Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

The look on Zach’s face when he realized he just dumped a huge amount of work in his own lap was truly priceless.

Although Zach and Zorian had successfully retrieved the imperial ring from the Ziggurat of the Sun and found out what it did, there was no time for celebration. Quatach-Ichl’s surprise visit had completely changed the dynamics of their current restart, and they had to prepare. One of these preparations was gathering everyone’s research notes and the like. Normally this would be done just before the very end of the restart, but since there was so much chance of things going wrong this time around, Zorian decided to speed things up a little.

At the moment, this meant visiting Kael in his basement alchemy lab to see how his projects were progressing. This would be normally rather mundane, but nothing seemed to be entirely mundane in this particular restart. Apparently Silverlake had figured out who Kael was at some point in the restart and had talked to him a few times already. Sadly for Silverlake, Kael had given her a chilly reception. Their previous interaction seemed to have left a bad impression on Kael, something that did not surprise Zorian in the very least, so he was not at all eager to reacquaint himself with her. The fact that she showed unhealthy interest in his daughter Kana, due to her witch roots, probably didn’t help. Sadly for Kael , though, that didn’t deter Silverlake in the slightest, and she decided to barge in on this meeting to give them both her personal opinion on what Kael had been doing all this time.

"It’s terrible," she stated without preamble.

Zorian had pretty much expected that. Kael probably did too, but he was too much personally invested into his project to just ignore the provocation.

"It’s not terrible," Kael said in a clipped tone, not even bothering to look at her. "There, now it’s your word against mine. What now?"

"Now I win, because I’m a wise, experienced witch and you aren’t," Silverlake said smugly. "Really, I don’t understand why you’re so angry with me. Are you really still so angry about the way I spoke to you back when we first met? Don’t be so petty! They’re just words. I guess I was a little harsh, but can you blame me? Fria totally broke the rules when she took you under her wing and taught you all these things. A harsh word or two is really nothing compared to what I could have done… bah, kids these days don’t know what’s good for them."

"It’s not terrible," Kael repeated, completely ignoring her attempts to pick on their shared past. "In fact, the potions and the research I have produced over the restarts are so good that they produce an uproar among Cyoria’s medical and alchemical community if I release them too carelessly."

"Well I’m not saying it’s worthless ," Silverlake clarified. "But considering the amount of resources you had at your disposal and the sheer advantage given to you by the time loop… it’s underwhelming. It’s terrible . So many missed opportunities. So much lost potential."

Zorian did not try to inject himself into their bickering, but Silverlake’s statement made him frown. No doubt Kael’s methods could be better than they were, but what exactly was she talking about? In his personal opinion, Kael’s work was pretty incredible.

Back at the beginning, when Kael had told him he wanted to research things with the help of the time loop, Zorian had agreed to help, but didn’t really think Kael’s work would have any wider impact. He knew this would be a tremendous personal boon for Kael, of course, allowing him to figure out the best recipes and production methods for known potions. The sort of thing that established alchemists don’t share with anyone except their apprentices. But affecting the medical field as a whole? He knew that Kael was something of a young genius that had been specifically recruited by the academy because the folk healing remedies he had been producing to support himself and his daughter were good enough to get some influential people to take notice, but still. Alchemy was a very profitable occupation and many alchemy-based Houses and organizations had experienced, well-funded researchers on their payroll. What could one beginner alchemist, working in his basement, do that they could not?

Indeed, at first Kael focused primarily on improving his personal alchemical technique. He experimented with replacing expensive alchemical components with cheaper ones, with increasing potency of the standard cures, with cutting down the production time and skipping certain steps… small things, but they added up. They added up in ways that Zorian honestly hadn’t expected. It turned out this sort of production optimization was rarely done on such a small, personal scale by the big alchemical groups. They usually produced their potions in large batches, so figuring out the best recipes and production procedures by a single alchemist working on an individual potion or two was of very limited usefulness to them. Plus, if something could be done by a lone alchemist with a relatively cheap setup, it was much easier for it to be stolen by outsiders or leaked by angry former employees and so on. Thus, they rarely invested too much into that kind of research.

Granted, there were no doubt plenty of individual alchemists that worked exclusively with small scale setups, and they had done plenty of research on their own… but they rarely shared these insights with anyone who wasn’t family or a chosen successor, and many times ended up taking them to their grave. The fact that Kael had done years of research, funded by considerable resources and in cooperation with many individual alchemists and Healers that Zach and Zorian had helped him contact, and was entirely willing to release it to the public… it was a lot more important than Zorian realized.

This wasn’t all, of course. Thanks to the support Zorian had given him, Kael was eventually able to be much more ambitious in his projects. Though he still pursued simple refinement of the production process, he had already picked most of the low-lying fruit in that regard. Now he was going after things like trying to combine several medical potions into one, experimental self-diagnosis potions that allowed a person to feel the state of their body with great clarity, and attempted cures for diseases that didn’t have any accessible cures on the market. Of course, Zorian had a feeling this last one was what Kael really wanted to focus on. The death of his wife and mentor during the Weeping had clearly left a great mark on him, and seemed to serve as his primary motivation to try so hard in his alchemical pursuits. But these sort of ambitious projects were quite hard, and Kael was having very limited success there. Especially since, in every single restart, Kael had to re-familiarize himself with what he had been working on before he began building upon it.

"Missed opportunities, huh?" Kael said, leveling Silverlake with an unamused glare. "So what would you have done in my place, then?"

"For starters, I would have been far more liberal and unrestrained with human experimentation," Silverlake told him immediately.

Both Kael and Zorian flinched at this.

"Oh, look at you two babies!" Silverlake cackled. "You’re living in a time loop, are you not? When are you going to do human experimentation if not now? You are surrounded by perfect test subjects! Any damage you do will be conveniently wiped out at the end of the month and you have the unprecedented ability to test various versions of a medical potion on the exact same patient without your previous attempts affecting the later ones and muddying the waters in regards to which one is really better. Really, it’s practically criminal that you’re not taking advantage of this…"