After a night spent scrubbing the stone slabs with quicklime and rinsing the massive vats with ice-cold water pumped straight from the river, Adrian had achieved the improbable: carving out a viable workspace in the middle of an industrial charnel house.
It wasn’t sterile—the stone joints still seeped dubious moisture—but it was clean. The stench of ammonia and rancid fat hadn’t vanished; it had merely been pushed back by the aggressive vapors of alcohol and black soap. An olfactory ceasefire, not a victory.
He’d slept four hours, curled on a dry pallet laid directly over the stone workbench. It was enough. The adrenaline of ownership—owning his own roof, his own tools—replaced caffeine.
He stood at the center of his makeshift lab. Pale morning light filtered through the rusted bars of the high windows, slicing the space into ribbons of dancing dust.
Before him, on the granite slab, his mismatched equipment stood in precise rows. He needed to solve a critical thermal logistics problem: taming the heat output of the cracked Hearthstone.
Adrian carefully placed a dry wood chip on the tripod, thirty centimeters above the fissured Hearthstone. The moment it made contact, the wood emitted a sharp crackle before combusting in less than a breath—reduced to smoldering embers before even hitting the ground. Carbonized fibers crumbled into a rain of gray ash.
[ANALYSIS: SURFACE TEMPERATURE >1650°F (900°C). IMMEDIATE DANGER TO ORGANIC TISSUE.]
Next, he tried an old rusted nail on a flat stone. The metal glowed red almost instantly, then liquefied into a thread of incandescent steel that flowed like overheated honey, carving a smoking furrow into the limestone.
"Not a heater... A makeshift industrial blowtorch."
He adjusted his protective goggles, the tinted lenses dampening the insidious glare of invisible thermal radiation. His hands—sheathed in stiff leather gloves—maneuvered the cast-iron grate with bomb-disposal precision. The first attempt was too low—the metal began glowing cherry-red in under ten seconds. He raised the tripod one notch.
This time, the heat dispersed in a perfect circle, transforming the metal surface into a homogeneous hotplate. A heat haze shimmered above the grate, but without localized melting points.
[SYSTEM: THERMAL DISSIPATION OPTIMIZED AT 87%. SAFE USAGE POSSIBLE.]
Adrian placed a vial of water on the now-stabilized grate. Bubbles formed after thirty steady seconds—finally, a controllable heat source capable of heating without reducing everything to dust.
Beside the workbench, he’d stacked his flea-market acquisitions from the day before: secondhand boiled-leather greaves (worn at the knees but intact) and a pair of thick pigskin work gloves. Low-grade, stiff and uncomfortable, but all his meager purse could afford for now.
He retrieved three items from his stockpile and lined them up like forensic evidence:
- A vial of "Blue Base" (undiluted Sylva Root extract).
- The two adrenal glands from the Thicket Wolf (salvaged from the forest after the ambush that nearly cost him his arm).
- Purified venom from the Crystalweaver Spider.
—IRIS, initiate Fundamental Research Mode. Data overlay.
[ANALYTIC MODE: ENGAGED] [SUBJECT: ETHERIC METABOLISM]
Adrian closed his fingers around the Wolfhound’s gland with surgical care, gripping it with the wooden clamp he’d painstakingly carved from an oak branch. The crude wood seams had been sanded for hours to prevent splinters, each groove meticulously calculated for perfect ergonomics.
To the butchers of the Grey Market, this slimy lump was offal for carrion birds. To a 21st-century biologist, it was a marvel of hormonal engineering—a concentrate of adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol. But Adrian, the foreign observer in this world governed by Ether’s obscure laws, saw beyond terrestrial biochemistry.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
He remembered the Thicket Wolf in the Whispering Forest, its musky stench flooding his nostrils. The Wolfhound had pounced with impossible speed, its distended jaw defying inertia. The muscle should have torn under that acceleration... were it not for the Ether.
—Cross-referenced 3D analysis. Full mana-tissue anchor point mapping.
Adrian’s pupils dilated mechanically as IRIS projected a luminous mesh across his retinas, dissecting the organ into layered cross-sections. Crimson filaments coiled through the glandular structure, converging on cell nuclei.
[ANALYSIS: PEAK ETHERIC DENSITY DETECTED IN MITOCHONDRIAL CRESTA. INDEX 0.87]
[HYPOTHESIS: ETHER REPLACES ATP AS PRIMARY ENERGY VECTOR]
A nervous tic tugged at Adrian’s right eyelid. The mitochondria—those tiny cellular power plants—were literally bathing in Ether here. Unlike terrestrial biochemistry where ATP required constant resynthesis, these creatures had access to a near-limitless fuel pumped straight from the environment.
