Having figured out exactly how I wanted the spellheart to crack, I pinned it into position and took a deep breath. One well-struck blow would be best.
Or at least, that’s what would have been best if my assumptions about the structure of the spellheart were correct. From examining the spellheart and the crack running through it I had thought the thing brittle enough that I could shatter a chunk off, but it seemed that under the force of the nail, the spellheart became a bit softer.
Instead of a chunk shattering off, the nail pushed a divot into the stone. This was far from ideal, but it was something I could work around. Unfortunately, because of this tacky property I couldn’t cleanly break off the piece I wanted. Instead I ended up with two major pieces and a bunch of tiny little fragments. I passed them off to Illiel for inspection
“Well, I’d say this is upper-low grade in terms of the quantity of zeal inside. Not great, but in terms of quality the internal structure of the zeal in the crystal is still good.” She passed the stone off to me, which I placed off to the side.
One by one, I picked up the pieces that didn’t have a trace of the blood drop that had given me so much trouble. Those I gathered all together. The impure pieces of the stone I set to the side for now.
“Tell me, Illiel, when you use a zeal accumulation technique you are taking zeal from the ambient environment and gathering it into a solid form. The spellheart is the physical manifestation of that accumulated zeal, right?”
“That’s correct. That’s why cultivators search far and wide for locations that contain high quantities of the zeal of their affinity. Higher concentrations make it much easier and faster to absorb.” She had a look of confusion on her face, not sure where I was going with this.
“So, if I crushed a spellheart entirely into individual particles of zeal, I could spread them around and enhance the density of zeal in the local area?”
Illiel nodded in realization. “That’s one technique cultivators use to increase ambient zeal density, but it’s a crude method. The vast majority of the zeal is lost. It really only works if you’re slaughtering many mystic beasts or other cultivators and collecting spellhearts by the dozen.”
“That loss assumes that I’m spreading the spellheart dust out into the air though. What if instead of just blowing it around I instead dissolve it into something, like water?”
“You’re talking about alchemy now. I’ve heard of such things being done as well, but the alchemists guild jealously guards the recipes and techniques they use. Clans proficient in alchemy will accumulate great wealth and the power that comes with it.” She glanced at me in surprise. “Don’t tell me… do you know some alchemy?” Illiel asked with eagerness in her voice.
I winked. “Don’t tell Sava. Now, what I need is a good solvent…”
***
The first thing I tried was water. Water is a pretty good solvent in most cases. I wasn’t a chemist, but I’d taken some interest in it while attending school. Direct mind-machine links meant that, while you couldn’t download an entire field of science directly into your head, it was much easier to learn about a variety of subjects. I’d taken chemistry as my elective for the sciences, and as a result I had around a bachelor’s degree of knowledge in the field of chemistry during the twenty-first century. Nothing too fancy, but I knew about valence bond theory, resonance, and aromaticity.
I never thought that this knowledge would come in handy. After all, during the twenty-second century, the real chemists spent years under accelerated learning to understand what they had to know since there was just so much prerequisite knowledge needed to even comprehend the cutting-edge techniques and theories, let alone try to do research. And even then, humans with years of accelerated learning were scarcely more than lab assistants for the AI’s that specialized in scientific research.
Still, knew enough that I had a couple of ideas. I had Illiel gather up a set of the smallest glass containers we had. These were my test tubes. I also had her light the fire. I’d probably need heat.
I picked up one of the smallest pieces of the mind spellheart and dropped it into a small cup of water. If only I had a graduated cylinder and a scale, so I could properly measure the volume, mass, and density.
As expected, the room temperature water did nothing, but if time was the issue, I should be able to accelerate things by increasing the temperature. I pulled a few embers out of the fire and stationed them around the glass. I was worried the sudden increase in temperature would shatter this medieval-era glass, but it held. Maybe glass making was further along than I thought. Or, more likely, the glassblower had reinforced her creation with zeal somehow.
Alas, the boiling water didn’t noticeable dissolve the mind spellheart either. Disappointing, but not something I wasn’t prepared for. Maybe it was dissolving the spellheart, just not at a noticeable rate. I’d have to test that theory later. Maybe I’d save one of the tiny grains and let it sit in the fire for a few days.
“I don’t think alchemy is something you can just pick up, Theo.” Illiel said to me consolingly. “If that weren’t the case you wouldn’t have clans and sects fighting over the good ones. After all, a good alchemist can for the foundation for an entire clan, since their skills can serve to massively improve the cultivation bases of everyone around them. Some of the fantastic pills and elixirs can raise someone from the heartwielder realm all the way to the true mage ranks in the blink of an eye.”
“I know I’m not the most talented.” I responded “But I’m not trying to predict the folding patterns for an amino acid chain here. I’m just trying to dissolve something.”
All right, no more messing around. I scraped some wood ash out of the fireplace. I didn’t recognize the type of wood, but it seemed like hardwood. I should be able to make lye out of it. Hopefully.
I got a pile of it boiling in water, skimming the stuff off the top.
