Skilled Tooling alchemists usually set up detailed plans before creating alchemy items. They needed a long time to do researches and preparations before finally proceeding with the item itself.
Innovation, talent, insight, and technique… These were all essential factors to make an alchemy item. Without them, one could only copy the ways of ancestors.
Many alchemists spent their lives in this field without making much achievement. People with less innovative ideas could never create new inventions while those who managed to find inspiration often failed to become successful in the end. Rather, their inspiration could go wild and prevent them from using well-balanced materials which could cause terrible results such as exploding experiments.
This was why there were very few alchemists in the world and even fewer talented ones.
Angor never considered how long he would walk down this path. The only thing on his mind, for now, was to recreate an Earth weapon by using alchemy.
There were many data saved in Jon’s hologram tablet. However, data about weapons only took up a small part of them.
Jon was a botany researcher who was not interested in aggressive weapons in the slightest. The few limited 3D printer weapon blueprints in the tablet were most copied by him from random places on the Internet when he tried out his new printer as a university student.
There were both blueprints for cold weapons and simple firearms. Angor aimed for the latter. He did not plan to go for something complicated from the start. So, he decided to make cold weapons first for practice.
Besides, he needed time to get used to how to use various materials.
…
After getting a vague idea about the theories, Angor began reading about the spells specifically used in Tooling.
He disregarded any high-level or powerful spells that he could not learn and looked for level-0 and level-1 cantrips.
And he only found five of them: [Level-0 cantrip: Thaw], [Level-0 cantrip: Condense], [Level-1 cantrip: Smelt], [Level-1 cantrip: Freeze], [Level-1 cantrip: Magic Barrier].
Thaw: Preheat materials for some time using a fixed magic frequency in order to melt down materials and change their shape.
This spell was usually used in long processes. The temperature would get very high which meant that the user had to always stay alert and in full concentration.
Condense: As the name suggested, the spell would lower the temperature to finalize the shape of materials.
These were the only two level-0 cantrips. For level-1 ones such as Smelt and Freeze, they were basically powered-up versions of Thaw and Condense. They did a faster and better job in creating correct models out of materials.
Magic Barrier was a defensive spell which required a long time to cast and with a short effective duration. The spell was used to prevent accidents such as explosions during alchemy processes.
Angor believed that once he recovered from the magic backfire, he probably could only use two level-0 cantrips, so he chose to focus on them.
After memorizing the key points for the two cantrips, Angor suddenly realized that he had only been reading the books from Sunders’ collection. He needed to check if the alchemy books in the Nightmare Realm contained anything different.
He proceeded with his idea right away. In the other folders in his hologram, he found the pages introducing cantrips in the book Basic Alchemy .
Thaw, Condense, Smelt… These were no different from the ones he just read. Angor turned a page and kept reading. Freeze, Magic Barrier…
His eyes brightened up when he saw a Tooling spell which was never mentioned in Sunders’ books.
[Blacken].
“Huh… it doesn’t have a level?”
While puzzled at how the spell did not require a level, Angor began reading about the spell.
In ancient times, alchemists belonged to various powerful factions. One of the factions was called Mortality Sect, which was led by Odorus. It was an extremely mysterious sect among all alchemy factions. Alchemists from there believed in “death and resurrection”. They regarded the color of black as the primal chaos that gave birth to everything.
According to Odorus, black was the real color. It contained all different colors in itself and was the true origin of them.
Mortality alchemists pursued black. To them, black meant death, and blackening also meant resurrection.
Blackening something would render all elements dead and turn them into another form of existence: the dark matter.
Dark matter was a decomposed remain that did not have any radiation or metallic properties. It represented a new form of substance when metal “died”.
The Blacken spell was used to render all substances into dark matter and create new, sometimes unique, properties for them.
Thaw changed material’s shape while Blacken changed its property of existence.
The book did not say anything about the results brought by such changes. Angor’s knowledge told him that everything was double-sided. Blacken had to have its merits and drawbacks, and he could only find them out after practical experiments.
