Origin Witch - Scaling the Cauldron
The blister on Corinne’s right thumb pulsed in time with the bubbling pots.
Soot had worked its way so deep into the tiny creases around her fingernails that no amount of scrubbing with lye soap seemed to loosen it. Her thumb was throbbing, a dull, nagging pulse where a drop of boiling Bitter-Grass syrup had splattered off the cauldron rim three hours ago, leaving a tiny yellow blister right beside her knuckle.
She ignored it. She had ten iron pots to watch, and the steam rising off the third one was starting to smell faintly like burned turnip greens. A sure sign the heat-array beneath it was running three degrees too hot.
“Lower,” she grunted, nudging the edge of the granite base with the tip of her Moonstone Carver.
The crystal blade caught the corner of the golden glyph carved into the gray stone. A faint spark popped and the glowing orange lines etched into the granite dimmed slightly, dropping the yellow flame underneath the pot from a fierce boil to a steady, rhythmic simmer.
The expanded fifteen-square-meter alchemy workshop was a hot, humid furnace.
Ten cauldrons, a mix of heavy black cast-iron soup pots she had traded from Jasper Finch and her own dark blue Abyssal Meteorite Cauldron sitting at the center, were arranged in two neat, parallel rows across the oak floorboards. Beneath each pot rested a three-legged granite array base she had personally hand-carved over the last two days.
To feed the pots without drowning herself in bucket trips, she had spent four hours yesterday rigging a crude plumbing system out of hollowed-out bamboo stems and copper troughs. The pipe ran from the hundred-liter iron water tank on the wall, fed continuously by the S-Rank Anvil of Repose, and split into ten smaller wooden spigots positioned right above each pot.
All she had to do now was turn a wooden peg, and fresh, cold Anseic spring water trickled straight into the iron.
It was an assembly line built out of river rocks, hollow reeds, and dead alchemical lore.
Steelwool let out a low, miserable keek-keek from its perch on top of the upper storage rack, its fluffy gray body pressed flat against the cool timber wall to escape the rising heat.
“Don’t complain,” Corinne muttered, wiping a trail of sweat from her jawline with her shoulder. Her hospital gown was gone, replaced by a dark gray linen tunic she had traded from a former seamstress for two vials of health potion. It was stiff and scratchy against her neck, but at least it did not burn through when a stray ember hit it. “You just sit there and eat raw rabbit liver all day. I’m the one turning my liver into lard.”
She hovered two inches off the floorboards, her Zephyr Float talent holding her weightless while her upper body worked. Floating saved her from the agonizing spine-strain of dragging her lower body through the clutter, but managing ten boiling pots at once was a mental nightmare.
Every pot had its own mood.
Pot four had a soft spot in its iron bottom that caused the Bitter-Grass roots to stick if she did not stir it every four minutes. Pot seven’s granite array base had a faint quartz fissure running through its left leg, meaning it leaked a tiny trickle of raw ether whenever she pushed the heat past a simmer. And her meteorite cauldron in the center, the heavy, star-iron beast, was so greedy for plant matter that it dissolved Yellow-Tail flower paste twice as fast as the ordinary cast-iron pots.
Mana Points: 42/80.
Her head throbbed behind her left ear. The continuous mental strain of monitoring ten separate mana-circuitry loops simultaneously felt like holding ten taut fishing lines in one hand while standing on a rope bridge during a windstorm.
Clang!
A wooden spigot above pot nine suddenly popped its peg under water pressure. A thin stream of icy Anseic spring fluid shot out, splashing straight into the boiling green syrup of pot eight.
The brew let out a long, furious hiss.
A cloud of blinding white steam erupted from the iron, carrying a foul, acidic stink that hit Corinne right in the throat.
“Damn it!” she barked, coughing violently as she shoved herself through the air.
She grabbed the leaking wooden peg, slammed it back into the bamboo pipe, and used her Moonstone Carver’s hilt to hammer it home with two sharp whacks. She leaned over pot eight, squinting through the dense steam at the frothing green liquid inside.
The sudden drop in temperature had ruined the fluid balance. The green syrup was separating, forming ugly, curdy gray clumps of unrefined plant cellulose that floated to the surface like dead pond scum.
Appraisal (Spectacles of Discernment): [Ruined Herbal Decoction (Grade-F) – Status: Thermal Shock Separation – Result: Useless Slag]
“Two pounds of Bitter-Grass down the drain,” she growled, her knuckles turning white around her stirring rod.
She did not waste time crying over it. She grabbed a wooden scoop, skimmed the curdled gray scum out of the pot, dumped it into a scrap bucket, and opened the wooden spigot to flush the pot with fresh Anseic water.
Mistakes happened. In a workshop running ten cauldrons at once, trying to keep a hundred percent success rate was a fantasy for people who only read books and never held a ladle. You swallowed the loss, cleaned the pot, and kept moving.
She pulled two fresh pounds of pre-sorted Bitter-Grass from her Pouch of Preservation, sent over three hours ago by Piper Bell in exchange for five vials of mana potion, and dumped the chopped roots straight back into the fresh water.
By two o’clock in the afternoon, the ten pots had reached their final condensation phase.
