Chương 143: Chapter 139

The demons had noticed the piece of paper floating down into Wade's hands. In fact, they all stopped talking with each other as soon as it appeared. Mysterious glowing scrolls aren't usually a thing in Azdrial, and them appearing out of nowhere was equally not quite normal. And given that Leon was also staring, it wasn't a normally occurring thing on Earth either. Zin already had a good idea what that was however.

"You do know once our divine-dorito-chip-terror finds out you're doing quests and even worse: Getting hellspawned rewards, behind her back no less, she's going to be real upset, right? And I mean reeeeal upset. And, more importantly, can you guess who's she gonna take it out on? ME." Wade waved him off, "That part's handled. She's watching again." Zin did not look amused despite the careful smile.

"I beg your finest pardon?"

"Had some storefront items I needed her to tell me details on from her end of it, and can't really do that just through text. If she behaves, I'll keep the privacy down for now." That last part was mostly said for a certain troglodyte's benefit.

"Mr. Wade," Zin said, taking a deep breath.

"A little, you know, heads up would be deeply appreciated next time." To be fair, Wade had been talking to himself this whole time while the demons discussed on the other end options for demonkind in general. Zin couldn't overhear everyone at all times.

"What's the paper for?" Medy asked, finally swallowing her current one-bite meal, and still not choking on it.

"Alchemy Recipe." Wade said, proffering the scroll over to her. That did the trick. She turned instantly giddy, jumping off her seat to get to the scroll, but when she looked through it, she frowned.

"Uh, this doesn't make any sense."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean it looks…" She squinted, bringing the scroll up to her face but not quite close enough for a sniff test.

"For one, recipes usually don't have glowing writing. And, hmm…" She brought it even closer, then rotated it left and right.

"Yeah, the scribbles are too small to read. I need a glass. Can't really imagine how someone could make words that tiny. Also the drawing here looks more like a summoning circle mixed with some alchemy sigils." She tapped the paper, pointing to some of the sigils off to the side.

"But none of them really make any sense together? These two essences here outright negate one another for example, it's like take two steps forward, and then two steps backwards kinda thing." Leon held a hand out next and checked it out, but his findings were very much the same as Medy's: It was nonsense. His phone vibrated and Wade checked his texts. Probably consumed on use like your necromancy scroll did. Try using it like that. He got his scroll back, and began running some tests.

Which immediately hit him with a single notification: Consume recipe scroll? A yes and cancel button appeared under his sight, which seemed pretty obvious. So he pressed yes and got another prompt. Unable to learn recipe. Prerequisites not met. He tried a few more times, just to verify that nothing he did to himself changed the result, then looked over to Medy. It had said someone of equal or higher alchemy ability in real life, which Medy likely was.

The System wasn't a strict computer without any real agency after all. He'd used the last scroll by just talking out loud.

"System, I'd like to teach Medy this scroll." Her eyes lit up, "Wait, really? You can get your game thing to teach me alchemy?" She was doubly excited and started on an entire tangent about how she hadn't learned a new recipe in years now, and she loved doing that in the past. Just putting random ingredients together and drawing their essences until she uncovered some interesting new quirk or another. The System, on the other hand, moved with the same order of operations as always.

The same exact prompt appeared once more in his field of view. Consume recipe scroll? He pressed the yes button, and this time the prompt closed and nothing more happened. Other than the scroll in his hands dissolving into ash, fading away from reality. Medy stopped gabbering midway through a tangent, as if a lighting bolt hit her dead on.

"Oh. Oh, that's so weird."

"You… learned how to use the recipe?" Wade asked.

"Not really? There's this big... rectangle thing with letters on it and instructions." She squinted at the air in front of her.

"Alchemy Crafting, that's what it says on top. Wait! Wade! Is this the Game?"

"Yep, that's how it looks for me." When he ran a quick identify over her, she remained what she had been before. No sign of her being a new player. Perhaps she'd gotten only a fragment of the System? Just enough to use the recipe. Medy we tapping around at things in the air, already figuring out some of it.

