Chapter 4 — How to do: Alchemy!

Okay.

Look.

Sex?

Sex isn’t supposed to hurt.

That doesn’t change whether it’s the first time or the thirtieth time.

The ‘hymen’ doesn’t block off anything and might not even be findable because, again, it doesn’t block off shit.  It’s not supposed to tear during sex!

If a girl is hurt when being fucked, it’s because her partner isn’t being careful enough!

The cervix can not be penetrated, consent is morally required, and there is nothing that changes when one loses virginity!

Do not bring your wrong facts into my lovely memories of rape and pleasure!

What?!

…Oh.  Right.  Yes.

Haha, okay, so, um, my rant was about, you know.  Earth.  Where things, you know, follow a logical consistency.  Not eroge-land.  In eroge-land, some of that is actually different.  For example, due to the goddess Modesty, who ascended between Alchemical Corruption 2 and 3, ‘rape’ doesn’t actually have a big risk of scaring a girl for life.  Sex is an incredibly intimate expression between two individuals; you quite literally bring your most vulnerable parts to bear in the mutual goal of pleasure.  Rape is bad.  Very, very bad.

…But that world, was the world of an eroge.  Rape was constant.  Modesty ascended, and became the goddess of Rape, specifically to ensure that instead of rape would not break any more woman's spirit.

Instead, it’s really really hot!  Well.  Usually.

The most she can do is, like, ‘smooth the path’?  Rape can still be deeply traumatizing, even with her help, if the one doing it is out to traumatize the other.  But so long as that’s not the case, you can come away from it with a deep rage instead of a scar on your psyche!

Rape is still illegal, by the way, but the laws of consent in this eroge world are -- ugh.  I’m not going to get into them.  They’re hot so long as I don’t think about how they apply to an entire world instead of, you know, ‘just me’.

So.  Where was I…?

Right, thanks.

So, a week later, the roper seed I was impregnated with --

Ugh again?!

Fine!

I’ll do it ‘in order’, instead of skipping to the fun parts.

You only have yourself to blame for this if you get bored!

Hmph.  Anyway.

I was still energetic after being raped into a little puddle of pleasure by the roaming tentacle beast, due to the mystical tentacle goop that I was covered with.  Without my pack I couldn’t bottle any of it up, and my entire outfit was torn and disheveled.  But, as I’ve said.

I’m pretty decent in emergencies.

After my body stopped trembling from aftershocks of pleasure, I took stock of the time.

It was still afternoon.

(I must repeat myself:  Time in that world is weird.  Ten hour hike, at least an hour to gather materials, and who the fuck knows how long getting raped by a monster with endless stamina, and no time had passed for me)

If I took a rest, then that would end this ‘time segment’ and move it into the ‘evening’... the first time slot of night.  That would make getting home a dangerous prospect.  Monsters get more active at night.

So I forced myself up -- wincing when I realized I had no idea where my shoes went -- and started the ten hour walk of shame.

After coughing up all the goo in my lungs, that is, so I could breathe air again.

…Air isn’t as comfortable as the goo.

I managed to spend most of the time convincing myself that I was not, in fact, addicted to pleasure.  That I was not a desperate needy subby slut.  That I was not a bimbo whore addicted to whatever I could shove in my greedy snatch.  It was a tough sell, but I bought it!

It was a lie, of course, but, well, you know that.  I mean, look at me.

Yeees~  Look at me more -- oh fine.  Back to the story.

I ate more goo as fuel when I was hungry, though that ended before four hours had passed on the return trip.  It was absorbed into my skin, which was slightly worrying, but not something I bothered thinking about at the time.  So that left me six hours without food, and without shoes, to make the return trip bearable.

It was Not Fun.

At least my bra wasn’t torn.  My tits would have jiggled everywhere if it was, and without anybody to see and tease me, it would have just been annoying!

…I did feel the lack of panties, though.  Goo occasionally slid back down, much to my embarrassment.

But all of that aside?  After another ten hours, I made it back to the town.  Shimizu, who was waiting for me, cried out in relief when she saw me.  “Ambrosia!  You’re -- are you okay?  Are you hurt?  What happened?!”