The workshop smelled divine now. The foul, sulfurous stink of raw herbs had been replaced by a crisp, sharp fragrance that reminded her of crushed wintergreen and frozen river stones.
Corinne hovered beside the master collection trough, a three-foot-long copper channel that caught the filtered outflow from all ten cauldrons as they passed through her oak-barrel filter setup.
A steady, sparkling stream of deep-green and bright turquoise liquid was trickling down the copper chute, falling straight into a row of fifty-milliliter glass storage carafes she had bought from Jasper.
Two hundred doses of Grade-E Mana Potion.
One hundred and fifty doses of Grade-E Health Potion.
She picked up one of the fresh ruby-red health potion vials, holding it up to the afternoon sunlight streaming through the workshop window. The liquid inside was thick, crystal-clear, and radiated a soft, soothing red glow that cast tiny crimson speckles across her dark gray tunic.
[Grade-E Health Potion] [Volume: 10ml.] [Effect: Restores 5 Health Points per second for 10 seconds (Total: 50 HP).] [Purity: 93%.] [Note: A highly concentrated, professionally filtered health elixir. Instantly closes minor lacerations, halts internal bleeding, and neutralizes low-tier muscle fatigue. Tastes faintly of sweet wintergreen.]
Corinne uncorked the vial, brought it to her mouth, and took a tiny two-milliliter test sip.
The liquid hit her tongue like cool, sweet cherry syrup, followed by a sharp, tingling warmth that spread down her throat straight into her aching chest. The dull, throbbing burn on her right thumb, where the boiling syrup had blistered her skin three hours ago, faded. She watched the red skin flatten out, the tiny blister shrinking until it was nothing more than a smooth pink spot.
Fifty Health Points.
In a world where an average human had twenty or thirty total health points, a single ten-milliliter tube was literally a second life in a glass bottle.
“Finch,” she said aloud, her voice raspy from the heat.
She moved to the Magic Desk on the lower floor, her weightless body floating smoothly down the curved heartwood staircase. She opened her private trading interface with Jasper Finch.
[Corinne]: First industrial batch is finished. 150 Health Potions, 200 Mana Potions. All Grade-E, purity above 90%.
The reply came back before she could even wipe her hands on her apron.
[Jasper Finch]: Praise the saints. Send them through, Miss Mercer. Half the sector is bleeding into their boots right now. I have fifty buyers waiting in my queue with raw iron and monster cores in their hands.
Corinne opened the trade square, dumping three hundred and fifty glass vials into the digital transfer grid.
[Jasper Finch]: Outstanding work. The contract terms stand: 70% of the raw material trades go straight back to your Spire inventory bank, 30% stays with my brokerage for distribution costs. Also, I managed to secure something special for you from a scavenger team near the northern swamp.
[Corinne]: What kind of special?
[Jasper Finch]: A blueprint. A real one. Non-crafting, non-construction. It’s a defensive array blueprint.
A blue parchment icon appeared in Jasper’s end of the trade square: [Blueprint: Caustic Thorn-Ward (Grade-E)].
Corinne’s eyes narrowed behind her spectacles.
[Corinne]: Where did they get this?
[Jasper Finch]: Found it inside a locked copper chest near the stomach of a dead Grade-D Swamp Hydrake. The team lost two men getting it out. They wanted three boxes of health potions for it. I gave them two, kept one for myself, and told them you’d give them priority allocation on the next potion drop.
[Corinne]: Accept the trade.
The blue parchment materialized on her small desk screen.
Corinne picked up the schematic, unrolling the stiff, calfskin scroll. The illustrations inside showed a complex, triangular mana-circuitry network meant to be carved into the stone foundations surrounding a shelter. When activated by an intruder’s physical weight, the array would trigger a localized spray of pressurized, acidic thorn-liquor harvested from corrosive plants.
An automated defensive trap. Something that did not require her to sit up at night holding a crossbow or dropping vials off her balcony.
She rolled the scroll back up, tucked it into her tunic pocket, and looked at her storage grid interface.
Wood: 12,400 units. Stone: 2,100 units. Iron Ore: 850 units. Grade-E Monster Cores: 42 units. Copper Slabs: 120 units.
Her raw material reserves were swelling like a river during spring melt.
She looked out the round glass window of her first floor. Down below, the giant oak roots stretched into the dark underbrush where two days ago eleven hundred people had died during the Ether Turbulence. Now, those same dark woods were crawling with survivors who had realized that if they wanted to stay alive, they needed to bring their wood, stone, and iron straight to Jasper Finch so Jasper could send it up to The Spire.
She was not just surviving anymore. She was running the mint.
Corinne drifted back up the wooden stairs to her second-floor bedroom, grabbed a clean cotton towel, and turned on the hot water tap above her stone basin. She let the forty-degree Anseic spring water wash the gray soot and plant oil off her face, listening to the quiet, rhythmic thump-thump-thump of Steelwool hopping across the terrace outside, chasing a stray beetle across the polished timber boards.
She looked at the row of ten cauldrons waiting downstairs, then at the flat, still surface of the water in her basin. Tomorrow the market would open for the new health potions, and the whole sector would learn what her medicine cost.
— Origin Witch —