty barrels to the staccato tattoo of furious displeasure. Felix watched his friend struggle with the mixture, thick as it was, but he finished it all. Carefully, he lowered the carafe and backed up.
"Alright?" he asked.
In response, Pit cautiously shrugged. Golden eyes widened. Feathers lifted and his tail bristled like a chimney brush.
"Again?" Felix groaned.
Pit retched, neck and chest undulating as clouds of noxious, black fumes roiled from his gullet, followed closely by a thin stream of fetid fluid. The clouds boiled upward, slipping into the grated vents located in the ceiling while the liquid pooled thickly on the polished floors. A smell like rotting meat and vegetation filled the air, making everyone in the Lab gag in disgust. It was not the first time they had smelled such, and much as Felix wished it were otherwise, he did not think it would be the last.
Felix carefully stroked his friend's back as he tried to empty himself of all the impurities his Cleansing Tonic had isolated, until only bile was coming up. By that point, the liquid had itself sublimated into a far thinner smoke, leaving only a stain upon the pitted, wooden floor.
"At least it wasn't as much this time," Felix said, giving Pit an extra pat between his shoulder blades. "I think we're getting closer to getting all of it."
Really? he sent.
"...No. This is barely scratching the surface," Felix admitted before rubbing his hands across his tired face. He'd been up for an entire day distilling that tonic, and still it had only grasped the most superficial of impurities in Pit's channels. With a quick flex of Cardinal Flame, a tendril of Felix's Mana delved Pit's pathways. "We haven't even touched your core space yet."
Pit wilted, his triangular ear tufts drooping.
"But, uh, have hope, we'll figure this out," Felix said. "These impurities aren't impeding you yet. Karys says you could most likely evolve and suffer no diminished capacity at all."
Pit snorted. The man with holes in his Mind?
Felix opened his mouth before letting it shut with a snap. "Fair point."
They had tried this mixture three times now, and over the past week Felix had put the majority of his attention into solving the mystery of a Cleansing Potion. There were no records of how to make one, and none among the Stronghold's residents had been any help, not even the Farwalkerthough the man had been a font of knowledge regarding Companion Pacts. In the end, Felix had been forced to improvise his Cleansing Tonic, though he'd been given good general instruction by Karys' faulty memory. Alchemy was as much about the physical process of mixing and distilling as it was about the crafter's Intent. One could, in fact, skip much of the basics and simply impress Mana and one's Intent upon a mixture and make a passable Healing Tonic. Not a great one, mind, but passable. Enough to cure a few scratches and bruises. Coupled with Felix's impressive Intent and near bottomless Mana and they had, at the very least, a place to start.
"I'll mark this variation as 'needs improvement,'" Felix said as he set the blue-stone carafe upon his workstation.
Also 'tastes like krem butt,' Pit offered.
"I'll make a note," Felix said, grinning. If Pit's sense of humor had returned, then it wasn't as awful a process as he'd feared. "We still have variation number four brewing in the cold storage. Hopefully the lack of heat will"
"Sir!"
Felix whirled toward the voice and saw Vyne urgently waving at him. The man was standing near Felix's Ladder of Ascension, where a series of tubes, alembics, and retorts fed into a vial at the very top...a vial that was supposed to be holding his newest attempt at distilling the Spirit Fruit. Instead, the vial was producing a large quantity of prismatic steam, all of it so heavy it was pooling around the base. It sparked, like fireworks going off, popping and snapping.
"Get back!" he shouted, while driving his Intent and Affinity through his core space. His Stone Shaping responded, manifesting a foot-thick dome of grey stone around the entire Ladder, which slammed in place just as an explosion rocked the Lab. It was so powerful Felix could feel it through his feet, numbing his toes while it sent his alchemist falling to their knees in pained shock.
Vyne, meanwhile, had slammed a massive shield made of blued steel into the wooden floors. The dome cracked, releasing a rainbow-hued spray of Essence in a sharp-bladed arc that neatly bisected his very impressive shield and threw the warrior back a dozen paces. Felix sent Mana hurtling across space, while his core rang out the pattern of Stone Shaping once again. Another slab of stone burst upward, shattering floorboards as it turned aside the explosion's deadly edge.
