Moxlin was still in high spirits for much of the day, but after twelve hours of consistent failure and no apparent progress, she started to look worried. They took a long break, where they went over the details of the glyphs of every step for several hours. Her insights into the talismans' ingredient processing were genuinely informative.
Still, two more attempts afterwards failed just as thoroughly.
His mind far more tired than after fighting Puppy, Axl realized that he had no choice but to sleep it off. And this was no four-hour nap, but his mind needed a full eight hours to recover, as it did the previous night, making the deadline loom closer.
Day three's first attempt produced another poisonous-looking slurry, and in a fit of frustration, Axl dipped a finger into the foul concoction and tasted it. To no real surprise, it tasted like the inside of a space suit after a weeklong recon with a broken pisser. But the substance was strangely Mana-dense, and he turned on [Mana Shroud], surprised that the Skill worked rather well inside his mouth.
In a way, that made sense, since his Skill could access the substance fully from every side, his body enveloping it, the control more exquisite by sheer proximity. He then remembered something about Moxlin's casting that he didn't realize until just now—her glyphs were much smaller than his, obviously because her legs were quite a bit skinner and shorter than his fingers. Or was that the case?
There was no way that something as delicate as glyphs would act the same regardless of their size, but clearly they did, so he wondered what else was actually needed to get them to work.
He remembered the simple first spell in the [Selsin Clan Glyphic Compendium], and tried to etch them in the air, without his finger, and was surprised to see that it worked, a small globe of light floating in front of his face. It wasn't even that much harder than doing it with a finger, it used more Mana to get it out of his body and close the distance, but somehow the motion felt smoother.
Next, he tried casting the spell inside his mouth, and while it felt weird, he apparently didn’t really need to worry about some of it being inside his flesh and some not, it just worked. When Axl opened his mouth, it produced a dim beam of light from the globe of insubstantial luminance on the back of his throat.
"What in mom's web are you doing?" Moxlin asked, looking up from a half-inscribed talisman.
Axl smiled at her, the light peeking from between his teeth producing a grating pattern across their hidden cavern. "I think I should mix the ingredients in my mouth."
Moxlin tilted her head to the side, then snapped back to her work. "I'm just going to pretend I didn't hear that."
There were two main ingredients to the potion, the cave moss and a small piece of the Mana-rich leaf Olkan had a bunch of, so Axl set the talismanic glyphs on the inside of his cheeks, and placed the ingredients in his mouth. It was actually far easier to produce the glyphs in his body than in the air, even if he had to make them much smaller than on the blank talisman papers.
He still used the bowl, simply spitting out the mixture of processed ingredients onto it before activating the fire. Already the first try went far better than any before, the output being just an opaque half-slurry.
A few more trials and he figured out that he had to pre-heat the bowl, and use less potent fire than before, the results becoming clearer and clearer. He also reconvened with Moxlin to make some alterations on the glyphs, his [Selsin Clan Glyphic Compendium] now showing variants that could work with his new approach.
He also smoothed out some unevenness of the bowl with [Mana Shroud] and the edge of his sword, getting a corner of the bowl to have a more uniform distribution of the flame's heat. A few more tries later, it actually worked. Suddenly, the entire process clicked in his mind into a unified flow, and a small cup's worth of vibrant red liquid was produced at the end of the cycle.
>>Technical Art unlocked: Glyphic Alchemy (Proficiency G.1)
>>Composite glyphic manipulation art for concentration, refinement, and preservation.
Not only did he formally unlock the Technical Art, but he got a proficiency step from it. He tilted up the bowl to Moxlin, who looked up from her work with surprise. "I got it! It even gave me my first proficiency!"
Four spidery legs jutted up, throwing the nearby pile of talisman paper into the air. "AHHHH! Amazing!" She then lunged at his chest, feeling like a small ball of fluff on impact. "This is crazy! Nobody gets their proficiency with the unlock!"
