Chapter 18: Learning the Proper Way

Silence draped the lower floor of The Crimson Spire, broken only by the soft rustle of fabric as Serayne drifted toward the console. 

In her hands, she carried the lantern and a woven bamboo basket, which soon held a hefty meat bun and a bottle of tea.

She had read until hunger finally made itself known again. 

She found it faintly amusing that even being dropped into an alien world hadn't cured certain habits; a midnight snack run here felt suspiciously like putting down her phone just to raid the fridge.

The catch was that her supplies were downstairs, her bedroom was upstairs, and satisfying every little craving meant making a small trek. 

Food in hand, she eyed the Worldheart Console, wondering if she couldn't simply relocate it beside her mattress.

Before she could even search for the right setting, a notification flickered across the surface.

[Relocation available.]

The console hovered about a centimeter above the floorboards, suspended motionless as if waiting for a destination. Serayne regarded it with genuine approval.

“Well, look at that. You can actually be accommodating when you feel like it.”

Setting down the basket and lantern, she guided the console along, quickly discovering that the mechanism handled all the levitation itself - sparing her from wrestling with the furniture's bulk.

Only when she looked toward the way upstairs did she remember that convenient midnight snacking wasn't the only factor to consider. The console was also where she retrieved buckets, cookware, and bulky deliveries - things she definitely didn't want to drag through her bedroom.

She abandoned the idea of hauling it upstairs, setting it down beside the workshop entrance instead. There, she could conveniently receive shipments, list potions, and stash resources without having to cross the entire room.

Once she confirmed the placement, the console settled smoothly onto the floor. Gathering her food, Serayne returned to the bedroom via the terrace, using familiar handholds and the wide entryway she was growing to appreciate more and more.

After devouring the meat bun and washing it down with tea, she settled back against the mattress and picked up Fundamentals of Elixirology, which she’d only managed to skim since claiming it.

She had spent most of the late hours immersed in glyphs and drafting, trying to organize the new concepts. Now, she could finally study the craft that had earned her home a second story, a bathroom, and a private workshop.

Half an hour later, she slipped a scrap of paper between the leaves, closed the book, and rested it on her stomach, letting her eyes drift shut.

Thirty minutes of careful reading wasn't enough to digest much of the manual, but it was plenty for Serayne to grasp why her maiden brew had earned such a scathing review.

The manual covered far more than recipes; it detailed workstation setup, reagent processing, and the step-by-step kinetics of the brew. With every paragraph, she uncovered another rookie mistake she had executed with remarkable precision.

If there were a contest for hitting every single beginner trap, I'd probably take first prize.

To begin with, she hadn't prepared an alchemical matrix. Instead of regulated heat and a structured mana circuit, she had relied on an open hearth - tossing on firewood whenever the flames looked too puny, then fretting that the pot was getting too hot.

Worse, she had stirred the concoction purely through mechanical force, failing to channel her own mana to bind the reagents. Eight hours of waving a peeled stick had been far less effective than she’d hoped.

Nor was river water an adequate base just because it held mana. The manual drew a sharp line between raw water and properly prepared mana water, whose ambient properties had to be stabilized through a specific procedure first.

Then came filtration, which Serayne had bypassed entirely - apparently assuming that if the broth could pass into a test tube, any floating sediment was merely a cosmetic issue.

Her ingredient and equipment preparation left plenty to be desired as well. A quick rinse of the herbs and scraping the obvious soot from the cauldron were no substitute for proper purification, and the lingering metallic tang was a blunt reminder that a scrub hadn't solved the vessel's mineral buildup.

The most humiliating revelation, however, lay in the notes on final volume.

For these simple recipes, the finished draught was supposed to reduce down to roughly one-tenth of its initial volume. Serayne, on the other hand, had called it quits far too early, watching the eight-hour mark on her clock and panicking that she was about to scorch the brew.

And so, instead of letting it simmer down to the proper concentration, she had gone and topped it off with more water.

She lay motionless for a moment, recalling her midnight water run with the bucket - an outing she had proudly considered sensible and proactive at the time - before slowly burying her face in her hands.

So not only did I brew a diluted mess, I personally flew down to fetch the very ingredient to water it down even further.

The rings etched inside the cauldron took on a very different meaning now; at least some of those tide marks were likely left from ancient batches properly reduced to their ideal concentrate, rather than random stains.

She couldn't know the exact ratios Avelra had used, of course, but for the first time she understood why copying a few lines from a personal diary hadn't yielded a masterwork potion.

Dropping her hands, Serayne looked down at the book and let out a long sigh. In hindsight, she should probably be amazed the tonic had worked at all rather than grumbling that it turned out weak.

She was a self-taught novice who, until recently, couldn't even consciously channel mana into an object. Yet she had still produced something the system recognized. After a brief bout of embarrassment, she decided against spending the rest of the night beating herself up.

There was still the matter of the potions she’d sold, but their performance had matched the description. Buyers had paid to restore ten Mana Points, not for a signed guarantee that she had mastered alchemy.

It's not like I need to blast out a sector-wide announcement that their supplier just discovered the user manual.

The materials had already been spent, the potions functioned as advertised, and she could sell off the remainder of the batch under the same modest label instead of dumping it down the drain just because she now knew how far short it fell.

