As Lucas reached out to it, he felt that he could affect several different things. It was hard to put his finger on precisely, but he got the general impression he could probably tune almost anything with a bit of effort. He looked to the intelligence -1 effect first, visualizing it as a slightly brown oily residue on an otherwise vibrant potion. A number of options popped up.

  Remove: 5% mana

  Cancel Out: 1% mana and loss of Mana 1 attribute.

  Enhance to -2 Intelligence: 7% mana.

  All of those options were interesting, and Lucas considered the first two briefly before going with the second one. The moment he selected it, both of the attributes vanished. Lucas felt a brief surge of power leave him as that happened. The visual effect on the potion, though, was more interesting.

  The red fluid frothed briefly and changed colors ever so slightly, becoming less of a cherry red and more of a pure, deep red. It was still translucent, but it looked closer to what he expected a healing potion to look like.

  Alchemical Mixture (8 doses): Healing 6 (Deep Healing), agility 1 (twitchy), endurance 1 (steady).

  Lucas briefly inspected each of the remaining elements of the now simplified potion and smiled. Man, this shit is sick! Where have you been all my life, baby? He thought as he flipped through each option briefly.

  Empower: 10% mana - Increase healing to 7

  Greater Empower: 25% mana - Increase healing to 8

  Purify: 4% mana and Agility 1 - Increase healing to 7

  Alternative Purify: 3% mana and Endurance 1 - Increase healing to 7

  Stabilize: 5% mana and Endurance 1 or Agility 1 - Increase the remaining attribute enhancement to 2.

  Imbued specificity: 8% mana reduction to healing 5 - Increase effectiveness against cancers, digestive ailments, or blood diseases by 100%.

  Bonus Yield: 10% mana to increase the yield by 33%

  Lucas’s mind balked at the options. For the longest time, he’d had to scrape together whatever he could get and boil down some pretty weak shit to make something that was worthwhile. Now, he could use mana to do the heavy lifting.

  Suddenly, he became even less interested in using magic. He really only used the stuff for his ring when he was about to die. On pretty much any other day, he had no problem using it to make potions. The real trick was going to be to limit his enthusiasm and trim a little here and a little there instead of trying to make every brew the most badass thing he’d ever created.

  It’s not a bonsai tree, he reminded himself. It's a freaking science experiment. Of course, we need to see how far we can push things.

  Unfortunately, before he could decide on one of his other options, Heisenbugle adjusted his gsses and cried out, “What did you do! The color shifted after the mixture had already matured!”

  “Uhhmmm, deyed reaction?” Lucas answered as he suddenly realized just how closely the other man was paying attention. “I’m not sure. I’ve never used these ingredients before.”

  “Maybe.” The gnome said, peering at the mixture closely. “I can’t recall a shift like that after such a dey without catalysts unless it was being done by a talented Alchemist.”

  It took Lucas a moment to figure out that talented wasn’t an insult this time. He was discussing the magical talents that some people had, which was uncomfortably close to the truth since that was just what Lucas had used.

  Lucas stood there quietly for a moment while the gnome studied the mixture, and just when he was expecting Heisenburgle to turn around and guess the truth. Instead, he just lost interest and turned back to Lucas before he said, “Well, it certainly looks like a healing potion. I was certain that yer of rust-colored oil was going to spread and corrupt the whole batch, but this might be drinkable.”

  “It’s more than drinkable!” Lucas countered, removing it from the heat. As much as he wanted to tweak it further, it probably wasn’t best to tempt fate under Heisenburgle’s watchful eye. “This right here is the good shit.”

  The gnome might accept that he was a poor, misguided human who had gotten lucky a time or two, but asking him to believe that he had a deviant talent that had been altered by his own god, well, Heisenburgle would probably burn him at the stake for that.

  “And who’s going to have to suffer for your folly this time?” Heisenburgle asked. “Are you going to test it, or shall we have one of the condemned drink it, just in case you’re wrong?”

  He thought about it for a moment and considered drinking it just to call the gnome’s bluff. If he really thought that it was that questionable, there was no way he’d let Lucas do something that might get himself killed. As fun as that would be, though, after studying it for a few seconds, he decided that would be a waste of the strongest healing potion he’d ever made.

  Potion of Major Healing (8 doses): Moderate healing, immediate, lesser healing ongoing, endurance +1, agility +1.

  You have created a Major healing Potion and gained 88 experience!

  You have developed a new healing potion recipe and gained 54 experience!

  You have created your tenth type of healing potion and unlocked a new achievement.

  A Thousand Roads to Health - 10/100 - In progress.

  He raised an eyebrow at all of those popups but said nothing. He could examine them ter. Instead, he answered, “Nah, that would be a waste. Let’s have Betsen try it and settle the bet.”

  Betsen was one of the cooks he’d gotten to know in his time in this pce that wasn’t quite a prison. She was getting on in years, and her arthritis was obvious now, but she made the best pastries in the pce, so getting on her good side was never a bad idea.

