Lucas wanted the peace and quiet of course, but more than that, he just wanted to work on his secret recipe without anyone looking over his shoulder. Whenever Adin had forced the issue, Lucas had talked about all the different ingredients and how complicated it was, but that was a lie. He wasn’t even really going to use most of the ingredients. He was going to use the leached off poison instead. 

But that was a ways from now. First, he had to get the goblin bile together, which meant wading into the goblin guts. Just thinking about that part sent a shiver down his spine and made Lucas wrinkle his nose. He hated this part, but there was no way around it. 

Carefully he opened up the pot and hung the livers from a nail above it. They were both about as big as his fist, and they stank like three day old roadkill. 

I’m definitely going to have to air this place out, Lucas thought to himself as he watched the dark organs drip their black bile into the clay vessel. Once that was done, he cut off the little purple acorns that were their gallbladders and squeezed them dry, too. It took over fifteen minutes to harvest half a cup of the dark liquid, but that was plenty. 

Lucas wiped his stained hands on a rag and then wrapped the drained organs in it and set them aside to throw into the midden heap when it was all done. After that, he turned to the blue esper vine sap he’d already drained and got to work adding alcohol to both the sap and the bile, bringing both of them to a gentle boil for several minutes. 

Goblin Bile: Poison 9, strength 3, endurance -1, violent diarrhea

Blue Esper Willow Vine (sap): Perception 4, poison 3, endurance -2, 20% chance to hear voices and/or experience paranoia for 3 hours.

Lucas was thankful that the marginal qualities like diarrhea and hallucinations were usually lost in the mixing process. That was a shame when they were more interesting, like the witch grass blossoms, but he supposed there was a reason that witches and other mystics were reputed to eat it raw. 

The reason he’d done these two first was because, as liquids, they couldn’t be filtered. Instead, he had to be clever and put all this fancy glassware to use with fractional distillation. It took a minute to attach the fractioning column and the simple condenser to the two flasks. He could have mixed them together at this point to make the set-up half as difficult, but he decided against it. 

After all, when he was done, he could turn the bile into potions of lesser strength and the sap into potions of true sight, but together? Who would even want to boost their perception and strength at once? He wondered. An archer? 

Maybe something like that would have high demand among the elves. He shrugged. It didn’t matter. They would get a lot of silver kings if he took an extra few minutes. It wasn’t like it was hard. He just had to align everything and then put a couple coals until the mixtures, and as long as he kept an eye on it, he could move on to the wizened gnome caps. 

They were simple enough, though he usually wore gloves if he had any cuts on his hands, just in case. Lucas had tripped hard on these ugly gray mushrooms exactly one time, and that was enough as far as he was concerned. He had no interest in seeing fairies coming out of his mouth whenever he spoke or feeling the grass and weeds of the earth try to tangle him up and swallow him whole while the trees reached for him threateningly. It was a bad fucking trip that he had no interest in repeating, and he’d have happily worn latex gloves if they’d been invented yet.  

Today, despite his fight with the spider, his hands were wound-free, though. So, he quickly got to work slicing and dicing before drawing the ugly gray chunks in cheap alcohol.

Wizened Gnome Caps (processed): End 3, Poison 1, 

Wizened Gnome Caps Dregs: Poison 1, intelligence -1

Once that was done, he quickly set aside the sludge and dumped the gray liquid into the purple alcohol he’d made with Danaira earlier, producing the start of what would quickly become a rather toxic compound. 

Slightly Poisonous Mixture (20 doses): Poison 3, intelligence -1

Lucas stirred that together well, and then reached for the next two fluids he’d concocted. The pale blue liquid that was derived from the esper vine sap made the concoction shimmer like twilight for a moment as the blues, purples, and grays swirled together without ever actually mixing. All that disappeared when he dumped the black bile dregs in too. It plunged the entire concoction into inky blackness. 

Very Poisonous Mixture (40 doses): Poison 10, intelligence -1

Then, it was all but done. He could heat it to try to intensify it or dilute it to make more of it, but all he really needed to do was add the juice of two dozen sour dwarf berries. 

Lucas didn’t do that just yet, though. Instead, he paused to appreciate this moment. 

He’d built himself up from nothing again for the third time on. As a snack, they were common enough among dwarves. It wouldn’t kill a human to try them, of course, but they were eye-wateringly tart and so sour that they made those little gummies he used to get at the movies seem sweet by comparison. They were a snack that only an IPA lover could enjoy, and that had never really been his thing. 

Sour Dwarf Berries (raw): Euphoria 1, intelligence - 1, sour, strong catalyst (alters the alignment of the largest attribute in the current mixture.) 

They did have one unique feature that wasn’t commonly known, though. They were just about the cheapest strong catalyst that one could buy. 

