Chapter 90: Compromise
The blueish-green concoction stopped boiling, giving Percy a moment of reprieve.
But he couldn’t relax for long. The mixture was currently unstable, so delaying could easily cause the yield to suffer. Moving quickly, he grabbed a pinch of ground leaves he’d prepared earlier, tossing the colourful dust in the cauldron. Next, he turned up the temperature much higher than before, stirring it again.
“The rainbow grass seems to work!” Orin exclaimed as he watched it bubble.
Upon learning of the cyan paste’s ability to mend one’s core, Percy had been trying to incorporate it directly into the elixirs, aiming to maximize its effectiveness.
The first additional step had been relatively simple. He’d only needed to mix the powder with a finished elixir. Naturally, it had involved some heating and stirring, much like the previous steps. That had allowed the crystallized mana to bond with the beast mana already present. And of course, this hadn’t been very complicated, so Percy had actually succeeded on his first try!
However, the resulting elixir hadn’t worked as intended. The moment he added his own mana to the concoction, it reacted violently inside his stomach, nearly injuring him. After some reflection, the problem had become clear. The recipe for the regular elixirs involved three stages, commonly referred to as the “three pillars” of alchemy.
First, the pacification step delayed the activation of the beast mana, allowing the elixir to work gradually over several minutes rather than surging through the mage’s body all at once. During the redirection step, the beast mana was modified to target impurities more strongly than the rest of the core, enhancing the elixir’s purifying effects. Finally, the deattunement step allowed the beast mana to blend more easily with the first new type of mana it encountered, so that it could be guided through the user’s channels.
And this was exactly where the problem lied. It was precisely because of deattunement that the cyan powder could bond with the beast mana. However, that meant the elixir was no longer deattuned afterwards.
Of course, the solution had been rather obvious too. Since the deattunement was “used up” after adding the cyan powder, all Percy had to do was deattune it a second time. Essentially, the new recipe required five steps now: pacification, redirection, deattunement, bonding and then deattunement again!