I, who had spent a good six hours without food, gave her a deadpan look.  “Yes, no, lots of rape.”

She squeaked at my last word, face turning red.

I sighed and rubbed my forehead.  “Sorry, I’m hungry, tired, and feeling rather blunt right now.  And hungry.  Very hungry, in fact.”  I gave her a look that was somewhere between an order and a plea.  “Can you meet me back at my room with a large meal?  Or two?  I need to eat before I make the elixirs.”

Shimizu just bobbed her head and rushed off.

…leaving me without clothing.

I looked down at myself, but I was, sadly, too tired to get flustered or feel embarrassed, so I just mentally shrugged and continued my walk of shame to my dorm.

Over twenty hours in one time slot, and I wasn’t sleepy in the slightest.

Time.  Was.  WEIRD.

So, alchemy.  In order to --

-- No, there wasn’t.

Really!  Shimizu didn’t say a thing after that!

No!  Nothing happened, she --

-- take that back, she’s amazing you --

Fine!

We had a talk after she came back to my room with all of our stuff, and a lovely spread of food.  I, apparently, had a maid, who failed to hide how delighted she was to see me mostly naked, and was very happy to help set up two chairs and a table in my room.  By the time Shimizu returned, it was waiting for her and -- more importantly -- her food.

I had taken a quick shower and placed a simple fuzzy white bathrobe over myself for the modesty I still thought I had, and devoured it.  It was a simple meal.  Thick steak and rice.  But that was more than enough for me, along with the endless variety of fruit that’s always available in the kingdom.

Shimizu wasn’t as hungry as I was… she had our rations with her on her trip back, after all… so she spent the time after she was full looking at me as I ate with an intense expression on her face.  I didn’t notice her doing so until I paused, my stomach feeling overfull from how much I ate.  I was sighing in contentment, willfully ignoring the fact that I had been raped just earlier that day, when Shimizu broke the silence with, “...You sacrificed yourself for me.”

I opened my eyes with a kind of blink and looked at her.  It took me a moment to understand what she was talking about, and when I did, I blushed lightly, coughing a bit.  “...I wouldn’t really say that…”

“No, you did,”  Shimizu stated.  Her voice was firm.  “You rushed forward, freed me, and took my place.  You even told me to take your supplies and leave.”  She paused and looked down, her hands clenched into fists.  “...And then I did.”

I felt a bit awkward.  Heck, I still feel awkward thinking about it!  It wasn’t exactly a ‘rational thought process’.  There wasn’t time for that, I just did what anybody would do, right?

…Ugh, not you too!

Look, it wasn’t a big deal, and even if it was, well, as I told her, “...Well, even if that is what happened… and I still say it isn’t… I was just using you for my own goals.”

See?  perfectly rational!  But nooo, she had to respond with, “Your own goals… that include giving me a Potential-Freeing Elixir, just for a long hike?”  I knew she was teasing me at that point, I could see her smile!  “Your own goals that include telling me the truth of the goddess Chastity?”  I mean, please, anybody would the moment they realized she didn’t know!  “Your own goals that include teaching me to be careful of my ceremonial blessing, and what to look out for on every stop on our trip?”

Yes!  I even told her, with some heavy exasperation, “Yes!  Obviously!  Shimizu, it was nothing.  I did, and have done, what I needed to do, that’s it.  Okay?  It’s not worthy of praise.  Please stop.”

And to my frustration, then and now, that only made Shimizu even more amused!  Ugh!

Regardless.  Onto the alchemy --

No, really, that’s where it ended!

I swear!

That was it nothing more happened --

…You’re not going to let this go, are you?

Haaaaa…

Fine.  I’ll tell you.  But you need to grope me.  Twice!  And none of those wimpy ‘touch the tits then back off’ gropes, I want you to use your hand muscles with this, okay?!

Good!  Hmph!  Now go oooooa-aaaaaaaah yeeeees~

W-well?  Go on, the second one?

…Fuck.  Fine.  But you better do it after I give you the details!