  “Okay…” Heisenburgle answered skeptically. “But if you kill one of the staff, I take no responsibility for it.”

  They chatted about other things the rest of the night, but mostly Lucas just agonized over not being able to try out his new powers. Instead, he eventually shifted the conversation to elemental impurities, which interested him since he’d seen them in the raw reagents before he’d purified them.

  “It's as I’ve tried to teach you from the very beginning,” Heisenburgle insisted. “The elements are at the very root of what it is we do! Too much is just as bad as too little, but worst of all are cshes and other disconcordances!”

  The conversation earned Lucas three more books to read, but he found it much faster to find what the gnome was talking about and search for an example in one of the ingredients that cluttered the b. He had no way of searching terms directly in his system, but if he found something that had the term, then he could use that to drill down for more information.

  Still, after a while, even his interest in that faded, and instead of listening to Heisenburgle pontificate further, he picked reagents at random and then used his newfound powers to search for compatible ingredients. That was a fun game and one he could py without Heisenburgle ever catching on.

  Still, as he pyed it, he was less and less surprised to find that there were elemental threads that ran through. Those choices. Though a water element and a fire element might sometimes mix, most earth-elemented reagents would match with other earth-elemented reagents, and the more strongly something was aspected, the more true that was. It was ditch weeds and things like that that tended to cross over the most often, which interested Lucas even more.

  I wonder if that would be the case if I had the facilities to really isote and concentrate certain aspects of these chemicals, he wondered as dawn arrived, and they started to pack things up. If Victorian motherfuckers could isote actual elements on Earth, then surely I can figure out how to isote and extract elementals, right?

  Normally, Heisenburgle was slow to call an end to his nightly experiments. Lucas was sure that he would have been doubly so today after Lucas had been away for so long. Still, this morning, he was so eager to prove his human companion wrong that he practically ran down the stairs.

  That made Lucas smile when he yawned as he kept pace with the gnome's tiny legs with his long, slow strides. The dining room was mostly empty save for a few guards coming off shift. Lucas thought they would sit down to a nice breakfast first. He could smell the sausage and the greasy ham steaks they were cooking back there.

  That was not to be. Instead, the Heisenburgle made a big show of calling the elderly chef out from the kitchens and discussing a new remedy that had been prepared that night in the course of their experimentation. “You are under no obligation to try this, of course. This is the work of a novice and entirely experimental. The possible side effects are legion and might py havoc on your delicate constitution! I can offer you no guarantees as to its efficacy because I had no part whatsoever in its formution.”

  She looked from Lucas to the fsk sitting on the table doubtfully after all that. Still, despite Heisenburgle’s strenuous warnings, she looked tempted, which spoke to the level of pain she was enduring.

  “Go on,” he said, pouring a small dose of the cranberry red liquid into an empty gss. “I promise you, it’s perfectly safe.”

  Heisenburgle looked at him with a mixture of outrage and glee but said nothing. It was obvious he thought that Lucus was about to fall on his face. Still, the old woman took the gss and said, “Well, if you think it might help these old hands of mine,” before she hesitantly drank it.

  She made a sour face, but he couldn’t bme her for that. Medicine tasted like shit in any world.

  For a brief moment, everyone, including a couple of maids who had gathered to see what the commotion was all about, stood still. The tension was thick. At least, it was for everyone but Lucas. He stood there perfectly calm as he waited for the magical drug to take hold, and in a few seconds, she started to smile.

  “By the Gods above, it works, it actually works!” she said, taking his hands in hers and growing more excited by the second. “Am I— Will this work forever?”

  “Who can say,” Lucas answered with a shrug as he gave Heisenburgle a look. “New formution. You can help us test it. You just let me know when it wears off, and I’ll give you another dose.”

  “Oh, bless your heart,” she said with a smile before returning to the kitchens.

  “See, I told you,” Lucas answered, swiping both coins from where they were sitting on the table once the two of them were mostly alone again. “Ditch weed one, time-honored alchemical recipes, zero.”

  Heisenburgle gred at him for that one, but since there were so many other people around, he managed to suppress his usual outbursts. Instead, he fumed silently for a time. However, halfway through the meal, when the now-healed cook came out with a rge sweet roll just for Lucas, the gnome abruptly left without a word.

  Lucas didn’t let that bother him. In fact, he lingered and cleaned his pte, and when the footman inquired about his foot, which was bothering him ter, Lucas was happy to pour him a shot, too. He was under no illusions that even a moderately strong potion would heal their ailments forever, of course. Medicine needed to be taken regurly. Still, it was nice to do some good now, and then, he decided as he walked back to his room humming a little song.

  He y in bed that morning before he drifted off to sleep with a dumb smile on his face. “I’m going to be able to do some crazy shit now,” he said to himself. “Once I get this monkey off my back, we’re going to do some crazy shit!”