Chapter 41: Meeting The Alchemist

Aden moved through the textile district, his silver hair tucked under a discarded worker’s cap.

The moon was high, small dark patches visible for Aden to see as he walked through the narrow paths.

The address in the ledger led him away from the charred ruins and toward the Green-Glass District, where the air didn’t smell like unwashed bodies, but like acrid sulfur and copper. This was where the Alchemists thrived.

He stopped before a modest stone house with blackened windows and a reinforced iron door. According to the ledger, this was the residence of Master Alchemist Horen, the man responsible for turning the Shard-Dust into a cure.

’If the Baron is stealing 40%,’ Aden thought, his hand hovering over the door’s resonance-lock, ’How big is each serving? Surely that small shard couldn’t amount to more than three bottles or so,’ he reasoned.

’And is he in on it or just being exploited by those stronger than him?’

He didn’t use the Hannya mask. He didn’t need the [False Frequency] here. Instead, he channeled a tiny, focused thread of Void energy into the lock. The lock dissolved and the iron pins simply ceased to exist in the local dimension.

Aden stepped inside with a hum.

The house was a mess of bubbling glass tubes and stacks of parchment. In the center of the room, slumped over a desk illuminated by a single, flickering candle, was an old man. He was clutching a vial of glowing, violet liquid as if it were his only child.

“I told you, Valerius,” the old man croaked without looking up. “I can’t refine it any faster. The Shard is unstable. If I push it, the whole district turns to dust.”

Aden stayed in the shadows, his voice a calm, natural whisper.

“I’m not Valerius. And I’m not here for a refinement report.”

Horen froze, then turned slowly, his eyes wide behind thick spectacles.

He looked at Aden, the silver hair, the split knuckles, the calm blue eyes ethereally enchanced by the moonlight that filtered through the window.

“You…” Horen gasped, his gaze falling to the storage ring on Aden’s index finger. “That ring. I haven’t seen that since the Redwyn fire. Who are you?”

Aden’s eyebrows raised. He lifted up his finger and have the Alchemist a closer look.

“You know this ring?” He asked.

The Alchemist adjusted his spectacles and leaned in, his stomach bulk falling on the table and documents that laid there.

“That’s the Redwyn ring, all right. You must be a really lucky thief or fanatic if you managed to slip away from the Royal Procession with such an artifact.”

Aden rubbed the ring with his thumb.

’Why didn’t Kaelen notice the ring earlier? I know he’s dumb, but surely not that dumb,’ he convinced himself with a wry smile.

Aden half expected that the man would start rambling about the history of the Redwyn and their accomplishments or that his eyes would flash with greed as he dreamt of the opportunities that the ring could bring to him, but he was left pleasantly surprised when he just placed his head on a large pile of documents.

“…I want to see how well the progress of the Shard Dust conversion is going,” Aden asked while taking a seat.

The man didn’t respond immediately. He just straightened his head on the pile he laid on and stared at him with half–lidded eyes.

“And why should I give you that? How did you even get wind of it in the first place?” His eyes narrowed.

Aden glanced at the half–eaten bowl of meat stew that lay on the Alchemist’s side–table.

“I’m just a concerned citizen,” he replied half–heartedly.

The man kept silent for a moment, then he shrugged tiredly. “Not my problem. Half the nobles in this town and neighboring towns already know about it.”

Aden flicked an empty bottle as he watched the man’s large frame bend under the table and struggle with himself to get a thickly bound ledger.

With a groan, he dropped the large document with a thump.

“Here it is. Everything you need to know from the initial structural integrity of the shard to the general yield per shave.”

Aden pulled the heavy document toward him, the smell of old parchment and chemical spills wafting from its yellowed pages. He ignored the complex molecular diagrams and Resonance-Binding equations, that was for a version of him that didn’t exist.

His eyes scanned for the Bottom Line.

“The yield is dropping,” Aden noted, his finger tracing a downward graph.