[Process for making lye]
“I think... now don’t hold me to this, but when I was young, my mother had me tested for alchemical ability. I had a moderate degree of talent, but nothing special. In the end she decided that it wasn’t worth it. After a year of study, I’d only learned to make the most basic cultivation aids. But, one of the things I did learn is that a great many things in alchemy are made from elixirs, which always start with a base. That base is usually made from a zeal-infused liquid. Blood, water, milk of a sacred cow... anything that contains high concentrations of zeal. I usually used pre-made bases, but one of the things my tutor once mentioned was that a good alchemist could make a base for an elixir out of a source for zeal. The best could simply meditate and pull the zeal out of the air, like when cultivating a spellheart. Breaking down an existing spellheart would be a bit easier.”
“What did they do? How did they dissolve it?” I asked curiously, hoping that Illiel would have whatever piece of knowledge I was missing. As it was, I planning to just keep trying different solvents. Maybe I’d get something that would work, eventually.
“Well... the thing that makes spellhearts useful is that they’re a very stable state. Stable unless the force of Intent is applied. The Intent of a sentient creature can influence the zeal and cause it to ever so slightly reshape the laws of the natural world around it. A spellheart can stay stable for countless years, unless an alchemist uses their Intent to influence its state. This is where talent comes into play. For must cultivators, bonding with a spellheart means that they have an easy connection to use to utilize their spellheart. This connection grows incredibly strong once you reach the rank of mage acolyte and fuse the spellheart to your body.
“Alchemists need to be able to interact with spellhearts they aren’t bound to. This is one of the things that stops most people from being able to become alchemists. Intent is like a muscle that must be carefully honed and trained, but at the same time people are built with different levels of Intent innate to them. Those with greater degrees of Intent will have a much easier time of becoming an alchemist.”
“I suppose you could think of it that way. It’s much harder than you’re making it out to be though.”
And so that’s what I did. I sat before the mind spellheart fragment sitting in the glass of water and thought at it. Nothing happened. I squinted and held my breath. I’d expected to go red in the face, but surprisingly, the tiny spellheart fragment fell apart. It shattered in two just as easily as if I had struck it with a tiny little nail. Easier, actually. This was a clean cut, unlike my butcher job.
And then I did it again, and again, and again.
Bit by bit, I divide the spellheart fragment in half. The pieces shrunk and shrunk. Now, I wasn’t planning to keep dividing pieces until I reached the single particles of zeal. For one, there were quickly dozens of fragments, and many of them were too small for me to see already. But what I did realize was that my divisions weren’t completely efficient. Every time I cut the spellheart in half, a portion of it was lost. Dispelled into the ambient environment. It was less like cleaving the spellheart in half and more like turning a large piece of it in the middle into a gaseous state. Or whatever the equivalent for zeal was.
Normally, this loss would be a bad thing. My crude butcher job with a hammer and a nail was a more efficient process with less waste, but in this specific case it was that waste I wanted. The ambient environment around that shard of spellheart was my elixir base.
Soon, the tiny fragment was gone, and the acidic solution had taken on an ever-so-slightly amber color.
“Does this look right?” I asked Illiel, who was staring at the glass in surprise.
“That... yes, it feels like a base to me! I can’t believe how quickly you did that! Making a base with a spellheart took my old tutor a full day of work! And you did it in just a few minutes of sitting here. Admittedly, you only used a tiny spellheart fragment, but still...”
That’s when I had a great idea. If a spellheart was like a crystal, and I could dissolve the spellheart, then I could probably recrystallize it as well. The biggest scrap piece of spellheart suffered the problem of having the blood-drop impurity in it that rendered that portion of the spellheart unusable. But recrystallization was one of the most common techniques for purifying a substance.
I quickly got to work. I’d never actually done a recrystallization in the lab, but my chemistry elective set included two hundred hours of simulated lab work in an accelerated virtual environment, so I knew how it should be done. Probably.
I mixed up another back of acid. I’d need to secure a wider variety of solvents, so I could test for a good one. Ideally, I wanted a solvent for which the spellheart was highly soluble at high temperatures and weakly soluble at low temperatures. That way I could dissolve a high concentration of my impure spellheart into a solution and then cool it into a crystallized, purer form.
It took a bit of work to gather all the supplies, but Illiel was an eager lab assistant. She knew enough of alchemy to predict what I’d need and was happy to help. Apparently, alchemists in this world use recrystallization as well, and it wasn’t long before she realized what I was doing. The main difference was that in this world recrystallization is considered an advanced technique.
“I can’t believe you’re an alchemist!” Illiel gushed again. “And a talented one at that. It’s so rare to find a male elf who can cultivate with any degree of success. Your level of talent with regard to cultivation was rare enough, but being an alchemist too? I’m suddenly thinking the Songstone clan might be in a better position a few years down the line than they ever were operating the royal mines.”
I smiled. “Well, don’t talk too highly of me yet. I still haven’t really done anything.”
But despite my words, the recrystallization went smoothly. There was a noticeable amount in loss, but I saved what I could of the solution. I’d evaporate the solvent off entirely and do this again a couple more times to try to get as much as I could out of the mind spellheart.
