Chapter 40: “The Secrets of Alchemy”
After spending a bunch of XP getting all the [Enhance Follower] skills and [Space Magic]-related skills, Rare no longer earned any XP from the enemies around the great forest. However, she could still earn XP indirectly via the unenhanced ant squads to grind groups of goblins. It wasn’t a huge amount, but between that and the farm, it wasn’t too bad for daily XP income.
Either way, she wasn’t fighting anything herself anyway. She had long since stopped worrying about the loss in XP due to being “overleveled,” as it were. That being the case, it might be a good time to start trying to break a new skill. Rare sunk into thought while watching her XP go up by itself. There was only one skill that piqued her interest from the start that she seriously wanted to look into.
That skill was [Alchemy].
You’d think this would be the skill tree for the kind of alchemy popularized in modern fiction, but even on social media, you could only find discussion about the [Refine] skill unlocked from [Pharmacy] and [Formulate]. Of course, players could be hiding information the same way Rare was doing with [Subordinate], but that still meant that you couldn’t discover new skills the usual way.
The reason why [Alchemy] caught Rare’s eye was the fact that “homunculus” was one of the races that could be chosen during character creation. Homunculi were the fabled artificial lifeforms produced via alchemy. It was natural to believe that there was a connection here in this game as well.
In the closed beta, homunculi had the appearance of smaller humans, and their stats were around the level of humans but with higher INT. That meant that they had more overall stats than humans did, despite not requiring any additional XP to choose. There was a huge demerit that justified this, though: while they could live normally in cities in the human countries, once they were discovered to be homunculi, the town NPCs would treat them like monsters and try to kill or capture them. Because of this setting, it seemed reasonable to think of them as “artificial lifeforms,” as creations of mad alchemist using forbidden knowledge.
Rare wanted to know if she could crack open the [Alchemy] skill and find a way to produce homunculi.
For now, let’s learn [Formulate]. If that didn’t unlock anything, then she’d have no choice but to pick up [Pharmacy] as well[1]. In any event, all the XP she had was basically leftover anyway, so it was fine to pick up any cheap non-offensive magic spells. Stuff like [Wind Magic]’s [Dessicate] and [Fire Magic]’s [Heat] felt like they could be connected to [Alchemy] in some manner.
Starting with [Pharmacy], she also had to learn [Refine], [Dessicate], [Heat], [Wash], [Conduct], [Freeze], and [Demolish] before she unlocked the [Alchemy] skill in the [Alchemy] tree. It took way too much effort just to get the [Alchemy] tree’s namesake skill.