"Vyne!" Nevia said, rushing to his side. She held a pair of Healing Tonics in her hands, but the young guy sat up all on his own.
"I'm, ouf," he winced and held his chest. Blood welled up, but it was a shallow cut. "I'm fine. Barely scratched me."
"You stupid oaf," Nevia cursed. She poured one of her Tonics onto his chest, letting the solution bubble and fizz against his opened flesh before pulling out a roll of bandages. "You're supposed to run from a failed experiment!"
Vyne gave a pained chuckle. "I didn't know you cared. Ow!"
Nevia smiled smugly, deftly tying the knot she'd just tightened. "Hold still."
"Gonna need a new shield," Kikri mused, running a finger across the sundered edge of his former armor. She hissed and recoiled, her finger bloodied. "It's sliced clean through."
"That's why I brought the granite in here," Felix said as he walked by. "Nevia's right. Next time, run."
"A-aye, sir," Vyne said with a swallow. He traded glances with the Dwarf.
Felix left them to it and inspected the dome of granite. It had been cracked all along a side, and within he could only see swirls of chaotic Mana. With a flex of his Will and expenditure of Mana, he tore the thickened dome apart into chunks of swirling liquid stone. They spun about him for a second before returning to the block of Tier II Granite that he had kept nearby for exactly these situations, reconstituting it seamlessly.
Stone Shaping is level 74!
Beneath the dome was absolute wreckage. Felix let out a heavy breath, annoyance and resignation both, and inspected the remains of his Ladder of Ascension. The alembic and nearly every retort had been shattered, while the frame and circular inscriptions were all twisted beyond remedy. Perhaps if Felix had managed to figure out Metal Shaping he'd have been able to reconstitute it in some form, but that Skill had been elusive. He was sure it existed, but again, his Shaping Skills were missing something. He'd yet to find out what.
At the top of the broken Ladder, the vial holding his latest attempt at an Essence Draught was split in half. It contained nothing more than an oily foam, like bubbles in an oil slick.
"Failure. Again." Felix had tried distilling an Essence Draught an entire sixteen times while working on the Cleansing mixture, but where he'd found limited success with the latter, the former had proven a stubborn obstacle to his alchemic advancement. He massaged his temples, fighting back the stress headache that was taking up more and more of his mental space each day. He wasn't getting much sleep as it was, and the strain of his friends being held back by this was maddening. "How many Spirit Fruit do we have left?"
"Over two hundred," Kikri said.
Felix nodded. He hadn't harvested an eighth of what the Spirit Tree had to offer, but squandering even one of them felt like a colossal waste. "Get me another."
Need sleep, Pit said from across the Lab.
"I need to figure this out," Felix insisted. The others went about their tasks, ignoring him talking to the air. Half-conversations between Felix and Pit had become common-place. "Sleeping can wait."
Dreams are worse, he said. I hear them.
Felix looked up at his Companion. The tenku was looking at him with concern in his big gold eyes. The headache behind his eyes redoubled, a pain sharp enough to push beyond his Song of Absolution. His Body, Mind, and Spirit all felt like taut strings, stretched over the rim of a hollow abyss. The dreams were still there, worsening by the day. "I know. I'm sorry."
No sorry, Pit snorted. Fix. Action. Confront dreams.
"What?"
BEWARE.
Felix stumbled, the words shoved into his brain rather than a blue-box notification. It had felt like the System talking to him almost, except that it came from the very earth around him. He looked around, unable to shake away the impression of enormous footsteps headed in his direction.
What is it? Pit asked, leaping to his feet. His wings rustled.
"Someone's here," Felix said. No matter how he pushed his Perception however, he sensed nothing amiss in the Crafting Halls or beyond. "Come on."
They tore out of his Lab, down the steps and across the Beacon's landing and into the Temple proper. He leaped, bouncing off the steps he'd constructed around the base of his Spirit Tree, out of the crevasse and into the early autumn air above. There, he and Pit skidded to a stop, the waterfall thundering to their left and the cliff dropping toward his Stronghold on their right.