The smartest move was to bottle the rest, and on her next attempt, follow the manual to see how many rookie errors she could eliminate before sitting over the pot again.

Tucking the book within reach, she pulled the quilt up to her chin, feeling exhaustion finally overwhelm the urge to learn one more thing.

Tomorrow: herbs, matrix practice, and preparing mana water before starting a fresh batch.

No rushing everything at once. Step by step, learning from my own mistakes.

Preparing mana water required using her own reserves to align the chaotic mana in the raw fluid - a discipline in its own right that she had to balance alongside foraging, drafting, minding the stall, and everything else.

She had never imagined having this much on her plate. Yet as she closed her eyes, her last coherent thought wasn't a complaint about being tired, but a quiet, pleasant anticipation of waking up to get to work.

***

“Ow… my eyes!”

Serayne twisted away, throwing a forearm over her face as a shaft of morning sun pierced through the expansive terrace glass, beaming directly into her eyes and ruthlessly terminating any hope of a gentle awakening.

She lay with her eyelids squeezed shut, watching colorful afterimages dance in the dark, before cautiously peeking out from beneath her arm at the light-drenched bedroom that had seemed so wonderfully cozy last night.

Curtains.

I need curtains immediately. If every morning is going to start like this, I'm going to start missing the windowless room.

Even a bedsheet or a bolt of cloth would do, so long as she didn't have to wake up feeling like the sun was personally conducting an inspection of her skull. Committing the purchase to memory, she pushed herself up on her hands.

The quilt slipped from her shoulders, and the loose neckline of her sundress dipped as she leaned forward, briefly revealing the soft curves of her small breasts before she smoothed the fabric and pushed her hair back, far more consumed by her watering eyes than her appearance.

Downstairs, she ate breakfast, reviewed her stall, and scrolled through the regional logs to see if anything had unfolded during her sleep that might affect her daily run.

Aside from the stir caused by her Hearthhold upgrade, the night had passed quietly. The supposed ghost hadn't materialized, despite several residents spending hours staring into the gloom.

Zara, who had started the rumor in the first place, had taken a barrage of flak, as if she had personally led a monster to everyone's front door. A few of the more hotheaded users had even leveled threats, accusing her of stirring up panic among people who already had plenty to worry about.

Serayne had no intention of wading into the drama, but the lack of sightings was a quiet relief - it meant she didn't have to scrap her plans for twilight foraging runs.

It didn't prove the woods were devoid of such entities, but a rumor born of a single sighting and stoked by exhausted nerves looked far less credible than it had the evening before.

She set out shortly after, packing her pouch, mattock, and tools. By the time the sun climbed high toward its zenith, she had returned with another supply crate and a sizable haul of flora.

This time she hadn't limited herself to Serraleaf and Ambertail. Skimming the recipes had taught her to spot several reagents useful for other basic concoctions, though she gathered only what she could identify with absolute confidence.

The pouch made hauling effortless, but unearthing, inspecting, and trimming root balls still ate up time. Returning home, she enjoyed the pleasant satisfaction of a productive morning, coupled with an unmistakable desire to spend the rest of the day inside.

Stowing the crate and organizing her harvest, she returned to her manuals, deciding a fresh batch of potion could wait until she learned to draw a functional alchemical matrix.

“The sun corresponds to gold, the moon to silver, an upright triangle to fire, an inverted one to water…” she recited under her breath, tracing a finger beside the diagrams before consulting the companion volume.

Memorizing the symbols alone wasn't enough; their application was bound to the laws laid out in The Four Elements and Their Four Properties. Skipping that foundational theory would just mean blindly copying instructions without understanding the underlying mechanics.

“Heat and dryness yield fire; cold and moisture yield water… Right. I have to balance both properties, not just the name of the element.”

She copied the glyphs, measured proportions, and circled back to the same paragraphs whenever she realized she could parrot a sentence but couldn't explain it in her own words. The studying swallowed far more time than her morning schedule had allocated.

She didn't rush to the iron pedestal. As the remainder of the day slipped away, rather than forcing readiness, she put the attempt aside and resumed practice the following morning.

Only in the afternoon of her fourth day in Elyndra did she finally step into the workshop with the manual and a chosen schematic, confident she understood the sequence of steps she was about to perform.

Arranging a stable posture beside the pedestal, she set the book where she could clearly reference the diagram. After centering her focus, she channeled mana to the tip of her index finger, feeling the subtle tingle gather in her hand.

According to the instructions, she had to trace the energy across the surface, setting each line into the iron. On paper, it sounded almost as straightforward as sketching with charcoal, but the very first stroke taught Serayne the vast gulf between the two.

She had to juggle line geometry, stroke speed, and mana flow all at once. The moment she focused too hard on one aspect, the other two threatened to slip from her grasp.

Setting her jaw, she pressed on, glancing at the reference page between strokes until she finally reached the concluding glyph. Her taut shoulders began to ease with preemptive relief.

The moment she drew the final line, a dull bang cracked through the room. A plume of black smoke erupted from the iron pedestal, swallowing the freshly traced glyphs.

The entire matrix collapsed into ash before Serayne could even pull her finger back.