"All right, all right. Is it ready?"
Baize stammered as he approached the iron barrel piled high with scrap. He couldn't bear to see precious ore treated like scrap metal and used as experimental material.
The discarded ore piled in the clearing had nearly formed a small hill. Kas, who knew nothing about the secrets of alchemy, had no sense of resource conservation at all. Without even clearing the residue from the heater, he tossed in more ore.
Some precious, rare ores had their structure and properties ruined by preliminary smelting. Aside from metals like Adamantine, which could be remelted and processed, the gold spent on this experiment was already enough to bury a whole room.
"Still not quite..." Kas watched the heating barrel for a while. He should be able to run two more tests.
He didn't rush to have the Black Guard put in the few remaining minerals and heating crystals. Instead, he closed his eyes and thought for a while.
Maybe I need a little help... I mean, some mystical stuff, like drawing patterns around the iron barrel or something.
Kas knew virtually nothing about magic.
Of Fullmetal Alchemist, which he'd watched in his previous life, he only remembered three cute and charming villains who were always defeated by a blue-skinned cat who pulled out all kinds of strange gadgets.
But thinking meant letting his mind wander without restraint, allowing intuition to roam through the realm of the unconscious while waiting for inspiration to strike.
Kas stood with his arms crossed, deep in thought for a long time. His breathing was steady, making it seem as though he was about to fall asleep.
Baize felt a little disheartened. So even "spirits" could be charlatans?
"Forget it. I'll lead this raid south myself. I won't return until I find Radel. I swear on my late father's bones—"
Kas suddenly opened his eyes. He found a lump of Dark Ore in the scrap, smelted into something like dog shit, crouched beside the heating barrel, and began drawing the pattern that had appeared in his mind.
First, he drew a straight diagonal line beside the barrel, then drew two more in the same way, forming an equilateral triangle with perfectly equal sides.
He stepped back, then drew a bent line from each vertex of the triangle, connecting the ends to form a square enclosing it.
As he focused on drawing the pattern, inspiration throbbed wildly. Countless symbols poured into his subconscious, where reason processed them into rows of perfect, intricate, harmonious patterns.
[Project: Transmutation
Status: In progress
Inspiration: "1" is a measure, revealing the essence of all things being measurable; the undivided beginning, the origin of all numbers.
"2" is negation, the first even number, the outflow of the origin, the opposite of truth, the number of division.
"3" is harmony, the first odd number, the exaltation of contradiction, the number of resolution.
"4" is justice, the first square number, the four seasons of heaven, the four qualities of matter, the number of order.
"5" is union, the joining of odd and even, marriage and procreation, the number of life.
"6" is balance, a measure; negation multiplied by harmony equals a measure; negation plus harmony, the perfect number.
"7" is creation, God is the sum of harmony and justice, solitary and self-contained...]
[Project: Transmutation
Status: In progress
Inspiration: Blackening, whitening, reddening—death, purification, rebirth, the cycle of the Trinity.
The foundations of the world—earth, air, water, fire; calcination, dissolution, separation, union—purification, refinement, transformation, transmutation, order restored to wholeness.
Gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, lead, mercury—the Sun, the Moon, gold, fire, earth, wood, water; the seven metals combined are...]
[Project: Transmutation
Status: In progress
Inspiration: "3" is planning, "4" is justice; together they make "7," the authority of God, whose essence is the perfection of "10"...]
Kas suddenly snapped out of it again. He stared at the circle, which needed just one more arc to cover the square's vertices, and was overcome by a strange feeling.
His intuition told him not to let his inspiration keep spreading. He needed to stop it while the project was still in progress. This wasn't a path meant for him.
When Project: Transmutation was completed, everything might undergo a drastic change.
Reason's impulse whispered seductively in his mind: I know exactly what the last few inspirations will reveal. I only need a little more time. Maybe one more hallucinogenic mushroom, and everything will change.