So after I told Shimizu the completely rational reasoning behind why she didn’t need to do anything for me, she decided to completely ignore everything I just told her.  She told me, to my face, fighting back laughter, “If those are your goals, then I will gladly serve you.  I succeed my claim to land to you…”

…Do I really have to say it?

…Fine.

She called me, “...Princess Ambrosia.”

No I don’t want that getting out!  It’s embarrassing!  And not the hot kind!  I’m not a oooooOOOH YES that’s good hand work…  There’s some official details about Shimizu’s oath, but we can get to that later, when she files the paperwork.

For noooow~  are you sure you don’t want a break before we move on?

…Really?

…Fuck.

Fine.

On to alchemy, I guess.

So.  Alchemy follows rules based on the five Chinese elements; wood, fire, earth, metal, water.

As a quick refresher, there are two cycles; one of generation, and one of destruction, or control.

Wood feeds fire, which burns it to ash to create earth, from which you mine metal, which can be used to carry water, which then nourishes wood.

Similarly, wood can break the earth, which can absorb water, which can extinguish fire, which can melt metal, which can split wood.

Every item in Alchemical Corruption 12 has a number of semi-random traits to them.  Each of these traits corresponds to one of those specific elements, and has a certain… let’s say ‘value’ to them.  ‘Weight’ is more accurate, but ‘value’ works better for explaining it.

Alchemy is all about strengthening the traits you want, and weakening or removing the traits you don’t.

So, in this case, every Golden Apple has a value that I very much want:  ‘Foundational Potential’.  It is of the fire element, and the value of it is anywhere between twelve and seventeen.

Thus I need to feed it between twelve and seventeen of any ‘wood’ element trait, or traits in order to ‘prime’ that trait to express itself.  The sum total value of the wood traits that I feed it need to reach the value of ‘Foundational Potential’ for that specific Golden Apple exactly.  That alone isn’t actually too hard.  A bit annoying, perhaps, but not that hard at all.

…But Golden Apples can have up to the maximum of nine traits, and ‘Foundational Potential’ is the hardest of them to prime.

For example, ‘Spoils Very Quickly’ is a very annoying one-value wood trait that ruins absolutely anything that you make with it if that trait is primed or ‘over-primed’.  In other words, ‘Spoils Very Quickly’ will immediately latch onto any water trait you feed the cauldron regardless of its value, so long as it’s one or more.

So if the Golden Apple has ‘Spoils Very Quickly’, you need to first destroy it with a fire trait with a value of exactly one.  And you need to do that first, before it’s primed, or things get… even more complicated.

…I’m aware it’s a bit messy.

On top of all of that, every Talent that a person has can be used in unique ways during the process.  ‘Sword Talent B’ allows you to declare a trait an ingredient has, and ‘split’ the ingredient so that you only have to deal with that trait and up to two other traits, randomly selected from that ingredient.

And if that wasn’t enough, each item also has a rank that can affect -- you know what, it’s not important.  It’s a lot; I get that.  I’ll walk you through my creation of the first Potential-Freeing Elixir that I ever drank.

I started with the best apple we had, at SSS rank, as the core of my personal elixir.

Golden Apple, SSS Rank

Seven traits.  The curse needs to be both fed and destroyed before I can feed wood to anything else, and it can not be removed.  Now, as for the skills available to us, I had the [Archery], [Fire Magic], [Endurance] and [Mercantilism] all at rank C.  [Mercantilism] is useless; it only increases the value of one item that I make.  [Endurance] lets me make another item in the same time slot, which isn’t useful for making this item.

Thankfully, [Archery] lets me ‘snipe’ off one point of value from one trait of an additive three times, and Fire Magic lets me prime or destroy up to five points of ‘fire’ traits.

As for Shimizu, well, I already mentioned what her [Swordmistress] rank B trait lets her cut up items, ensuring that one chosen trait remains along with up to two randomly picked other traits.  And because it’s B rank, it doesn’t even have a use limit!  I was planning to use her blade as a kitchen knife for my cooking!

