Prologue: Joanna (Part 3)

It was now the fifth consecutive run through the experiment, and she'd been relatively successful so far.

She pawned her wand online for three hundred silvers, enough to buy materials for 10 sets of reagents to use in her makeshift home lab. It was extremely difficult to part with the prize, and she'd promised herself to buy back the wand, as soon as she could.

The demon familiar shored up her strength and skill in pyromancy, she channelled its elemental affinity to control and modulate the highly energetic reactions as she performed Crystal Condensation: the process of producing magical crystals using the magical beast blood and monster cores.

Her first three tries had been busts, however, she could feel her skill visibly improve with each run-through. Even then she still needed to give up more control to the demon than she was comfortable with.

Her fourth run through had been successful! The crystals produced were of substandard quality, sure, but she'd finally created an actual crystal!

She'd been so excited she took a break and even bought a monster core to feed the familiar, to strengthen its incorporeal form. It didn't come cheap but she was extremely happy. However, her moment of jubilation was cut short when a loud knock came from her door. She quickly ran back to her lab, sealing herself inside once more, and discarding the crystal fragments from her fourth attempt.

"Time to get down to business!"

She took out an advanced book on chronomancy, time magic. And begun to write down a simple time spell and equation. She then summoned Gilgamesh, commanding him to help her to alter the set-up using the new equation, to integrate the new spell improving her control over the condensation process.

She wanted to be able to manipulate the reference frame of her interaction with the reagents, allowing her to slow down the reaction without removing energy from the system.

She didn't have the magical aptitude to handle such a complex spell, her manna pool didn't have the capacity to handle both spells simultaneously, on her own. This was because of how strenuous the manna cycles required for each spell was, independently, and a sum would be even more turbulent.

She could now do this because of her new high level familiar, which could act as a secondary manna pool and a buffer/dampener on her own smaller manna pool, enabling her to use larger and more turbulent cycles in a way she couldn't do alone, while reducing the danger because she could partially direct the demon's immense soul strength, like water from a pipe.

It took her a few hours to adjust the original magical circle, enough changes had to be made and she ended up drawing a new one altogether. It took frequent references from The Book, copying out the energy flows in the diagrams of the book's alchemy chapter, and cross-comparing them against basic alchemy magic circles from her university textbook. She looked for the nodes that affected the rate of reaction and started to add in the time dilation spell equation.

She had to watch out, ensuring that it only affected her perception, rather than the actual process. Crystal Condensation was a highly energetic procedure, and affecting the critical rate of change would almost route any chance of success. She also had to be careful and aware that the spell did not become a hex, causing negative side effects on her soul and time perception beyond the instance during the procedure.

After several long and drawn out hours of corrections, editions, refinements and revisions, she was finally successful, or so she hoped.

"Okay, here goes nothing," she muttered. She could feel Gilgamesh's sneering smile at her back.

She drew the new magic circles, setting up the alchemy equipment using the new arrangement. The reaction started once more, a drop of drake blood (she'd only been able to get one vial of this rare substance), a drop of tiger blood (common), and a drop of golden sheep blood (a relatively new breed of magical beasts, artificially created to produce golden wool); each drop was put into a tube of distilled water, with morning dew lemon leaves. She let them heat up, adding a drop of decoagulating agent that served to break up the blood in the test tubes and accelerate the vaporisation.

She watched as the multicoloured gases moved through the tubes, getting distilled and reheated several times to remove as many impurities, as possible. The goal was three distinct red, orange, and purple gases to form from each of the respective feeding lines. They were emitting a faint purple glow, signifying that they were by far the purest batch of reagents she'd produced. "Now, to get serious," as the three gases were distilled into a single boiling flask, in which she'd already placed a fresh horned snake monster core. The monster core could be seen visibly degrading, emitting a purple vapour.

The magic circle lit up, creating the new modified flame. She felt a slight stirring in her heart, as she opened a manna flow into the magic circle, taking control of the process. Her spirit eyes showed the alchemical process as a kaleidoscope of colours, with multitudinous minute flashes of light for each collision and interaction between the exotic substances in the melting monster core and the gaseous extracts from the blood drops.

She could feel each reaction as the magic circle made her soul resonate with the entire process, and as she started to dial down the time, making things appear slower to her, she could feel an intoxicatingly god-like level of control, unlike anything she'd experienced before.