"The Steam Honey Workshop Management Diary, Rites of the Chaos God, and Violette's letters contain quite a few leads worth looking into," Water Clone said, pausing. "As for the other two, we couldn't make much sense of them, but they might be useful to you."
This time, Water Clone had sorted the manuscripts into three categories: useful, useless, and possibly useful to Angel.
Naturally, Angel was most curious about the last category.
What sort of manuscript could be useful to him when Water Clone couldn't understand it?
Curious, he turned to the two manuscripts.
The Path of Cold Refining and Dream Energy.
Neither was long. The first ran to a little over ten pages, while the second had only three. Angel finished them quickly.
After reading them, he understood why Water Clone had said they might be useful to him.
The Path of Cold Refining was an alchemical manuscript.
Its central subject was the Cold Refining Technique.
Ordinarily, alchemy relied on heat: fire melted materials, and thought shaped them. The Cold Refining Technique reversed that process, using ice to bind materials and stillness to pursue perfection.
Violette had not invented the Cold Refining Technique. Angel had learned about it long ago, and the alchemy books he had brought back from Abyss City in the Nightmare Realm even included a detailed explanation.
But Angel's alchemy now focused primarily on enchantment, so he rarely touched such an obscure branch of the craft.
Back to the manuscript.
The Path of Cold Refining did not explain the principles of cold refining. It merely recorded some of Violette's personal alchemical experience, much of it in symbols she had clearly invented for her own use.
These invented symbols were incomprehensible to outsiders, but to their creator, they were keys to sealed memories.
When Angel was young,