According to the book, the Blacken spell did not have a level because the amount of substance which would become blackened depended on the caster’s mana pool.
More mana meant something would get more thoroughly blackened, or even entirely blackened into dark matter, while insufficient mana would bring inferior results. Since the amount of mana was the only requirement, any wizard could use this spell. This included someone like Angor, who had just barely become an apprentice.
Angor managed to comprehend the overall idea of Blacken spell. As for trying it out for real, he had to wait out his condition and do experiments on it.
Still, Angor was confident of the rarity of this spell.
He read about a concept in many alchemy books; it was easy to change the shape of something but very difficult to change its natural property.
There were alchemy spells that altered the property of something, but all of them were intended for wizards. “Property change” was already something close to the very core of alchemy. Of course, there was no hope for low-level alchemists to learn something like that.
Yet… the Blacken spell bypassed this rule. This was never possible in the field of alchemy today!
Now, Angor was really curious about the true identity of the warden of Stairs of Hanging Prison. Singularity Dispersive Meditation was already a huge surprise. Now Angor just found another surprise; Blacken, which was merely something recorded in a basic alchemy book. Angor was wondering what awaited him in the more advanced books.
…
The discovery of Blacken spell kept Angor excited for a while.
Soon, he calmed his mind and focused on other plans.
For example, in the coming days, he planned to study theories about a spell combination and learned these spells after his mind space recovered.
Spell combination meant a specific arrangement of spells.
There were many spells available to wizards. Apprentices could find dozens of thousands of cantrips to learn. And if self-made spells were taken into consideration, such as “Remove Dampness” and “Create Water” which Angor named several days ago, there would be millions of spells beyond.
A spell combination meant to choose several selected ones from all the spells to use.
Generally speaking, a combination consisted of four types of spells: assault, enhancement, control, and recovery.
Of course, different wizards might have different ideas about their combinations. Someone preferred using defensive spells or even detection ones. There was no fixed rule about how to choose a combination. The key point was how the wizard used the spells in different situations.
For example, choices for control spells included Frost, Grease, and Flash. In actual combats, wizards had to know how to apply these spells effectively. An apprentice who learned a correct combination was able to deal with most situations.
However, studying combinations was usually a preferred tactic for apprentices only. Especially since they did not have enough time, effort, and mana to learn many additional spells. Apprentices could only master a few spells while wizards did not have such a problem.
Combinations also had their weakness. Predictable spells were easily countered by opponents. For example, Monarch of Eternal Freeze only knew how to cast Frost. A Bloodline wizard or someone adept at fire spells could easily break his trick apart.
This was why spell combinations only worked for apprentices in general.
Angor also planned to get a combination, but he never intended to set such a restriction for himself. The reason why he still wanted to learn a combination was to prepare himself for the challenges at Sky Tower. In other words, this was an emergency effort when he did not have much time to do much else.
Instead of following typical combinations, Angor gave up on learning any assault spells. He only focused on finding control and defense ones.
Once he got his alchemy weapon, he would rely on the weapon to attack people. He only had to prevent enemies from getting too close as well as watch out for long-range cantrip attacks.
Grease, Flash, Ice Wall, Optic Confusion… Angor listed the spells he needed and slowly memorized their fundamentals.
Three days went by quickly.
He had almost finished setting his combination. The main focus of the combination was to stop anyone from approaching. If it failed, he could use Optic Confusion to hide. And if that did not work either, he had Toby to help.
Once he successfully learned these spells and created his alchemy weapon, it would be time to finally challenge the tower.
Angor’s mind space still did not recover by the time he almost finished learning the spells. Thus, he had to choose something else to study.
During his time, Nausica and Sailum came looking for him and invited him to do quests together and earn merit points. However, Angor refused by using his condition as an excuse.
With nothing better to do, Angor took out the information about seeded participants in Sky Tower that he received from Dave.