“Of course it’s dropping,” Horen grunted, reaching for a lukewarm cup of tea. “The Shard isn’t a battery, it’s a heart. Every time we shave off dust to make a cleansing dose, the core frequency destabilizes. At this rate, the Shard will go empty in three days.”

Aden looked up. “And the Baron knows this?”

Horen let out a dry, hacking laugh. “Valerius doesn’t care about the long-term. He wants his 40% refined into High-Density Essence now. He’s planning to leave the town to rot once he has enough to bribe his way into a seat in the Inner Circle.”

Aden closed the book with a sharp thud.

“So, if I were to, say… relieve the Baron of his stolen stash, I’d be saving the heart of this town?”

Horen stared at Aden for a long time. He looked at the split knuckles, the silver hair, and the faint, bruised violet glow of the Ring.

“You’d be committing suicide,” Horen said plainly. “The Baron has two Anchors on his payroll, and his vault is keyed to his own life-signature. If his heart stops, the vault incinerates everything inside. Including the Dust.”

Aden stood up, his hand hovering over the half-eaten stew. He looked at Horen, who just nodded.

“Then I guess I’ll just have to make sure his heart keeps beating,” Aden said, shoving a piece of cold meat into his mouth. “While I take everything else.”

Horen watched him, a tiny spark of hope— or maybe just curiosity, flickering in his tired eyes. “You’re either extremely overconfident or stupidly strong. Either way you’re crazy for doing this for us.”

Aden swallowed the meat and headed for the door. “I don’t really care for any of you. I just want some meat and meat requires money.”

Horen waved his hand resignedly and began scribbling some equations on a crumbled piece of paper.

“I wish you luck, foolish warrior. I’ll be here if you survive.”

Aden studied the man with an unreadable expression before leaving through the window.

“I’ll be coming back soon enough, and if the bartender comes back, tell him he’s doing a good job.”

Horen cancelled the equation and wrote another one. Licking the pen with a thoughtful look, he replied with a muffled voice:

“I don’t think they’ll accept any compliment apart from that of their Silver god.”

Horen’s eyes widened a bit.

“Unless you’re—”

When he looked at the window where Aden crouched, his figure was nowhere to be found.

He sighed and massaged his forehead. “I’m getting too old for this.”

Aden walked down the roads with his hands behind his head. The high frequency sounds from different shops and low explosions in the distance accompanying his walk.

His mind went back to an excerpt from the ledger:

“The Shard operates on a Non-Linear Resonance Matrix. Unlike standard energy crystals that deplete like batteries, the Shard is a Harmonic Oscillator. It pulls energy from the surroundings and converts it into a healing frequency,” he mumbled.

Aden looked up to the moon. “I have no idea what that means, but it sounds smart.”

He jumped over a fence leisurely, letting the cool breeze blow against his face.

As he walked down a green path, he halted his footsteps immediately and hid behind a bush quickly.

“The hell?” He cursed.

In the distance, he spotted two guards covered in silver armor with the Royal emblem engraved on their chest. They were currently engaged in a leisure chat while sticking a poster on a wooden pole.

He squinted his eyes. He could clearly make out the warning to the citizens to stay indoors for the Purification Ceremony the Princess would be carrying out tomorrow.

But that was of no interest to him, at least not as pressing of a matter as what was posted below.

A demon–like mask with protruding fangs and horns that looked hastily drawn. A number was written under the drawing, Aden ignored his rapidly beating heart and counted the number of zeros on the poster.

“Twenty thousand gold for whoever has information on this masked figure. Proper evidence shall be presented to Princess Elara directly…”

His hands clutched the sides of his head. “Fuck, I’m cooked. That Kaelen sucker snitched on me!”

He wasn’t sure on how much information Kaelen blurted to the Princess, but the mask description was too detailed for someone to misinterpret.

’Hopefully, I didn’t attract that much attention…’

Aden smiled wryly as he weaved his way past the guards.

’Masking my Void energy, upgrading the mask and avoiding certain death. Rather simple goals a young man can have…’

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