Chương 53: Alchemy

Day 90-95. Arturos 8th-15th (July 8-15) I was feeling much better after my talk with Emily. That week we did some more food preservation, and I helped Emily make blackberry preserves and blackberry cordial. While I hated the grape jelly we always had in abundance when I was growing up, I never grew tired of my grandmother's strawberry freezer jam. I ate so much of it when I was around eleven, that she made me help her make it.

We combined crushed ripe strawberries and sugar, then we stirred in a boiled pectin-water mixture. After letting it sit at room temperature for a day, we'd put it in the freezer. We didn't have pectin, or a freezer here. I asked Emily why we didn't just use the sealed crock pots, but they didn't actually preserve the ingredients inside on their own. They simply kept a clean item clean by keeping the lid airtight. The absence of gelatin or pectin also confused me.

I wasn't sure when pectin had been invented on Earth, but gelatin had been around since ancient Egypt. I wasn't sure people used it in foods back then, but people definitely used it as a glue for that long. Emily hadn't been impressed when I told her how it was used to make jam or jelly. I knew pectin was a vegan alternative, but I had no idea how it was actually made. It seemed like citrus was involved somehow, but that wasn't super helpful for reproducing it.

In this world, blackberry preserves were made by using roughly equal amounts of sugar and blackberries. Emily slow-boiled the mixture until it simmered down and became a gel-like substance. It wasn't quite as thick as the jam I was used to at home. There's where the pectin would have come in handy, but it was still thick enough to spread on bread. We put this mixture into the quart glass jars we'd purchased for the purpose.

There were runes on these lids as well, but the jars and lids were shipped separately since they activated as soon as you made a full turn. After we made a fair amount of blackberry preserves, we made blackberry cordial. We made the cordial by mixing four parts blackberries with three parts water and then getting it to a simmer for half an hour. We had to stir and mix it constantly to mash the berries in. Then Emily strained the mixture and added brown sugar until it was dissolved.

Once the mixture had completely cooled down, Emily poured in one part apple brandy. The brandy was ninety proof. I offered to distill the brandy using alchemy to create a homemade version of Everclear, but Emily was not amused. The mixture had to be cooled down before we put the alcohol in it. Otherwise, the boiling process would have caused the alcohol to evaporate. I also got started on my first bit of alchemy during the relative lull of the early part of July.

Alchemy was the thing that felt the most game-like to me. Even more so than the Guild Store tab. After some talk with Emily, I realized that getting to level 5 would be extremely tedious. Heck, making biofuel was going to be a nightmare. Way worse than I had initially assumed it would be. The biggest issue was that vegetable oils were not a thing here. Olive oil was a luxury good, and corn oil wasn't something Emily had ever heard of. Most people used butter or tallow to cook with.

It was possible to make biodiesel out of tallow or lard, but it required some chemicals that weren't available here, if anywhere. Once we had our corn harvested, I would have to make corn oil. The problem was that you only got around a pound of oil for every bushel of corn that could be made into biodiesel. A bushel of corn weighed fifty-six pounds. You got closer to three gallons of ethanol that you could blend into around two gallons of gas.

Luckily, the corn mash was still good to use as fodder afterwards, but it wasn't going to be a quick and easy solution. That would require a lot of labor, but probably wouldn't be as difficult as it would have been on Earth with similar technology. The way alchemy worked was that you set up at a still or an alchemy table, and a screen popped up and gave you possible actions you could take using the products you had. A still could only process liquids.

An alchemy table would also let you process solid materials with the aid of certain chemicals. In my case, I would want to grind up corn in water and then run it through a still. I could separate the corn oil out that way. Of course, that would require an industrial still, which I'd have to purchase for a thousand gold. That still would be capable of distilling up to 500 gallons worth of the corn and water mixture at a time. It looked like it wanted a 1: 1 mixture of water to corn.

That meant that each batch made less than a gallon of corn oil. That was disheartening. To begin my leveling I purified seventy quarts of river water, giving me seventy-seven quarts thanks to my 10% volume bonus, to get to level 2 in alchemy. When I hit level 2, I was given more quests, including: Make Minor Pain Reliever Potion - Requires a medicinal vial, willow bark, and purified water. 5XP per dose Make alcohol - After distilling a product such as corn, produce a flavorless, odorless, 99% pure alcohol.

5XP per quart Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Once I hit level 2, I had to move on from purifying river water. I could still get some XP from it, but the System imposed a cap of a gallon per day for XP purposes from there on out. Since I had a quest to make a pain reliever from willow bark I walked down to the river and stripped some bark from one of the many willow trees dotting the riverbank.

To make the minor pain reliever potions, I just had to mix distilled water and willow bark in the still and cook it until a pop-up said it was concentrated enough. We had willow trees on the river, and the almanac showed me how to dry and process the bark. I sent Colin into town to buy some medicinal vials. They were too damned expensive for my liking at 25 silver per vial for the thumb-sized vials. It ended up taking me several days, and 6.

