Origin Witch - Ten to One
A lump of wet ash dropped from the cauldron rim, hitting the stone bench with a soft splat. Corinne wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, leaving a streak of black soot across her cheek. The air inside the new five-square-meter alchemy workshop was thick enough to chew, a rank humid fog of burned iron, wet bark, and the sharp sour tang of boiled grass. Her cotton hospital gown was soaked through at the chest, clinging to her skin like a cold wet rag.
She hovered two inches off the oak floorboards, her dead legs swinging slightly as she adjusted her weight. Her shoulders burned. The Moonstone Carver tucked into her cinch-string kept her arms strong enough to lift heavy buckets, but thirty minutes of scraping rusted iron with river gravel had left her fingers stiff and numb.
She leaned over the Abyssal Meteorite Cauldron.
The interior metal, stripped of its crusty brown oxidation, shone with a weird iridescent dark blue hue, almost like oil slicked across wet asphalt. It was clean now. Mostly.
“Needs a filter,” she grunted, tossing a handful of grit into a scrap bucket.
Her first batch had been a fluke, a thick sludge-filled syrup that tasted like copper nails and boiled lawn clippings. The appraisal system had mocked her for it, calling it an imprecise disaster. She knew why. She’d left the boiled roots, the leaf veins, and the fine dirt sediment floating inside the brew. Anyone drinking that garbage was swallowing half a cup of mud along with their magic.
She hauled herself over to the Magic Desk on the lower floor, her floating torso trailing through the air while her bare feet scraped lightly along the floorboards.
A yellow alert icon was blinking on her private inbox.
[Private Message from: Piper Bell] [Sender Tag: Outcast Trader]
Corinne tapped the glass.
[Piper Bell]: Hi! Um, I saw you were buying glass test tubes earlier? I don’t have glass, but I found a blueprint in a supply crate near the river. I can’t use it because I don’t have an alchemy workshop set up. Do you want it? [Attachment: One-Time Filter Schematic (Grade-E)]
Corinne’s eyes narrowed. She tapped the attached image to read the system preview.
One-Time Filter Schematic (Grade-E) Required Materials: Wood * 50, Cotton * 5, Charcoal * 5, Sand * 10, Small Pebbles * 50, Cloth * 3. Effect: Constructs a dual-chamber mechanical filter capable of removing 95% of solid impurities from liquid mixtures without stripping raw ether.
It was exactly what she needed.
[Corinne]: What do you want for it? [Piper Bell]: Could I get some mana potions? Just a few? I tried drinking creek water yesterday because I was so thirsty, and I’ve been doubled over in my shelter with stomach cramps for six hours. The chat says your potions help clear the ether-sickness. [Corinne]: I’ll give you 10 vials. But you wait until the next batch is finished. The old stuff is gone. [Piper Bell]: Deal! Thank you so much! I’ll send the schematic right now!
A blue parchment icon appeared in Corinne’s storage grid.
She didn’t waste time chatting. She pulled up her inventory, checking her material counts. Wood, sand, and pebbles were plentiful in her storage, harvested from her flight trips and trades. Cloth was easy, she had three extra hospital gowns dumped in her corner from dead supply crates.
The only problem was cotton.
She looked around her treehole. Her eyes landed on a plush yellow stuffed duck resting on her bed mattress, a useless decorative junk item she’d pulled from a supply box two nights ago.
She pulled the Moonstone Carver from her belt.
Sliccch.
The crystal blade sliced the stuffed duck’s stomach open in one clean stroke. She dug her fingers inside, ripping out five handfuls of white synthetic cotton stuffing, ignoring the plastic bead eyes that rolled across the floorboards.
She set the materials flat onto the Magic Desk’s transfer panel and hit Construct.
A gray mist swirled over the desk for three seconds. When it cleared, a dark oak barrel roughly two feet tall sat on the wooden floor. It was split into two chambers, connected by an internal clay pipe. The top bucket had a fine brass mesh screen laid across the opening, sitting above layers of crushed charcoal, coarse sand, packed cotton, and polished river pebbles.
“Primitive,” she muttered, tapping the wood with her knuckle. “But it’ll do.”
She hoisted the filter barrel under her arm, heavy, at least thirty pounds, and floated back up the vine ladder into her second-floor alchemy workshop.
She set the filter on a low wooden bench beside her iron cauldron.
Now for the base solvent.
She turned to the Anvil of Repose she’d set inside her 100-liter workshop water tank earlier. The small smooth stone sat at the bottom of the iron basin, quietly bubbling. Pure crystal-clear Anseic Water trickled out from its pores, filling the basin to the fifty-centimeter mark with sparkling room-temperature fluid.
