Chapter 153: Alchemy (Part 1)
Kyle Sichi walked into his workshop, and a hundred apprentices bowed.
He waved them back down without stopping.
The outermost room — the cleaning and sorting hall — was long and bright, divided by two channels of running water set flush in the stone floor. Light came in from windows on both sides and fell across the streams in angled bars, the overlap of light and shadow shifting along the floor like the skin of a snake. The apprentices crouched along the walls in orderly rows, sorting and washing whatever had come in from across Graycastle: ore, minerals, plant material, compounds hauled from mines or river beds or the back rooms of merchants who didn’t ask questions.
It was work that took three to five years to master. Some of them would be here their whole lives and never pass through to what came next. Kyle had spent his own early years in this room; he remembered the particular quality of the light at midmorning, the smell of wet stone, the way you learned to distinguish materials by texture and weight before you learned to distinguish them by formula. A man who rushed past the washing room was a man who would one day make something that killed him.
He passed through it and opened the door into the refining room.
The space always startled him slightly, even now. Twelve timber pillars — old growth out of the Concealing Forest, shipped downriver — held up the ceiling, and every wall carried windows, and the roof above the central atrium was windowed too, so that light poured in from all directions and fell across the six long worktables in complicated intersecting shafts. The tables held everything: round-bottomed flasks, scales so precise they could weigh a sneeze, mortars worn smooth from years of use, furnaces built into the stone on the room’s south side. Each table belonged to one of the six instructors. His was the longest, placed at the room’s center, crowded with equipment enough for three men.
The room was always in what other people would call disorder. Kyle had learned decades ago that disorder was where alchemy lived. You combined things, applied heat or cold or water or fire, watched what changed, wrote down the changes that could be reproduced. If a path revealed itself through all that chaos — a series of steps that produced the same result twice, ten times, a hundred times — you had a formula. And if the formula was new, you were an alchemist.
He had fourteen formulas. He believed in each of them the way other men believed in the gods.
“Chavez.” He stopped at the young man’s table. “How is the Snow Powder coming?”
The youngest alchemist in Redwater City — twenty years old, already the owner of his own table — looked up and shook his head. “The King’s City formula must have additional components. Whatever I try, the powder goes too fine. Useless for extraction.” A frustrated tilt of his jaw. “They’re hiding something.”
“It will come.” Kyle patted his shoulder. Eight years as Head Instructor had given him a very precise sense of when to comfort and when to push; Chavez was the kind of talent that needed patience more than pressure. “I made something yesterday evening, though. Come and see.”
He led the younger man to the iron storage box — half a person’s height, solid, the kind of container you used when you didn’t want something walked off with. He drew out the key and opened the inner lattice.
At the center of the padded interior lay a small piece of clear material, catching the light.
Chavez picked it up slowly, turned it toward the window. Held it there.
“This isn’t cut from a crystal.” His voice had gone very quiet. “This is — this is Crystal Glass. God. You actually did it.”
The exclamation was enough. Within a minute every instructor in the refining room had abandoned their work and gathered around Kyle’s table. He let them pass it around, let them hold it up to the light, let them look.
There it is, he thought, watching their faces. That’s the expression.
“How?” one of them asked.
He explained it the way he always explained things: step by step, sparing no detail. “Glass from river sand comes close, but always carries color — impurities that survive the burn. Two approaches: purify what you have, or find sand that begins purer. Most of us tried both. I selected fine white sand from Willow Town and sandstone from the Fallen Dragon Ridge, then—” He outlined the process, and no one interrupted, no one breathed unnecessarily, until he finished.
The silence after was the best kind.
Crystal Glass was the great achievement of the King’s City Alchemy Workshop — the thing they used to stand taller than every other workshop in the kingdom, the thing that filled the Duke of Redwater with an envious resentment he had carefully never let become official policy. Their income advantage, year after year, rested on that one formula. And now it was here, in Kyle’s hands, in Redwater City.
If Chavez cracked the Snow Powder as well — if the acid process Chavez had already established combined with this — then the haughty silence of King’s City would have to break. Kyle let himself picture it and found his mood improved considerably.