After several recrystallizations, there was no evidence left of the blood impurity.
“These crystals are so pure! You can’t find spellhearts of this quality by killing mystic beasts! These have obviously been processed by an alchemist!” In my estimation, Illiel was entirely too excited by some simple chemistry. I’d have to teach her to do it herself in a bit, since she seemed so enthusiastic about it.
“Well, we’re not done. A bigger spellheart is better. This pile of tiny crystals doesn’t do me nearly the good that one big crystal would.” I pulled out the intact fragment of Gurthari’s mind spellheart. This was the piece I had bonded to. Luckily, I have this piece here. I can use this as the seed crystal. Then I can have all those tiny crystals build on top of it to make one big crystal. I just have to keep things happening nice and slow, and let each tiny particle falls into position."
“No, you don’t.” Illiel said. “You’ve already bound that crystal to yourself, so you can accumulate new zeal directly onto it. All you need is an environment ready to supply a large amount of zeal.”
I grinned ear-to-ear at the sudden realization. I wouldn’t have to wait weeks for a big crystal to form. I could just pull zeal directly from the surrounding solution directly onto my crystal. Anyone who’s ever spent months trying to crystallize a unique molecule would be dying of jealousy right now if they could see me.
***
It took a bit of concentration to get things going. This wasn’t my normal position for cultivation, and I was doing something new. But soon enough I had the same cycling technique working as what I now routinely did with my earth spellheart.
Except nothing was happening. I told Illiel so.
“That’s because the cycling technique you use is for earth zeal. Mind zeal behaves differently. It’s like thousands of tiny strands that wriggle and writhe. Collecting them is like scooping up a handful of tiny worms. They won’t stay together for long.”
“Then how do you build up a spellheart with them?”
“The Unblinking Eye has a few techniques. One of them, the simplest method, is made available to even new members. It involves simply sticking these writing worms into your spellheart one at a time. That’s rather inefficient though.”
“Lucky for me, my mother managed to obtain permission for me to be granted access to one of the more powerful accumulation techniques. The process is kind of like fishing. You use some of your own mind zeal as a fishing line and gather up little fragments of stray mind zeal. This is much faster than trying to pull them right into the stone. Considering you have so much mind zeal concentrated in an elixir, this should be even easier, and far, far faster. I think Mistress Gurthari was jealous of that. She was stuck with the basic technique, and she didn’t have a connection higher up in the organization to get her anything more advanced. Otherwise, she would have made it into the mage acolyte ranks long ago.”
I followed Illiel’s instructions, for the basic technique. She explained that she was only able to tell me an extremely abridged description of the more advanced technique. Part of the deal in getting it was that the Unblinking Eye planted a compulsion in her head that would render her unable to teach the technique to others. By now though, she’d figured out that I was quite gifted in terms of these zeal accumulation techniques, and that it might be possible for me to figure it out on my own without the step-by-step instructions of passing down the technique.
I started with the basic technique Illiel described and slowly bit by bit I was collecting all the mind zeal from the outer edges of the container and bringing them closer to the center. Bit by bit the mind spellheart was growing. It was expanding rapidly and by the time the hour was up, the spellheart was twice the size. Soon enough it was half the size that Gurthari’s had been, but of a higher quality.
“Amazing.” Illiel gushed again. “It’s so pure. Better than the one Gurthari made with years of wo
rk. It’s no wonder alchemists are so highly valued. This one is even purer than mine with my advanced accumulation technique.”
“Want me to do yours then?” I asked.
Illiel glanced up at me in surprise. “Wait, really?”
“Why not? I did it once. I’ll probably be able to do it again.”
“No, not that. Alchemists in big clans refine spellhearts for their fellow clan or sect members all the time. Some in the cities will even refine the spellhearts of strangers, for a price. My mother had such a freelance alchemist refine her water spellheart before she bound it to her body and ascended to the mage acolyte ranks. It’s just that such things cost a fortune even if you are a fellow clan or sect member. If you aren’t, it costs countless precious treasures, on top of ten fortunes worth of money.”
“Well, if you insist on paying somehow, how about you help me refine the process? The part I’m most unsure about is this accelerated recrystallization. You’ll have to do that part yourself if we’re using your mind spellheart. Also, we’ll need some raw materials. You wouldn’t happen to have any mind spellheart fragments?”
Before I finished speaking Illiel thrust her hand out, holding a bunch of tiny fragments of amber colored stones. None of them were big enough to be a spellheart, but all together they made up a sizable portion.
“When the Unblinking Eye sends us out into the field, it isn’t just to spy or assassinate. We’re also supposed to be cultivating. In fact, we’re supposed to be cultivating constantly. Most other kinds of cultivators have a hard time fighting mystic beasts that use mind zeal. They almost always have some sort of distraction aura running around them.”
“But for us mind cultivators, it’s actually quite easy to hunt down mystic beasts of the mind aspect. We have ways to get around their distraction auras. In fact, their own natural defenses often make them easier to spot, since we’re trained to look for and deal with structures made from mind zeal.”
Zeal of the Mind and Flesh Page 25