Most alchemists and merchants kept a long list of ingredients along with their elemental alignment, their known properties, and other trivia. Lucas didn’t have to do much of that because, unlike most, he could simply see what each herb and berry did and didn’t do. Fortunately, the man he’d apprenticed under when he’d first come to this world liked to get a little high, and that was where Lucas had disc discovered the grand alchemical cycle, so to speak. 

For a long time, he’d wondered what the catalyst tag was on some of the herbs in the shop, but it wasn’t until he’d watched that old bastard Mr. Keller sprinkle some vitriolic earth into some mana potion dregs that he finally understood. 

Now, he knew the people of this world had it backward: it wasn’t earth, air, fire, and water that mattered. It was a different Binary: healing vs poison and mana vs euphoria. It had only taken a couple experiments to prove it. His master had thought that turning poisoned dregs into some kind of mild hallucinogenic ambien had worked because the air in the vitriolic earth had interacted with the fire intrinsic to all mana, making it effervescent, but he couldn’t have been more wrong. 

Lucas was certain that was incorrect, though. Instead, a major catalyst moved the property clockwise, and minor catalysts did the same thing counterclockwise. There was probably more to it than that. If he’d written a paper and presented it to the guild, he probably would have been showered with riches to dig ever deeper into alchemy. 

He hadn’t done that, though. Instead, he’d done the next most logical thing: he’d learned to make hard drugs to sell and buy his way out of that little shithole town and make his own way in this world. 

A couple of years later, he’d finally found enough synergies to make blue, and the rest was history. Now he knew things had a specific order well, at least some things did. It didn’t seem to matter what he did them in. He could add the sap to the bile or the bile to the mushroom juice. In the end it would all turn black no matter what order it was done in. All that mattered was that the berry juice was added last.

He poured the clear liquid in at that moment, and watched as the tiny alchemical lightshow kick on. For a brief minute the black void lit up like a stay sky, as magical sparks and unknowable chemical reactions kicked the black morass over to a deep navy color that slowly turned more and more cyan with time. 

Lucas watched an alert flicker briefly before vanishing, but he didn’t need to read it. He’d read it a thousand times before. 

Catalyzed: Poison -> Euphoria. 

After that, it was gone, and he was left the same message as always. 

Brew of Mana Intoxication (pure) (45 doses): Euphoria 8, poison 2, intelligence -1, mana regeneration decreased by 180% for 1 hour. 

Inevitably, some of the poison was left, which was annoying. You’d think that since this literally turns one to the other, there’d be none left, but what can you do, he thought. Still, he ignored that and smiled just the same. 

“With this set up I can finally try to figure out what causes that,” he said to himself. “Maybe we can filter it or distill it and get closer to pure.”

For now the only way he knew to purify the stuff was to boil it down to a more concentrated form, like he’d done in the experiment that Adin had gotten a taste of. It probably wasn’t cost-effective, though. Even at its current concentration, they’d have people lining up around the block to pay five kings for the privilege. Even if they stepped on it a few times to make something more palatable to lower classes, they could still charge a silver or two and make a whole pile of dragons. 

Still, the former plan appealed to him more. While he liked the idea of getting a bunch of assholes in the upper crust strung out on blue, the part of him that felt guilty and getting a working stiff hooked on something so strong was growing large by the day. Other than maybe the guards he seemed to keep crossing paths with or Brog, he really didn’t wish that on anyone. 

Lucas took his time to meditate on these and other issues, and it was only when he was good and ready, and he’d sealed and stowed his jar of cyan liquid, that he started opening up the doors and windows to air the place out. Outside, in the shade of a badly overgrown apple tree, he found the rest of the gang, including Kar’gandin.

“Where the hell have you been? I thought we said we were going to stay out of the city!” Lucas asked before noting the dwarf was happily munching away on his very sour catalyst. “And why the hell are you eating all my berries. I need those!”

“Yer berries?” Kar’gandin laughed. “This is more like share and share alike. I think ye mean our berries.”

The dwarf started by catching Lucas up on his trip, and eventually even he was forced to concede that he’d probably done the right thing. Kar’gandin had gone to test security and see how tight things really were, and the answer was not very. He’d smuggled himself inside a wagon on the way in and had worn a big floppy hat as a disguise just in case, but even as he walked around the city speaking to various contacts, he’d never gotten the feeling that anyone was seriously looking for him. 

“On the other hand, I did get the feeling that people were looking for you, well - your little blue potions, at least. Apparently, it’s very popular stuff, and your old customers are frantic to find a new supply.”

“Fuck ‘em,” Lucas spat, hoping they tore Brog to pieces looking for a fix. “I don’t care what happens to them.” 

“Well, all I care about is a ready customer base, laddie,” Kar’gandin said with a shrug as he pulled out his pipe and began to pack it. “We have the product and the customers; now we just need to decide who’s going to handle the… ahem… distribution for us.”