Wish upon the Stars chapter 42

The inside of the crafting hall was the first building that seemed  small on this campus. It wasn't actually any tinier than the others mind  you, but it was so swarmed with people that it just felt...cramped. A  huge variety of people in costumes that almost beggared the imagination  were mixed throughout the entire are, some in groups, some in pairs. The  paired ones seemed to be wealthier students talking direct commission,  the groups looked like poorer students who were pooling their money to  get something for their most valuable member.

Shadowthorn  brought us to the first counter from the back on the left side, where  an older girl with light blue hair in a braid and a white lower face  mask was sitting looking bored. Shadowthorn grinned as we approached.  "Lapis!" The girl looked up and her eyes sparkled. She waved excitedly,  before turning to shout for someone else and a big Asian man with green hair and eyes made his way over. The two of them headed over to where  our guide was standing excitedly.

Lapis,  the blue haired girl, threw her arms around Shadowthorn. "Annie! It's  good to see you! I thought you turned down the offer to go faculty, what  are you doing slumming it here with us rookie?" Her eyes were bright  and happy as she talked, and I saw Callie tense slightly at the  familiarity. I winced internally, I imagined seeing another girl being  mentored by Annie in this situation was probably a bit painful.

The  large man with green hair rolled his eyes. "She's here with rookies of  her own Lapis, that much is obvious. He held out a hand to me, since I  was closest. "I'm Rustle. You folks must be VIP's if you have Annie  showing you around. An alumna from the top fifty is nothing to scoff at.  Clearly she brought you to the best workshop so you could see how the  pros work. I'm one of the best around at Alchemy, and Lapis is a master  of enchanting with water type materials!" His voice was confident and  assured and I perked up a bit at his statement, this was my first time  meeting an alchemist.

It  did bring up an obvious question though. "Workshop? So you guys start  your own sub groups in the crafting hall?" I realized I was being rude  and tacked on hastily. "I'm Solomon by the way. We're new students over  from Velan." I held out my hand and he shook it once firmly.

He  chuckled. "I have no idea where that is. But yeah, you can go solo,  start a workshop with others, or join the Creation League that the  faculty runs. Workshops have more freedom than the League, but they have  to split the contribution points for the rankings. Solo crafters have  an advantage in terms of point intake, but they can output way less.  Both independent methods require you to supply your own materials  though. The League supplies the materials for you, and you keep all the  points, but you have to submit a certain number of League commissions on  top of your own workload every month to stay in."

Lapis  snorted. "It's a fancy way of saying you're getting a part time job.  Basically workshops are more balanced, solo work favors quality, and  League work favors quantity." She clapped her hands together once in  excitement. "Hey, I know! Since you're all newbies why don't we make you  something as a welcome gift. Nothing crazy, Rustle has a knack for  Seven Star Construction Pills though, and we have a ton of materials for  them because he gets so many orders. It's a G rank medicine, but it  only gives ten points of Creation so it's low tier."

I  didn't know too much about Alchemy other than the fact that it was  extremely dependent on materials. Enchanting was mainly dependent on  stats with materials supporting, Inventing was the most economical using  both aspects to their fullest, but you couldn't control what they did  really, so it was considered kind of a moot point. Alchemy was almost  entirely material dependent, but you had to refine and manipulate those  materials to get what you wanted out of them. Specific stats and  attributes could be gathered to make the same medicine from different  but similar materials, unlike Inventing. That was as much as I knew  about it.

When  I mentioned that Rustle smiled. "Yeah Alchemy seems complicated on the  surface, but it's pretty straightforward. Like the Seven Star  Construction Pill. It's made from G rank materials, but it doesn't give a  hundred points, instead it can be used by people at the G rank. H rank  pills don't work on G rankers very well, not enough Impact to affect  them. Of course, you can have the opposite problem, taking pills much  too high rank can seriously injure or kill you, but almost no one would  waste high rank medicine on a lower ranked Ascendant anyway."

He  gestured us behind the counter. "Here, if you want you can watch. The  Construction Pill recipe is pretty well known, and none of you seem like  alchemists anyway so I'm not worried about trade secrets in this case.  How about it? Want to see a live demonstration?" They seemed like nice  people, and they obviously wanted to impress Shadowthorn, so I saw no  reason to turn it down, when I turned to look at her she shrugged.

I  gestured for him to go ahead. "Sounds good then. I'm curious to see  what Alchemy is all about." We followed him inside a back room behind  the counter and waited as he started sorting through ingredients. Mostly  the things he took out were odd plants or powders. "So, I'm curious,  you mentioned the rankings, how do those work? How do the test rankings  effect your ranking in the faculty." I was curious about this because  the Might test had rankings but I knew the tests weren't the only way to  get contribution points.