"Oh, oh.... it has a step by step guide on how to brew the potion. Along with a list of ingredients. This is really cool!" look at your questlog boo~ (b ᵔ▽ᵔ)b When Wade gave his interface a quick look through, he saw a notification that had appeared a while back. He'd been too focused on the actual alchemy rewards to notice he'd also been given a followup quest to this whole thing. New Fleeting Quest: Alchemy Reagents (Part 2) - Produce or hire a retainer to craft potion of Uncommon quality or higher.

Rewards: One Storefront Coin. Negligible leveling experience. Continued questline. If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Wade looked it over, nodded to himself, and then looked up to Medy.

"Welp, we're making that potion one way or another today."

"Really?! Today?! We can?!" Medy started vibrating in place. And then started hopping on her hooves, as if she was part bunny. Absolutely he was getting this potion brewed up today and potentially added to his build. One way or another. There was a storefront coin for it. Just getting that completed with surviving to the end of the round's challenge mode would hand him four coins already, which would unlock all the basic System potions on those random loot spawns.

"What do you need to get it done?" Wade asked. She tried to stop squirming in place, and bit her lip in order to keep from squealing further. It sounded like a tea kettle settling down. But once she was calm enough, she started going down the System's list of ingredients.

"Okay so, I need a glass vial, fire, flower herbs, a granite stone, ash, two copper coins, a bird's skull and a trophy of a slain foe."

"That's… a lot of odd requirements." Wade said.

"I know, right! I can see extracting hatred and a wish for destruction from the slain foe trophy, ruin and inevitable end from ash though there's better ingredients for those specific essences. Like a single drop of water from the spirit realm has loads more of that than ash." She started pacing up and down, still eating the whole time.

"Fire could pair with the ash using Hadral's law of essence convergence and maybe get it somewhere near that level. I don't know about the granite stones and copper coins, elemental stability from Yddrial's constant maybe? That's so niche though. There's really not that many essences in rocks. Endurance, stability, fracture, time, and so on down the line of possible use cases if you're creative enough to think of looking for that, but this recipe doesn't list any essences needed, just… ingredients. Which is weird."

"Uh huh." Wade had zero idea what she was babbling about but Medy was clearly having fun.

"Yeah, normally in alchemy recpies those would be suggestions, like, recommendations from the original potion maker. You replace those with ingredients you're more attuned and familiar with generally, lot's of ways to get the same potion done, the real artistry is making the best out of what you got." There was a lot to unpack in all that. And possibly some more ideas of what actual alchemy was in Azdrial. But Wade did not have the time to dig into alchemy lessons.

Very likely it might have an entire field of science dedicated to it, may as well be Azdrian chemistry technically speaking. And clearly the System was doing something more simplified like a video game's version. What he needed was to figure out how to get all these ingredients into Medy's hand before he had to travel back to Azdrial. Of which, there was a simple solution.

"Zin, how much of all this do you think you could get in the next few hours for us?" The Archdemon started laughing.

"Mr. Wade! Amigo, ol' pal. What part of these two thousand dollar shoes and perfectly tailored suit screams delivery boy to you? Rhetorical question, just to make it clear."

"You're our best bet in getting some of these things together. And you have the car. Plus," He took out his phone, and then waved it at Zin, threateningly. It buzzed in his hands with a new text message, which meant Play was at least being a good henchwoman about all this. He didn't even need to read the message to know it worked, because Zin's face had a plastered over grin.

"Ah-hah-ha… I see how it is. Classic move, real original."

"I'm not hearing a no."

"All right, fine! Normally it's polite in demon society to at least offer something in exchange as a token. And some of these are going to be a little hard to find in under a day."

"The bird skull, right?" Medy said, popping up next to him like a mushroom out of nowhere.

"I'm getting these weird impressions that birds are tiny feathery creatures that can fly without free magic? They're probably going to be really rare to find."

"Surprisingly, no." Zin clarified.

"Flying things on Azdrial are rare and dangerous yes, but on this side of the world the feathery little rats are everywhere. Getting one would be easy. Trip to the park, bits of bread tossed into the water, a little free magic, and bada bing, bada boom, duck ready to be plucked and cooked medium rare."

"Assuming nobody's there to see you. There's got to be at least one law against doing exactly that." Wade said.

"Please don't kill a duck in front of children just trying to feed them."

