Moonlight Blue

Stacy’s perspective.

It’s been three weeks now since Allen has started to train the girl he brought in as his sister. How nice. By nice I mean him bringing in the girl and not him training her. I feel sorry for the poor soul. All this time, he hasn’t come out. I have a lot of questions about the new knowledge he gave to me.

Alchemy is something that is highly valued in this world. It is a craft that has existed since ancient times. It is believed that more than ten thousand years ago, this world was oblivious to the existence of magic. So, when people got sick, they used alchemy, both potion and pill alchemy to heal people.

Potion alchemy has a lot of processes involved in it but all those processes can be summarised into three. The first process is called the extraction process. This is the part of the process where you grind the dry herbs needed for a potion and adding them to a solvent, usually water, and boiling it.

This process extracts the medicinal essence found in herbs. We then filter out the plant residues leaving the decoction/solution. The next process is called the binding process. Since the solution will be mainly water or another liquid, the medicinal properties of the herbs used will be weak. We would need something that would bind the molecules of the herbs together, creating a thick fluid in the process.

This is where we use monster parts like the teeth of goblins or the ears (the tip especially). That is because these materials contain special enzymes that react to the herbal solution. By crushing and grinding the teethes, we can then add the powder into the solution and stir it. We also use a plate board in this case and we subject the process into heat.

A plate board is a device that has a magic circle engraved on it. They are magic tools used for alchemy. The next and final process is the infusion process. This process involves having to melt a magic core under intensive heat and using its dissolved form. By adding the liquefied magic core into the solution, not all of it of course, and mixing it by putting the entire solution under an intensive rotational motion, it is then that the potion is crafted.

The potion’s colour depends on the type of potion you’re crafting. If it’s a mana potion then the colour turns blue and if it’s a healing potion, it turns green. Colour is important in telling whether a potion is complete or if you made an error. Grading is also judged by colour, potency and magical efficiency.

If an error happened, the potion will either turn white or brown, sometimes black. It turns watery brown when there are impurities in the herbs and watery white when the ratio needed for the potion is incorrect. It turns black when you make a mistake in any of the processes. Like when you cook. Even if you added all the ingredients correctly, if you leave it on the fire for too long then it’ll burn or over cook.

Of course, the kid came up with many ways to improve the potion’s efficiency. By using a method called steam distillation to extract the oils by completely isolating them from antimicrobial compounds, the efficiency of the end product increased by five percent. Five percent might not sound like much but that five percent is actually the one that is making a low-grade level one potion have an efficiency of a low-grade level three potion.

But that distillation method takes twice as long and Allen had to craft a quartz glass that was weirdly shaped. I don’t even know how he made quartz glass in the first place. The process of making it is only known by the people at the top and because of that, it isn’t available for everyone.

He then went on to use water magic to extract the medicinal essence of the herbs to reduce the time. I guess a week of sulking made him feel pity on me since he made me a plate board that was able to extract the medicinal oils by water. What a nice kid.

Sigh, thinking about this kid’s notes is splitting my head open. I’ve got to go get some fresh air.

I leave the pharmacy to get some fresh air.

The moon is beautiful tonight. The kid will take a week more before he comes out of training. That means I’ll have to wait that long.

It’s weird. Looking at the moonlight somehow reminds me of everything I have overcome to get this far. Thinking back, I have grown so much from the little girl who always cried just because she wasn’t good enough. I wonder how’s everyone doing back home.