Rustle  didn't look up as he sorted out materials but he answered anyway. "No.  The Creation ranking is based on the test exclusively, same with the  other faculties. I was talking about the campus ranking, which uses  contribution points you can get from any of the faculties. The faculty  rankings are actually relevant there though, because being high up in  those gives you contribution points on it's own. Being highly ranked in  multiple faculties is the best way to drive up your campus ranking. Even  better than doing tasks, but it's not really common to see people use  that method because it requires a ton of emphasis on one stat to  maintain a faculty ranking."

It  also explained how Shadowthorn, who had only been top one hundred in  Perception, had managed to come in forty second on the rankings. She  must have been doing quite a few tasks to push her points up. Finally  Rustle finished gathering that materials and placed them all down next  to a big black metal pot. He rapped on the side of it. "Ok, good to go.  Now, first thing to know is the basics, so this is a cauldron. You need a  decent cauldron for alchemy. They're designed to resonate with the  skill better. If you use a bad cauldron or something else you get half  the results for twice the effort."

He  put on hand on the cauldron and focused, and the thing started to glow  green. Only dimly, but enough to see...something happening. Then, with  his other hand, he started to toss in ingredients, lecturing casually.  "Normally you need to prepare ingredients in special ways to maximize  their use, but I've made these pills so many times I can do it with just  my Alchemy skill. I can slowly filter out the portions of the medicinal  essence that isn't needed because of my constant practice and  familiarity with the ingredients."

Once  everything was in he put his hand on the other side and the glow  intensified. "You can look inside if you like. It's pretty interesting  for beginners." I leaned forward to see the inside of the cauldron and  blinked. He was right, it was interesting. The glow from the cauldron  was rising up in wisps from along the inside, creating a sort of  gelatinous cloud where all the ingredients were suspended. As the energy  pumped in the cloud roiled like bubbling water, moving the ingredients  around inside. Occasionally, red wisps would puff out of the top, what I  assumed were the unnecessary portions he was getting rid of.

As  the process went on the gelatinous cloud was forced into a tighter  shape by the new wisps of energy from the cauldron, becoming denser and  denser as the crafting progressed. Each time one of the red wisps was  spat out the green light from the cloud became deeper and more vibrant.  Finally, after about twenty minutes Rustle gave a grunt and the wisps  amplified. There was a bright flash from the cauldron as the mass of  energy was condensed the last little bit into a sphere the size of a  gumball and popped out the top, propelled by the fading wisps.

Rustle  casually reached out and caught the thing, holding it up for us to  inspect. It was...green. There were some swirls of blue in there too  that reminded me a bit of the grass he had added first, and some purple  specks that looked like the powder he'd added last. It was beautiful. I  also understood now why he hadn't minded us watching, because that whole  process meant absolutely nothing to me in terms of applicable  knowledge. It was a very pretty lightshow but if you weren't an  Alchemist you wouldn't learn a thing from seeing it happen.

He  tossed it to me. "Consider this a welcome present. I have one for each  of you actually, but the other two are from my stockpile." He chuckled  ruefully. "I don't feel like doing that two more times." Which was fair.  I could see from his slight shaking and the sweat on his skin that he  was exhausted. I wasn't sure how many times he had done that today  already, but I was pretty sure that wasn't the first. I hadn't  considered the drain from Alchemy, but assuming it was similar to  enchanting even a G ranker would have a limited capacity.

A  fact Shadowthorn seemed to realize. "Well, I think we've gotten as much  as we can from the crafting hall for now. I wasn't planning to make  this a day trip anyway, i just wanted to show you some of the  interesting things while we were down here. Why don't we head back and  leave them to their projects." My lips quirked at how much she sounded  like a parent there, but she was right so I followed behind her as we  headed back up to where the skyride was parked. The path back was easy  enough to find since we hadn't gone too far from our original location,  and we made decent time getting back to the field where we had touched  down. Once we were there I mulled over my experience for the day.

I  enjoyed coming to campus. I couldn't wait to learn more about the place  and really get some use from my abilities here. Wishes would definitely  net me some interesting things in a place like this. As we walked I put  my hands in the pockets of my suit and balked a bit when I felt a piece  of card stock under my hand. I pulled the card out, curious where it  had come from, and froze. The card was a single piece of white paper  with a black symbol on it, a skeletal hand clutching a stylized heart.  Across the surface, scrawled in what looked like actual dried blood, was  one word. "Heretic." Well shit. I just knew that couldn't mean anything  good. Why did this nonsense always happen to me?