Axl flinched at the sudden motion, his body instinctively thinking he was under attack, activating [Mana Shroud] and tensing.
Moxlin jumped down and looked aside. "Oh, sorry, sorry, I got a bit excited. I didn't mean to touch you. I know bipeds tend to find us weird."
The spider suddenly reminded him of his brother, and the confusing hugs Axl had learned to tolerate. After a moment, taking a re-centering breath, he reached down with his least-burnt hand, cupping Moxlin's small body with an open palm. After a moment, she leaned against his fingers, eyes still downcast.
"I don't find you weird," he said, trying and failing to come up with a better way to sound reassuring.
Moxlin gave a small nod and slowly ambled back to the mess of talisman paper she left behind. "Well, back to work, rowdy student! The next step is even harder, after all."
But first, he turned to his newly obtained achievement.
>>Alchemical Prodigy (Consumable):
>>Use a self-derived variant alchemical process for your first successful alchemical product.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
>>Reward: Upgrades the reward from the basic glyphistry training quest.
The achievement was welcome and certainly raised the stakes of finishing that training quest. Axl practically salivated at the thought, remembering how his previous upgrades turned very good Skills into positively amazing ones. He was also reassured that this one didn't have the note that it was awarded by Terrania, meaning it wasn't going to cost him time to accept, so pure profit.
Before getting back to pushing to a higher proficiency, Axl examined the liquid at the bottom of the bowl, finding it differently colored and less Mana-dense than the one he found in Olkan's pouch. This wasn’t a surprise, of course, not expecting his very first try to be better than the finished product of a seasoned professional. All those glyphic artisans back in Piril had to have earned their fancy houses, after all.
With a shrug, he drank the liquid in a single gulp, using [Mana Shroud] to direct the healing to his increasingly battered hands. It flowed sluggishly, and didn't have as dramatic an effect as the other potions, but the angry, painful burns across his palms and forearms became much less vibrant, some even fully scabbed over.
Expecting it to be good practice, Axl started the same process again, making three more batches of the healing potion, using all of them to clear up his burns and covering the injury he got from Puppy in a thin layer of skin.
He noted that the third application was slightly less effective than the previous ones, however, as if his body was rejecting the medication. This felt worrying, but after talking to Moxlin about the problem, she confirmed this was normal, and that your body should regain its sensitivity to the same kind of potion in a few days.
This being a problem for later, Axl turned in for the night, rather content that he was halfway through his quest with still four full days left.
The next day, he eagerly set out to improve his process, tightening up the glyphs for ingredient refinement, optimizing the flame, and even altering the glyph placement on his makeshift bowl to compensate for irregularities in the material.
The output steadily improved, with the liquid getting redder and denser in Mana, and sometimes even more being produced for the same amount put in. The day was barely half done when Moxlin announced he was making potions that could be considered journeyman quality, surpassing what any reasonable potion house would ask of even a senior apprentice.
However, he realized this wouldn't be enough. There was a sense of heft and accomplishment that came with making that first potion and earning his first proficiency that was greatly hollowed out with each minor improvement. They slowly gained fullness with each one, but barely inching forward, and even keeping this pace, it would take months to fill up. And this was at the fast pace of fixing easy-to-find mistakes, but each improvement was taking longer to come up with and implement as he went on.
"Welcome to being a normal artisan like us," Moxlin snickered when he explained the problem. "What you call minor improvements, we consider real breakthroughs in our technique. That you can do so many early on just means that your weird mouth-using method has a lot of glaring errors that need to be smoothed over. It doesn't diminish the accomplishment of coming up with something like this from the beginning, but another proficiency jump likely needs something more than just capitalizing on the past victories."
Axl grunted. "Of course it would. Any suggestions?"
"To be honest, not really. I think offering too much of how I normally do things would only get you set on inherently limited strategies. It's also an issue of our bodies being so different, your elf mouth being so large and funny, but a big part of what you're doing."