He was beginning to lay out materials for a second batch when an apprentice appeared at his elbow, breathing a little fast.
“Head Instructor. A messenger from Border Town — from the Western Border. He has a letter. From the Fourth Prince, Roland Wimbledon.”
Kyle’s attention snagged on the name rather than the title. Fourth Prince. He dredged up what he knew of the Wimbledon children: there was one. A rumor. Someone the court didn’t talk about much. “What does he want?”
“He says once you’ve read the letter, you’ll understand.”
Kyle’s eyes flattened. A letter that explained itself. Some minor lord who had heard of alchemy the way minor lords heard of things — partially, incorrectly — and wanted either a demonstration or a formula sold cheap. He had spent his life building something that wasn’t magic tricks. He would not spend his afternoons performing them.
Still. A prince.
“Bring me to him,” he said. “So I can receive this letter and send him on his way.”
Chapter 153 Alchemy (Part 1)
Kyle Sichi walked into the Alchemy Workshop.
“Head Instructor,” when the apprentices saw him enter they immediately bowed.
He waved his hand, “You may carry on.”
The apprentice squatted down again, once again busying themselves with their work.
The outermost part of the workshop was the cleaning and sorting room; it was here that all of the gathered materials from all over the Kingdom of Graycastle was cleaned, sorted, filtered and ground down. The design of the cleaning and sorting room was very ingenious, laid within the stone floor were two rills with water flowing in them which were also parallel to each other. The area in the middle was the path, while the outermost sides of the room were used as cleansing area, and were accessible by wooden bridges.
At first glance, the long and narrow washroom was divided by the two streams into three sections. The light would fall into the room through windows on both sides, shining on the stone floor and streams, sending strips of lights through the long room. The overlap between light and dark resembled the strip of a snake.
Nearly one hundred apprentices leaned against the walls, dealing with the materials assigned to them. If the impurities could be easily cleaned and were lighter than the water, it could be directly thrown into the stream. If it was heavier than water, they would be put into a basket, to be brought out of the washing room and then discarded. The effect of cleaning with running water was several times more effective than cleaning in a cask of stagnant water.
The apprentice had to study here for three to five years. Only when their proficiency in the sorting and cleaning of all kinds of materials were good enough and the corresponding knowledge was known by them, did they get the opportunity to be selected as a disciple under an instructor, and in so doing moving on to the next room.
Kyle marched through the washing room, stepping into the core area of the Alchemy Workshop, the refining room.
When he opened the door, his line of sight suddenly opened to a wide panorama, twelve giant wooden pillars, all of which came out of the Concealing Forest and were delivered by ship, propping up this extremely spacious room. Within the surrounding stone walls, there were many windows, and even the roof was included in the construction and had many windows connected to the patio, making the room very bright.
In the center of the refining room, there were arranged six wide wooden tables. The tables were filled with all kinds of alchemical utensils: round bottomed flasks, glasses, scales, mortars, furnaces, crucibles… Each instructor was responsible for the management and use of one table, and Kyle, as Redwater City’s Head Instructor, naturally had the longest and widest table to himself, with most of the utensils placed on it.
The room was always full of clutter and in disorder, just like the alchemy process in general. Mixing all kinds of raw materials together then heating, carbonizing, watering or burning them. The results were ever changing, and simply fascinating.
In case you were able to find a clear path to follow within all these changes and disorders, it would become written down, turning it into one of the extremely rare alchemy formulas. As long as you were able to create a unique formula, you could be called an alchemist. So far, Kyle has had written down more than a dozen alchemy formulas, and he believed that each of them had been directly sent to him by God and that alchemy could be developing to such a level, that it would even be possible to separate the origin, making it possible to transmute everything.
“Chavez, how far are you with your Snow Powder imitation?” He asked.
Hearing his name, a twenty-year-old young man came over, shaking his head. “These wretched alchemists of King’s City definitely still add other raw materials into it. Until now the powder is too fine that it can’t even be extracted and used for anything useful.”
