Chapter 58: “Potassium MagiCarbonate”[1]
Of course the recipe for the Philosopher’s Stone wouldn’t be in the list. Perhaps it didn’t even exist in this game. But considering homunculi and alchemy did exist, it was hard to believe that would be the case. Rare’s mental logic was most likely flowing in the most convenient direction based on her observations, but since this was supposed to be a fun game, she wouldn’t mind even if her findings were subpar. Believing in her own optimism, she decided to just try her best.
The recipes she thought were worth investigating were the ones that required a lot of materials, and the ones that were the only ones in their subcategories. Rare would mark these as “provisional Philosopher’s Stones” and work on crafting them.
She still needed to find six more ingredients for these recipes. Right now, the ones she had unlocked and could see were mercury, sulfur, iron, monster heart, and potent acid. The last ingredient she had no information on. The fact that “potent acid” had been unlocked meant that Rare had encountered it somewhere. Since the acids she had seen mostly came from the engineer ants, whatever they produced should work. It shouldn’t be an issue if their levels were too high, so she would pick some engineer ants for “Experimental Use Only” and dump a bunch of XP into them to improve their acid as much as possible. If this recipe turned out not to produce a Philosopher’s Stone, they would suddenly just lose their old jobs, but given their new status as high-spec units, they should be able to find some place else to shine.
Mercury and sulfur could be gathered from the ore vein. After mining sulfide minerals, they could be [Refined] to obtain sulfur. Mercury was just found normally within the ore vein; they came out of the walls from digging tunnels. Of course, they also produced a small amount of cinnabar: mercury sulfide. She probably couldn’t just use cinnabar, though, even though it was made of both mercury and sulfur; if it was necessary for them to be combined through the magical means of [Alchemy], not a regular process like sulfidation, then there wasn’t anything she could do about it.
Speaking of cinnabar, old documents actually called the mineral itself the Philosopher’s Stone. After learning the [Alchemy] skill, Rare had spent some time while logged out researching real-world reference material about alchemy in the VR library. Cinnabar was famous in ancient China as an ingredient in the miracle medicine known as the “divine elixir.” That being said, it was still mercury sulfide in the end, just a toxic substance.
What if the mercury and sulfur listed were meant to make the cinnabar form of the Philosopher’s Stone? In that case, why did she need the other materials?
Whatever case, the mercury and sulfur would probably be used to create cinnabar, so she should consider the purpose of the other ingredients.
First, she was interested in why a comparatively common material was in the list: iron. It must be there to preserve the mercury. Mercury can form alloys with lots of metals, but she had the impression that it couldn’t do so with iron. Or was there another reason for iron’s presence?
If there were some other reason, then perhaps she could deduce that reason from the last material.