“It will be a few days’ trek there and back,” Crovacus explained as Zel and Strol both intently looked at a map that had been laid out overtop the mess on the desk. “I could get you access to motorized transport, but that’d be like painting targets on your backs.”

“March there, exterminate the bugs, march back,” the singer nodded. “The more things change the more they stay the same, huh?”

“Uh-huh. Just make sure to reach Rally Point Gamma on time, you’re to rendezvous with the third member of your party there,” the governor continued, pointing a free finger at the third stopping point on the plotted course, being the first stopping point of the trek’s second day. Ideally, the trek would only be two days with four stops, but the alternate path for bad weather accounted for up to four days with eight secure stopping points. Crovacus even gave Zelsys a military pocket watch, its tarnished shell stamped with a simple floral design. 

He reluctantly added that, “You’ll need four people in total to open the Fog door. I can have my son accompany you, if necessary.”

Zelsys chuckled and graciously refused the offer, citing that, “I already have someone to watch my back, but the offer is appreciated. Perhaps have the boy train some more so I don’t completely trample him when he inevitably challenges me again.”

Soon enough, the briefing was done and she made her way out of the town hall alongside the Singer, both of them having been given a map with their intended path. He was bizarrely normal in person, his violent charisma reined in so tightly that he would’ve seemed like a normal person were it not for his extreme appearance.

Makhus found himself flitting from task to task, yet he had no issue keeping up after a good night’s sleep. The first was taking care of Sigmund, who was practically bedridden with a truly severe hangover and covered in mild burns, having somehow lost several kilos of weight and developed an insatiable appetite for protein, fat, and sugar. 

Instead of purging the Rubedo that came from his seizures, it was cooking enough of his personal favorite lentil stew to feed everyone - enough for six, but Sigmund as he was now would eat for three. 

The second task was the elaborate, and thankfully slow process of brewing the Necrobeast’s Azoth and Zel’s blood into a cohesive elixir. He’d already worked out the new glyphic inscriptions he had to make, the arrangement of glassware, the process itself, even the math of it, all in his sleepless Liquid Vigor-fueled bender.

All he had to figure out was which of the beast’s positive traits he could safely distill, or rather, if he could manage to extract both its self-reconstruction and its ability to project a destructive breath of Essentia. Fortunately for Makhus, he had more than enough time to do this, as it would still be long hours before the new sample of Zel’s blood would fully dissolve into solution.

The third of his pursuits was his own obsession, his own desire to more thoroughly plumb the dead alchemist’s notes. Between adjusting both of his active alkahestry setups, making sure the soup didn’t burn, and checking in on Sigmund every hour or so, he couldn’t find time to do more than take a peek every once in a while. Much to his relief, Zefaris woke up at a rather reasonable time, sleepily stumbling into the kitchen just as the soup was nearing completion. 

“Mind keeping an eye on it for me?” he asked, and with a yawning nod, she took over the ever so important duty of making sure the soup didn’t turn to burnt mush. Now that he didn’t have to ping-pong back and forth every couple minutes to make sure it wasn’t burnt, he could direct most of his focus towards making sure neither of his ongoing alchemy processes got out of hand and reading more of the alchemist’s notes.

Makhus resorted to just taking the coded notebook and slowly decoding it piece by piece whilst also standing watch over the two active glassware sets. Whilst the one being used to dissolve Zel’s blood into solution didn’t really need any adjustment, the flask being used to melt the Necrobeast’s Azoth required constant adjustment to ensure the solution remained stable. He had ground the outer shell into dust until only a very thin layer remained around the liquid, mercurial essence in the stone’s core, simply dissolving the shell into a solution of alkahest before he added the core itself and placed the flask into a traditional extraction setup.

It took some trial and error with the giant tangle of tubes and flasks that the setup was, but he had managed to replace a solid third of its components with ones he had found that he thought had more appropriate glyphs - glyphs to dispel any Nigredo that formed, glyphs to ward against decay and death, glyphs to purge the bestial aspects of the Azoth to leave only the pure core of its constituent traits. Distilling an Azoth stone was a meticulous balancing game of filtering out the undesirables while extracting the desirable components. 

Many traditionalists would have found it offensive, they would have said that one shouldn’t be able to just pick and choose, that one should absorb an Azoth for all it was and put in the work to deal with all of the consequences. Many claimed it was disrespectful to the creature, to rip its essence to pieces with alchemy and discard those that don’t fit.

Most of these people had died in the war, unlike Makhus. 

“Natural order this, natural order that, they’d justify genocide by citing the natural order if it came to that,” he annoyedly murmured to himself as he adjusted a valve. “The natural order can go fuck itself.”

The process seemed to be going stable, and so Makhus finally turned his attention to the journal. He read, decoded, and found nothing but disappointment. The vast majority of the journal’s contents after its owner departed for the location given to him by the Sage of Fog was… What one would expect from a journal. Documentation of travel, of the weather, of the owner’s mood. Much of the contents were rather apt descriptions and sketches of the Exclusion Zone’s many oddities, certainly fascinating to anyone who hadn’t lived there for months on end like Makhus had. The dead alchemist had apparently even encountered a rot-bear, going by the accurate full-page sketch.