No river trips. No carrying heavy buckets through the dark woods. No waiting for rain.
She scooped twenty liters of the pure spring water into her Abyssal Meteorite Cauldron.
The water didn’t need to be neutralized with her own spirit. The Anseic Water was already naturally balanced, carrying just enough dormant ether to hold an alchemical charge without burning her throat.
She pulled four pounds of fresh herbs from her Pouch of Preservation.
Two pounds of Bitter-Grass roots, chopped into precise two-millimeter coins using her crystal knife. Two pounds of Yellow-Tail flower petals, crushed in her Abyssal Meteorite Mortar until they formed a sticky bright-yellow paste that smelled like wild honey and raw pepper.
Ten to one ratio. Twenty liters of water to four pounds of processed plant matter.
She dumped the ingredients into the pot.
Corinne hovered over the workbench, held her right hand over the iron base beneath the cauldron, and focused her spirit.
Activate Array.
A faint golden triangular line flared to life on the iron plate beneath the pot. The iron groaned as heat rushed through the metal, instantly bringing the twenty liters of spring water to a rolling bubbling boil.
She gripped her Verdant Rod, the green leaf-covered branch she’d dug out of Thane’s cellar, and began to stir.
Clockwise. Smooth even circles.
The steam rising from the cauldron didn’t smell like bitter mud this time. The combination of the pure spring water, the precise herb weights, and the steady heat from the alchemical base created a clean sharp scent that filled the small workshop, like pine needles crushed in fresh snow.
Hour one. The water turned a pale translucent yellow.
Hour three. The flower paste dissolved completely, blending with the bitter root sap until the liquid darkened into a deep glossy teal.
Hour six. Corinne’s shoulders throbbed with a dull aching heat. She didn’t stop. She shifted her grip on the wooden rod, her left hand taking the strain while her right hand turned the pages of Basic Alchemical Potions & Decoctions resting on the shelf beside her.
She read the chapter on Ether Condensation three times, her eyes scanning the dense text while her arm moved in rhythm with the bubbling pot.
Hour eight.
BRRRRRRRRING!
The mechanical alarm clock on the windowsill shrieked.
Corinne snapped her fingers, deactivating the iron array. The fire beneath the pot vanished instantly.
The teal liquid inside the cauldron didn’t just flash with a dull flicker like last time. It surged with a brilliant vibrant emerald light that lasted for three full seconds, illuminating the wooden ceiling of her workshop in green waves.
“Filtering,” she rasped, her voice thick with dry heat.
She picked up a heavy copper ladle, scooped the boiling emerald liquid from the cauldron, and poured it directly into the top mesh of her new oak filter.
Sssssssss.
Steam hissed as the hot liquid hit the wet sand and charcoal layers.
Corinne watched the bottom pipe.
Five seconds later, a thin crystal-clear stream of deep-teal fluid began trickling out the bottom spout, falling into a clean iron basin she’d placed below.
There was no mud. No leaf fibers. No floating gray specks. It was as clear as liquid glass, glowing with an internal electric green hue.
She waited twenty minutes for the entire batch to pass through the filter, yielding roughly two liters of pure concentrated potion.
She pulled a fresh glass test tube from her rack, filled it to the ten-milliliter line using her wooden glass-splitter, pressed a cork stopper tightly into the neck, and laid it on the Magic Desk screen for appraisal.
The screen lit up instantly with bright green text:
Item Appraised: Grade-E Mana Potion Volume: 10ml. Effect: Restores 5 Mana Points per second for 10 seconds (Total: 50 MP). Purity: 92%. Note: A standard, professionally filtered apprentice mana potion. Clean, stable, and highly effective. The taste remains slightly bitter due to the Bitter-Grass taproot, but the ether delivery is exceptionally smooth. Excellent work for a beginner.
Corinne let out a long ragged breath, her shoulders sagging as she slumped against her wooden work stool.
Fifty Mana Points.
A single ten-milliliter tube held enough liquid magic to completely refill the mana bar of almost every average adult human transferred to Kaelum. No more waiting four hours in a dark hole for mana to trickle back up. One gulp, ten seconds, full tank.
She looked at her iron basin. Two thousand milliliters of pure potion.
Two hundred doses.
She picked up the first filled vial, holding it up to the glass sliding door. The morning sun hit the turquoise glass, casting a bright diamond-like green reflection across her pale soot-stained face.
“Ninety-two percent purity,” she whispered, her cracked lips curving upward into a slow vicious grin. “Let’s see what the outcasts have to say about my math now.”
— Origin Witch —