Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

"Hmm," Zorian hummed thoughtfully. Okay, so this was slightly more interesting than he assumed. Still… "So why are you doing it like this, doing the procedure under the open sky, in a simple iron cauldron? You have an alchemy workshop that nearly every professional alchemist would be envious of. Why not use it?"

"Hmph. Shows what you know," Silverlake said. "I’m doing it this way because this is the superior option. It’s good enough for the job. Doing this with a complicated alchemical setup wouldn’t get stuff done any faster or give better results – it would just inflict wear and tear on delicate equipment and be a nightmare to clean up afterwards."

Zorian had nothing to say to that. Her argument did make a lot of sense, after all.

They both stayed silent for a while. Eventually Silverlake finally finished preparing the wild roots and unceremoniously dumped them into the boiling cauldron. She watched the liquid bubble for a few seconds, before nodding sagely to herself and adding a couple of wooden planks to the fire.

"Do you know what the difference between alchemy and potion making is, boy?" Silverlake asked suddenly, glancing at him with narrowed eyes.

Zorian was tempted to tell her that potion making was just a subset of alchemy, but he knew she would consider that a wrong answer.

She was asking about potion making in the sense that ancient witches understood it, not in the sense that was currently taught in schools.

"Potion making focuses on using a cauldron, and nothing else, to make their wares," Zorian said.

"Yes," Silverlake agreed. "Sounds very foolish, doesn’t it? A botched potion can release clouds of poisonous or mutagenic gas, explode in your face or splash all over you and melt your skin. Hell, a correctly made potion can be just as bad! Very often, old witches carried a mark of their minor failures in the form of scars, strange odors and skin diseases from the years of exposure to magical fumes and concoctions. Modern alchemy is so much safer, so much more precise . Why, then, do you think the old witches do things in the way they did?"

Zorian cocked his head to the side, trying to figure out what she was getting at. What’s that got to do with anything?

"Because it was… cheaper?" he tried.

"Ha. Close," Silverlake said. "It’s because alchemy, in its current form, requires an entire society built to enable it. Somebody has to build all the vials, containers, heaters, and other equipment. Somebody needs to grow, gather and track down the ingredients used in it. Somebody needs to transport and distribute it to those that need it… or have the right connections to use it. Somebody needs to guard the workshops full of valuable equipment from thieves and various miscreants. The old witches had access to none of that, so they had to make do with chucking things into a big iron cauldron and eyeballing things. It is, as you said, cheaper. Cheaper in terms of money and also cheaper in terms of social infrastructure needed to support it."

"I see," Zorian said after a while.

"These days there are virtually no witches that do not use alchemy in some form, in addition to their traditional cauldron-based skills," Silverlake continued. "The ancient covens would have considered us all heretics, I bet. But the ancient covens have all died out to my knowledge, and that’s hardly an accident. Times change. The covens didn’t and paid the price for it. Alchemy has its place… as does potion making. Don’t be so quick to look down on it."

"You made that entire long-winded speech just to deliver that little lecture at the end of it, didn’t you?" Zorian huffed in annoyance.

"You’re going to remember it better this way," Silverlake cackled. She prodded the bubbling liquid in the cauldron with an iron ladle she used to mix it. "Well, whatever, I think we can leave this be for a few hours. You recovered yet, boy? I say, you sure take your time with your rest – it’s a miracle you got this far with such an awful work ethic. Why, when I was your age, we…"

Zorian sighed and got up, doing his best to drown out her moralizing. He sent a quick message through his soul to the simulacrum working on implementing sensory filters, telling it to work quickly. He was going to need those skills as soon as possible.

The great wilderness that existed in the north of Altazia was a place that contained many rare and valuable things. Exotic natural resources, interesting locations, magical plants and animals extinct in the south… all of those and more could be located if one was willing to spend time searching for them and was strong enough to survive deep in the untamed mountains and forests. This wasn’t because the northern wilderness was particularly blessed in natural resources and magical hot-spots, of course, but simply because most of it had never been settled and systematically exploited by human societies. The southern areas had once had these kinds of things as well, but the spread of civilization and rising number of mages had caused many of them to disappear. Mines were depleted, forests chopped down and turned into farmlands, Dungeon openings sealed away or turned into carefully-regulated mana wells, delicate areas destroyed through war or short-term greed and dangerous plants and animals deliberately hunted to extinction. After all, nobody wanted to live next to a man-eating magical tiger or a walking tree that periodically planted itself in your field and ruined the crops, no matter how valuable they were to some mage in the neighboring country.

Such was the case with the plant that Zach and Zorian were currently after. The soulseizer chrysanthemum, as it was called, was one of the rare entities that ate souls. Since nobody wanted a soul-eating flower growing in their garden – or anywhere near them, really – the plant rapidly went extinct any time humans moved into an area. Thus, if Zach and Zorian wanted to find one, they had to go to the wild areas untouched by most of humanity.

Currently, the two of them were hiding under a globe of invisibility, warily watching a huge black bear amble past them. Though the bear wasn’t truly a life-threatening danger to them, they were in no mood to pick a fight with it. It was a resilient monster, and no part of its body was particularly valuable on the general market. Considering they had been trudging through the dense foliage of the Great Northern Forest for most of the day, they really just wanted to find where the soulseizer chrysanthemum was hiding and go home.

Thankfully, the bear did not appear to be hunting and paid little attention to its surroundings. It simply walked past them and soon disappeared from sight.

Zach dispelled the globe of invisibility that hid them from sight and then cautiously scanned the area for further dangers. Although not as dangerous as the deeper layers of the Dungeon and the like, Altazia’s northern forests were not a place for the unwary. This deep in the wilderness, there lurked threats that posed a danger even to Zach and Zorian working together, should they be caught by surprise.

"Gathering all these ingredients on Silverlake’s list is surprisingly hard," Zach said, relaxing slightly upon detecting nothing of note. "They’re rare, dangerous, or both, and Silverlake never gave us a single clue where we could find any of them… and yet, the task is still clearly doable, so we can’t really complain about being given a completely impossible task. The old witch really has a knack for this stuff."

"I’m half-convinced that most of these are not necessary for the potion at all," Zorian said, sighing lightly. He spent a few seconds reorienting himself and then set off in the northwestern direction. Zach followed him without complaint. "She probably added quite a few of these because she personally needs them for something, not because the potion we ordered demands it. The trouble is–"