That [Long Road Home] that had always hung in his heart would be completed, too.
Half-crouching, he bit his tongue, using physical pain to suppress the two restless impulses. Then he analyzed the [Project: Transmutation] that had temporarily halted in his mind.
No one would be bored enough to study the mystical theories of a mathematician from more than two thousand years ago—not even Pythagoras, one of the founders of mathematics.
Just like Sir Newton, people only cared about his three laws of motion. No one cared about the Alchemical Manuscripts he had written.
The inspiration in his mind came from the Pythagorean school's number theory. He'd learned all this from his talkative roommate, who lectured about things that should have earned him a pair of silver bracelets every day in their dorm.
So my inspiration has connected alchemy based on Four Causes Alchemy with Pythagoras's mathematical ontology of the cosmos, leading me to draw a strange pattern by intuition.
What will happen if I finish drawing this circle?
Kas thought for a while, then swiftly filled in the missing arc. But no matter how he looked at it, it was completely different from the pattern he'd drawn unconsciously just moments ago...
Ugly, jarring, utterly lacking in beauty—like a lump of dog shit stuck onto perfection.
"Light it."
The iron barrel heated up rapidly and burned as fiercely as before, melting the ore into molten iron...
This time, though, Kas felt connected to the minerals inside the barrel. He had a strange sensation, as if his body were burning. He could precisely make the flames purify the impurities in his body.
Remove the useless impurities...
Hardness, toughness, wear resistance... The flames were purifying this precious ore. Following the inspiration he'd gained from Four Causes Alchemy, Kas found the magical carrying capacity he needed.
Then came the refinement...
He took the Black Guard's poker and opened the barrel's lid. A wave of heat swept out through the narrow opening and over his body, turning his skin red.
He tossed in a steel ingot with no magical carrying capacity and covered the barrel again, trying to imbue the steel ingot, as it melted, with magical carrying capacity.
But the results were poor. Just having the thought made it feel as though his brain was about to grow another brain. Countless steel needles and daggers stabbed into his scalp.
I can't turn a steel ingot with no magical carrying capacity into Radel, but I can extract the magical carrying capacity from ore and grant the steel ingot an effect comparable to Radel.
With that thought, he poured the "Radel" substance he'd extracted into the molten steel ingot, gradually squeezing out and separating the excess impurities.
As the fire neared its end, Kas leaned on his knees, his face pale. His inspiration had run out...
Damn it, I should just be a Barbarian warrior.
The feeling of having his brain drained was like spending a whole week pulling all-nighters at an internet cafe, then going out every morning to find a beautiful woman to relieve the exhaustion. He walked numbly through the cold winter wind, so tired he could drop straight into his bowl of noodles.
In the pitch-black night, the severely overworked iron barrel turned into a little sun where it stood, softening into a lump like a crushed soda can.
Baize swallowed hard, then cautiously pried open the lid, which had melted into a single lump. Inside, he saw a strip of silvery-white metal about as thick as his little finger.
The metal strip was three centimeters long and 1.85 centimeters wide. The shaman didn't know why.
He felt that this unremarkable metal strip was more beautiful than the copper body of the first woman he'd ever seen, more moving than the first dagger he'd forged. It surpassed every physical desire he'd ever known.
In that instant, a thought flashed like lightning from his spine into his brain. The memories etched into his mind melted slowly in his frontal lobe, like a frozen hailstone.
Baize understood. It was "beauty," the supreme good he had pursued.
He took the little-finger-thick strip of silvery-white metal from the barrel. His expression shifted from confusion to astonishment, then to wild joy, and finally he fell to his knees in tears. Three seconds felt like an entire lifetime.
He wanted to share this joy with the person most responsible for it, only to find Kas, strong as an ox, leaning on his knees and panting violently.
"Kas, Kas... Are you all right?"
"Get me some Lip-Blue Berry. Then we'll... do it again. Put all the remaining ore in."
Before you continue