He was Redwater’s Alchemy Workshop’s youngest alchemist, and now he wanted to recreate the alchemy recipe for Snow Powder, but it seemed to be impossible without a long accumulation of knowledge, many attempts and sometimes a bit of luck. Many people, for their whole lifetime, only managed to become disciplines, even until their death they were unable to get past the last step. Chavez, however, had a remarkable talent for alchemy, two years ago, he summarized the recipe of dry distillation of green vitriol to receive an acidic liquid. Winning the recognition of five alchemists, owning from now on his own long table.
“Do not worry; it will come slowly.” Kyle smiled and patted the young man’s shoulder, offering him some comfort. After eight years, as chief instructor, Kyle naturally understood the difficulty of finding the right path through all the disorder and chaos. “However, I ended up making something good yesterday evening, the moment those haughty animals examine it they will lose all their color. Come with me.”
He went to his desk, to where he had had two disciplines deliver a storage box of about half a person’s height and made completely out of iron. Making it nearly impossible to be stolen nor easy to be destroyed. He pulled out the key and opened the first layer of lattice, within the middle of the lattice there laid a small piece of transparent crystal.
“Did you cut off a piece of a crystal?” Chavez who stood at the side took the crystal carefully into his hand to examine it, holding it in front of the window, “No, this is… Crystal Glass! God, you did it!”
“Yes,” Kyle smiled proudly, “I already can’t wait to see their expression when those guys discover that their proudest alchemy discovery had been successfully imitated by me, they will end up showing such a wonderful expression.”
Chavez who hadn’t been able to suppress his exclamation had gathered the attention of all the others alchemists. They all put down their work and came over to take a look for themselves.
“This is the product you’ve worked on until late last night? It really is great.”
“It’s so beautiful, it looks just like a crystal.”
“Congratulations, this will let the place of our Alchemy Workshop within the Duke’s heart greatly increase.”
“How did you do it, can you tell me?”
Kyle nodded, “We all know, that the glass made out of the river sand comes extremely close to it, but in the end when burned, the glass will still contain different colors. This is because the sand still contains some impurities. Now there are two possibilities, first to think of ways to remove the impurities, second to try to get sand which is purer from the beginning. We all tried both methods, I also did the same. The success of the alchemical process largely depends on chances and luck. I selected fine white sand from Willow Town and sandstone from the Fallen Dragon Ridge… ”
Everyone around him was quietly listening, no one spoke a word until he had finished his explanation, they even tried to suppress their breath, “So that’s how it’s done, that was very thoughtful of you.”
Crystals were very rare and expensive gems, and the colorless and transparent crystal are even rarer. So only the clearest of translucent glass had the right to be known as Crystal Glass. The haughtiness of the Alchemy Workshop in the King’s City was mostly based on their method for producing Crystal Glass. Always dominating the Redwater City’s Alchemy Workshop. Furthermore, the yearly income of gold royals let the Duke of Redwater City develop a deep feeling of envy.
But after today, this situation would soon change. If Chavez could also figure out the composition of Snow Powder, coupled with the double-stone method to create acid, we will be able to completely overthrow the domineering position of King’s City’s Alchemy Workshop. By then, those who are always
used to looking down on other people, I am afraid they will have no choice other than to lower their cooky heads. After picturing this, Kyle Kimmel mood became even better.
As he was preparing himself to screen the raw materials for the second batch of Crystal Glass, a frantic discipline run to his side, “Chief Instructor, a messenger from Border Town from the Western Border want to see you, he brought a letter from Roland Wimbledon with him the 4th Prince.
“4th Prince?” Kyle began to frown, it seemed that there really was such a person in the Royal Family. He knew nearly nothing about nobility, in his impression they were all uneducated and ignorant, always fighting for more power and wealth. “What is he looking for?”
“I do not know, the messenger said that as soon as you read the letter, you will naturally understand the meaning of His Royal Highness.”
“…” The Chief Instructor exposed an extremely impatient look, in all likelihood, the content of the letter will be recruitment offer for only a small sum, if that’s the case, I should show him that alchemy isn’t a cheap trick. However, since the other person is a prince, I still have to maintain a basic state of etiquette, “Take me to see him, so that I can get the letter and send him on his way!”