Unfortunately, I couldn’t use it on the apple.  The apple is the ‘core’ ingredient; I can’t affect it without risking ruining the batch, which I very much did not want to do.

But I could use it on everything else.

Seriously, Shimizu was an amazing character in the game… you just normally can’t get her on your side until, like, year 3.

Regardless.  I had her cut up the Tenacious Vines and Succulent Peaches that I had gathered just for this… and I kept on having her do so until I had the exact ingredients I needed.  It was wasteful… These were mid-rare items that required a fair amount of effort to gather… but the waste was more than worth it in this case.

I ended up with three Tenacious Vines and X Succulent Peaches, with the following traits:

Tenacious Vines 1, B Rank

Tenacious Vines 2, C Rank

Succulent Peach 1, B Rank

Succulent Peach 2, B Rank

So.  First, turned the cauldron on, and prepared the base -- a thick, syrup-like mixture made of water, sugar, some coal, and a lot of magic to help with the impurities.  The sugar is for the energy, and the coal is for the building materials -- carbon, essentially.  Why carbon is needed I have no clue, but diamonds actually make for a better base.

I stirred in the apply wholesale, letting it melt and the mixture taking a golden sheen.  Normally, now, I would add the second Tenacious Vine and the first Succulent Peach… but if I did that, then I would accidentally end up feeding Spoils Very Quickly due to the unused water.  Since I can’t ‘partially’ fill things up.  It’s total or not at all.

So first I put in Succulent Peach 2; I focused the Slight Mutant trait to clash with Spoils Very Quickly, thankfully removing them both.  Then I put in Tenacious Vines 2 along with Succulent Peach 1.

The combined total of Tenacious, Moves on its Own, Big Seeds, and Warm and Tasty came to 10 wood, enough to feed the curse.  And with my [Archery C] trait, I could ‘snipe off’ 1 water from either of the Succulent Peachs, leaving me with a total of 10 water.  At the same time, I focused on pushing Warm and Tasty into Rots Very Quickly.

The curse and traits all extinguished with a huge plume of steam from the cauldron, and I reared back from the heat.  This was very different from playing a game through a screen!

By now the traits in the cauldron where thus:

Underripe and Big Seeds are separated, as they were from ‘ingredients’ instead of from the ‘core’.  They would have automatically attached themselves to feed any ‘bad traits’ that they see… but I’d already managed to remove all negative traits.  Thus, I was safe.

Optimally, removing all extraneous traits results in a stronger result.  But this already was a minor miracle of alchemical skill.  Praise me!

…Moving on.

I then fed the cauldron Tenacious Vines 1; the sum total of wood it had was fifteen, just two away from the total I needed to prime the trait I needed.  Thankfully, I had [Fire Magic C]~  I had a full five points of fire value that I could use to prime or destroy any fire trait!  I used one to remove ‘Underripe’ and two to finish priming ‘Foundational Potential’.  Thus leaving me with the traits of:

Which was about as perfect as I could get it, at the time.  The average rank of ingredients was even A, which was very solid!

It took me some time to finish mixing everything together.  I had to bubble away and skim off all the extras added in, from the starting base, the mixing method, and even tiny particulates that were simply not caught in the process.  The end result was a shimmering golden liquid that could fit in a thimble with room left over.

With a small wave I activated the extraction from the cauldron, and the liquid was drained into a tiny vial.  Shimizu and I glanced nervously at each other as I placed it on a small tray set up to analyze it.

[Potential Freeing Elixir, Golden Apple:  Rank A][This Elixir was crafted by wasting approximately twenty ingredients in search of the perfect items.  The creators' obsession with quality shows, as it not only frees one's potential from their soul, but is also quite tasty.][Contain remnants of Slight Mutant and Curse: Insatiable]

The remnants I was certain I could ignore.  I knew, at that time, that this would only affect me -- there was nothing for the remnants to go to.  So, after laughing and relaxing with Shimizu, I downed the elixir without a second thought.

I’m quite thankful I had entirely forgotten about the roper seed that was sitting inside my womb!  It made things much more fun for me later on~