His fingers trembled slightly as he turned the gland. Its outer membrane glistened with residual Ether-sweat, that bluish substance evaporating as he watched. His mind instantly formulated the equation: more available fuel = more exploitable power = extreme muscular overperformance.
But with a terrifying trade-off: without Earth’s biological fatigue safeguards, nothing prevented muscles from shredding under acceleration. Unless...
—IRIS, zoom sector G-7. Show me interfascicular linkages.
The network that appeared made him pale. Etheric filaments coiled around each muscle fiber like a nanoscopic exoskeleton, visibly capable of instantaneously rigidifying tissue under g-forces. More than a lubricant—it was an integrated bracing system, a molecular harness preventing disintegration under acceleration.
Adrian’s mouth went dry. This single gland might hold the key to shattering his Gradeless status.
This was why Adrian, with his impervious "Grade 0", was so slow. He lacked access to this fuel. He was a combustion engine in a world of nuclear reactors.
The problem, he realized, was volatility. The energy dissipated the moment flesh died.
—Needs a cage, he murmured.
Magic was the gas, matter would be the container. He wasn’t inventing a new branch of science out of vanity, but necessity. He’d use physical chemistry to trap Ether and force it into his system—molecular shackles if necessary.
He got to work.
Experiment 1: "Quicksilver"
He didn’t crush the gland. He made a precise incision with his improvised scalpel, exposing internal tissues without rupturing cell membranes.
He poured a base layer of pure "Blue Base" into his glass flask. Sylva Root was a potent regenerative agent. It would buffer his human heart against overload.
He placed the flask on his modified hotplate.
—IRIS, gentle heat. Target: 150°F. Don’t cook the proteins—just activate the catalyst.
He meticulously adjusted the flask’s height over the hotplate, triple-checking alignment. At exactly 150°F (65.5°C per mercury thermometer), the water simmered without boiling. The blueish liquid’s surface remained mirror-smooth, emitting only faint vapor tendrils that dissipated in the lab’s cold air.
Yet when Adrian’s scalpel dropped the incised adrenal gland into the solvent, it was like tossing sodium into water. The liquid convulsed violently, forming thermodynamic-defying whirlpools. Not from heat—this was an Etheric reaction. Silver bubbles—each containing micro-explosions of compressed mana—spiraled upward before bursting silently, releasing blue sparks that briefly streaked the surface.
Under Adrian’s analytic gaze enhanced by IRIS’ retinal scanner, the molecular process unveiled itself. Stress hormones, torn from tissues by the regenerative solution, clung to Sylva Root’s Ether particles like magnets to a field. The mixture’s hue phased: deep indigo → electric violet → finally that diaphanous ruby red pulsing with contained energy, as alive as arterial blood under a microscope.
[STABLE REACTION. INTEGRATION RATE: 68.2% ±0.3]
The acrid stench of synthesized adrenaline stung his nostrils. No time to savor this. With precise movements, he seized the flask with a copper clamp wrapped in damp cloth and plunged it into the pre-prepared ice bath. The thermal shock (-80°C in under a second) froze the reaction at peak efficiency, crystallizing the hormone-mana alliance into stable molecular matrix.
Transferring the precious liquid into two borosilicate vials was surgical precision. Each droplet captured lantern light, casting ruby reflections on stone walls. When Adrian sealed the containers with beeswax, the contents seemed almost sentient—those silver swirls dancing like an intelligent swarm.
[FINAL ANALYSIS: NEURO-MOTOR STIMULANT GRADE 1.1. DURATION: 44.7 SECONDS (±1.2). TOXICITY: 0.8%—WITHIN BIOLOGICAL PARAMETERS.]
A rare smile split Adrian’s lips. Not only had he avoided creating a neurotoxin, this stimulant exceeded his initial calculations. The molecular "cage" held: each Ether particle was now chained to an organic molecule, forming a perfectly bioavailable energy reserve.
He rotated a vial between his fingers, watching how light fractured into blood-colored shards through the viscous liquid.
—Quicksilver, he murmured, naming his creation after that mythical substance which, in his old world, symbolized both remedy and poison.
[SYSTEM NOTIFICATION: LAB REPORT FILED]
Observation:
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