25 gold, to make twenty-five fever reducer minor pain reliever potions that were only about ten percent more effective than just brewing up a willow bark tea. That did get me to level 3. It cost me an additional 8 gold to make the next thirty-two to get to level 4. The potions sold for 1. 5 gold in batches of 5, so I didn't actually lose money, but if the average person needed 2 gold per day to live on, and it took me a full workday to brew twenty-five, it wasn't worth it for the 1. 25 gold I made in profit.

Luckily, my trip to town to sell the vials led me to my next level and got me to that all-important level 5. I had a quest to distill alcohol, and I could sell it for a bit more than the pain potions, but some almanac reading showed me that distilling alcohol was a much more involved and time-consuming process than I'd been aware of. I had drunk more than my fair share of beer and booze over the years, the past two especially, but I had never been overly interested in the distilling process itself.

I vaguely knew how cider and beer were made, but I didn't realize that you used apple cider to make brandy. The almanac taught me that. It also showed me the process to make spirits like corn whiskey. I wasn't capable of making a proper corn whiskey like an Alcohol Maker class could, one that would taste good or have an alcohol content below 99%, but I still needed to get the fermentation process started to make the corn mash that I would then turn into alcohol.

My breakthrough there was thanks to me being lazy and deciding I'd rather have a couple of beers and hang out at the inn with Priest Lewys and Ben and Janice. I was doing some good ol'-fashioned bitching and moaning when Janice, who actually had the Alcohol Maker class, told me she'd sell me a ten-gallon barrel of a corn mash she had that smelled off to her. She knew that once I hit level 5, I could cleanse the barrel for her, so she gave it to me for free in exchange.

When I distilled the fermented mash, I received forty-four quarts of pure alcohol and 220XP. That got me 5 XP past level 5, and I took the Extract Ingredient skill. Taking the skill actually opened up an additional tab on my UI called Alchemy. It had lists of ingredients you could take from plants. I decided to just add on an additional 10% volume bonus for my level 5 perk. I needed to get as much extra corn oil as possible for my biodiesel.

I also received a bunch more quests, including one that made me laugh so hard I had a coughing fit. Extract essential oils from medicinal plants. (See Alchemy Tab on UI) 5XP per medicinal vial Some other quests I got were helpful, and two were downright suspicious to me.

Extract Corn Oil - 10XP per quart Extract pure urea (requires alchemy lab) - 10XP per solid pound Actually collecting horse pee would probably take a little bit of effort, but I did know that you could get roughly one pound per gallon, so my DEF issues were going to be relatively easy to deal with. Deionized water was basically just perfectly distilled water, and I could already do that from level 1. Def was 32. 5 percent urea and 67. 5% deionized water. Easy peasy!

Supporting Class: Alchemist Level 5 Perks: Anything you distill gains 20% volume when the crafting process is complete (plan accordingly). Any potion you brew is 10% more effective when you consume it yourself. Subclass: Alchemical Purification Level 5 – This path allows you to remove impurities from any substance you brew yourself. Skills: Purify – Allows you to remove impurities from anything you distill.

Extract Ingredient - This skill allows you to extract a specific ingredient from a liquid Available quests for your Alchemy support class: Buy an Alchemy Table (0/1) - 50XP Purify a quart of any substance using a still or Alchemy Table (0/1 Repeatable, at level 5 this is capped at 1 gallon per day for XP) - 1XP per quart Make Minor Pain Reliever Potion - Requires a medicinal vial, willow bark, and purified water.

5XP per dose Make minor stomach reliever potion - Requires a medicinal vial, mint extract, and purified water. 5XP per dose Make alcohol - After distilling a product such as corn, produce a flavorless, odorless, 99% pure alcohol. 5XP per quart Create wood alcohol - Distil wood alcohol for use as a solvent. 5XP per quart Extract essential oils from medicinal plants.

(See Alchemy Tab on UI) 5XP per medicinal vial Extract Corn Oil - 10XP per quart Extract pure urea (requires alchemy lab) - 10XP per solid pound You now have 22/244 XP needed to reach level 6.

On rare occasions, usually after new technological advances, the System is able to update possible quests for various professions. The most famous example being the quest to create gunpowder for level 20 Alchemists, which was considered important enough by the System to give Alchemists their class evolutions for close to twenty years.

While it is no longer considered important enough, most likely because of the saturation of high-level Alchemists who can produce far more gunpowder than the empire needs even during wartime production rates, it is now a quest available for alchemists who have gone down the Apothecary route that can easily take an Alchemist from level 15 to level 20. Excerpt from The Changing Quest by the Royal Research Academy. Multiple Authors. This book is not available on the Guild Trade Store.