He nodded, but felt there was something else. "I think maybe I will stick to these improvements for a bit, if only to consolidate the recipe. I feel I'd have a hard time improving anything big until it stopped feeling like such a rickety process in my mind."
Moxlin nodded reassuringly, but said nothing as she turned back to her own study.
Axl spent the rest of the day improving his process, this time forgoing sleep and simply working through the night, becoming more and more familiar with the process.
The morning of day five started with a quick nap that annoyingly turned into four full hours, Axl's mind refusing to rouse any earlier. Then he set out to try another way to make a large step forward in the process, eager to try out some of his ideas.
His plans included simple things like using a cover over the bowl to better condense the potion, to more far-out experiments like killing a creature and using its body as an alchemical furnace. All ended up being more complex alterations than he expected, in addition to taking longer than even his upper estimates, and ultimately ended in a worse system than what he already had.
The full day was nearly wasted, his internal Mana almost depleted, his earlier excitement completely soured. It wasn't just that things looked difficult, it's more that he had no idea what to even attempt, no inkling of a plan left that would work out in less than three days.
"How did you do the thing at the end of the battle with the scary wolf?" Moxlin asked after another long discussion on the problem. "It was like your body moved so much better than before for a moment. And your reaction time was matching too, so it wasn't just improving the physical Attributes."
Axl shrugged, ready to dismiss the suggestion as irrelevant. After all, she likely was referring to his use of [Mana Shroud] that earned him its third proficiency, which for sure increased his Intelligence and Wisdom Attributes in addition to his physical ones, but it wouldn't help him with a long alchemical cycle, much less come up with a new idea for it. He'd also tried incorporating both the Skills he could work into alchemy, but it simply made the process more complex without any real gain.
With a sigh, he decided to pull the trigger on talking about his Dao. Nox certainly knew he had one, having eavesdropped on his conversation with Olkan, but he still hoped to get through this without giving the sneaky void creature more information on the topic.
"I didn't tell you this," he started, "but I have a Dao, a Glimpse of Lightening. Do you know anything about using this in alchemy, or glyphistry in general?"
"Oh!" Moxlin perked up. "This might explain at least some of your cheating. To be honest, I don't know, I've heard all the usual stories on how powerful the Dao can be, but nobody in our hive has one, as far as I know. Maybe Nox herself?"
Axl nodded, in a way relieved that Moxlin's reaction wasn’t as overblown as he had feared.
"But I do know one single lightning spell, it’s a bit scary to use, but maybe it will help you with your problem?"
"Scary how? Is it like the risks with using fire?"
"It's hard to explain, but it feels like the world is judging you when you use lightning, like you're getting something hidden angrier and angrier. Mommy warned us all that if we do anything with lightning, we should do it far from any communal area."
"Well, if I don't take a risk at this point, I'm going to fail the quest."
Moxlin nodded seriously and started teaching him the spell. It was unlike any other that he taught her, based on entirely different glyphs than the 256 he learned, and he guessed not from the expanded set either, given how strange they looked.
Still, he tentatively drew the two lines of eight glyphs opposing each other, barely a trickle of internal Mana used for the process, and an arc of electricity surged between them, a neat sheet of swarming electric bolts.
He'd seen this kind of stuff often back in Ost, the Mana concentrators sometimes flickering with arches of static, the various circuit boards he used for Mana engineering flashing with a misplaced solder, even the massive lightning strikes that rose from the ground when a new vein of lunar fulger was revealed, cutting into the depth of space above in a surge of Mana. Each time there was a touch of the fantastic, like watching a manifestation of power and potential made real, and the sense was even stronger now.
A small pressure of disapproval vaguely filled the air, but it was easily overwhelmed by how the bolts resonated with him, felt like something inherently true in a way he couldn't properly identify.
His distress at possibly failing the quest melted away, having found a path forward. He would attempt to use lightning in his alchemy instead of fire, a way to bring in the unfettered potential of the ancient electrics into his new craft.