"Hunting license, gun license, location and making sure is duck hunting season." Leon added, counting down on his fingers, backing up Wade.

"Wow, thank you so much for that riveting public service announcement from the peanut gallery." Zin began to clap. Real slowly.

"Really. Changed my life. May I remind you two geniuses that you're fighting for your LIVES here? Good ol' life or horrible. Brutal. Death. But sure, sure, let's clutch our pearls over Daffy Duck and the nameless tiny humans trying to feed him, why not? Really putting those priorities in order." He gave them both a withering look.

"I'll go buy a chicken instead, bird's a bird except if you're a mortal in which some birds are more equal than other birds apparently." Wade and Leon both shared a look, and Leon returned a bemused shrug.

"Gentlemen," Zin waggled a finger to get their attention.

"Getting a bird isn't the problem I'm having. At least, so long as you two don't ask questions on where I get one, apparently. The real problem is the cleaning. See, every technique in my particular skill set is a little too, ah, permanent. If you get my drift here. Whole thing would disappear - bones, feathers, tiny judgmental eyes - poof, gone, nothing left. Which, as you can all no doubt imagine, is great for my current job of making societal pests vanish." Leon had an answer to that.

"Getting clean skull is not so difficult."

"It isn't? Well, do enlighten us all Mr. Davoski. How are we going to get a clean bird skull, besides calling in the local etsy goth witch and hoping she can sell us part of her used wardrobe?"

"Sodium Carbonate." Leon said.

"Add maybe one fourth cup into gallon of boiling water for one hour, done. I can be double checking if ratio is correct." The Archdemon blinked his eyes a few times.

"And where, pray tell, might a boxer have learned that odd snippet of trivia from?"

"Ex-boxer." The Russian laughed, "And is from ancient Egypt. They have entire process to dry out and clean bodies for mummification. But many other cultures using the same for their ceremonies and tributes, is well documented." Wade had other ideas on his mind, namely the other items: "If you're getting a live bird for this, would the skull also count as a defeated foe?" Zin sighed, "Anyone else wanna pile on additional requests here while we're at it? Laundry? Dry cleaning? Grapes off the vine?

Really, don't hold back on my account here." It was some minimal complaining before they got Medy to detail more of the items, but the rest were standard enough for Zin to go out and gather, leaving Wade and the crew to debate the plan of attack for the Arcane realm after they heard his car pull out of the driveway. As far as Wade knew, the Archdemon himself had never stepped foot in the Arcane Realm as a miner himself, since he'd never been caught on the mortal realm yet until Play got him.

Medy and Bael on the other hand, they had all the info he'd need.

"All right so, following everything you said about all this game thing, you'll wake up tonight back in the Coffin, on one of the bunk beds." Medy said, mouth half-stuffed once more, but this time with crunchy chips and pico de gallo. Something she was a great fan of, and at least she was more understandable this time.

"Should be the exact bed that you two brought me to." Wade confirmed.

"So, what do I do from there?"

"Lights." Bael grunted.

"Heating and ventilation. At minimum."

"Oh, right! There's no Gravekeeper anymore to maintain it." Medy nodded.

"You'll need to get the base in working shape yourself first." New Fleeting Quest: The new Bellkeeper - Restore all functions to the Arcane Diving Bell. Rewards: Storefront progression options. Copper Lootbox. Insignificant Leveling experience.

"Gravekeeper?" Wade asked, looking over the quest. A copper lootbox to get done what he was already planning to? Something was suspicious about that.

"Unofficial name for the Bellkeeper, the one in charge of maintaining the diving bell." Bael said." Coffin. Remember? You can see why they get named that." Identify actually gave him a to-do list. Light Systems: Inactive. Boiler Room: Inactive. Internal Ventilation: Inactive. Internal Heating: -3°C (Min. 20°C) Water Tank: 2% (Min. 4% per Crewmember.) Food Supply: 24% (Min. 2% per Crewmember.)"Oh." Wade looked over the list. Perhaps his new home base might need more than just a new layer of fresh paint.

And then he saw the final requirement, and realized why this quest was a copper lootbox ranked one.

Crew: 0/20 (Min. 5 Crewmembers)