The Dark Lord of Crafting

“Alright Big Bird,” I said, “how do we start?”

Malphas clicked his beak at the appellation but didn’t otherwise complain. After gathering resources from the farm and around Mount Doom, we were back in the forge and I was ready to begin my journey as a junior alchemist.

“You must prepare a base elixir,” Malphas blinked rapidly, his beak turning this way and that as he examined the brewing stand. “It is the primal essence from which all true potions arise.”

“Okay, so what are the ingredients?” I gestured at a table full of the material coins, foodstuffs, and odds and ends we had collected.

“Fill the flasks with water, and add a powder of Bedlam Wart.”

The base elixir sounded a lot like an Awkward Potion from Maincraft. They did nothing on their own, but they were the first step to brewing the good stuff. The components were even the same. In the game, Nether Wart was all you needed to make an Awkward Potion, and bottles of water, of course.

We had more bottles than I would ever need. They could be crafted from three glass coins, and Kevin had dedicated a small section of the sanguinum factory to a furnace that converted sand into glass. I’d already prepped dozens, filling them from my bottomless thermos.

The Bedlam wart presented a bottleneck for brewing, as there hadn’t been a ready supply of the stuff at Mount Doom, but I still had the samples I’d harvested on general principle while I was stumbling around the swamp in Bedlam. If we ran out, I could simply ride outside and harvest more from the fungus growing around the mountain. The giant mushrooms yielded Bedlam wart stalks and caps, which could be converted to powder at the crafting table.

I poured water into the appropriate channel of the brewing stand, which traveled through the tubing into the flasks. Little bubbles appeared in the flasks as the liquid began to heat.

“They will boil off in under an hour if you leave them there,” Malphas said. “Best to add the ingredients immediately.”

I poured the mushroom powder into a funnel attached to the flasks via yet more tubing, and the water swirled and darkened.

“How long does it take?” I asked.

“For the former Dark Lord? The transfusion was nearly instantaneous.”

The powder continued to swirl and dissolve for several more minutes, at the end of which, the System gave me a notification ding.

Achievement: Crafty (7)

You have successfully brewed your first potion. This is only the first step on the road to becoming a true alchemist. Potion recipes will now be included in the crafting log of your journal.

New skill unlocked: [Alchemize]

Skills

Miner: 30

Progress to next rank: 0%

Artisan: 11

Progress to next rank: 22%

Tamer: 7

Progress to next rank: 17%

Alchemize: 1

Progress to next rank: 20%

I dismissed the screen. The skills were largely a measure of how fast I could work, but higher ranks also unlocked new use cases for my System. Miner had given me access to better materials as it rose, and a higher rank in Artisan was required for crafting some items, the mechanical stuff, and Kevin’s keys. The potions available to me at rank one were likely to be limited.

“Quickly,” Malphas said. “The next ingredient for a healing potion is a glistering melon.”

The phrase “glistering melon” was nonsense straight out of the computer game. We’d gotten a few watermelons from the farm, and I’d brought it over to the worktable to combine it with gold.

The transformation had been stunning. Its rind became something like the outside of a Faberge egg, a metallic crust studded with tiny, glistening gems. The fruit within looked like it was made of crystal, but still somehow moist and appetizing. I crushed it with a hammer and took the resulting pulp over to the brewing stand.

After the pulp worked its way through the tubes, the liquid in all three flasks began to thicken.

Once again, it looked like it was going to take a while.

“I want to do an invisibility potion,” I said. “What do I need?”

“It requires great skill,” Malphas said, “you must first brew a Darkvision Potion, which is then transmuted by the addition of an infusion of spider eyes.”

“Like, actual spiders?” The idea of running around Mount Doom, capturing spiders, and then painstakingly removing their eyes was not a pleasant one.”

Malphas gave me a quizzical look as if he was trying to decide if I was joking. “I refer to the eyes of a Vorokai, a lesser entity which you mortals often refer to as a spider.”

“Uck.” I’d never encountered a spider mob, which was something I’d been very grateful for in my early days on Plana. Spiders were a constant nuisance in Maincraft, made all the worse by their habit of scaling walls and fences to get to you. But if I’d never seen one, it meant that Vorokai were rare, and probably more dangerous than a troll.

“Do you think there are any of those around here? The other demons didn’t claim any when we were putting together the army.”

“Orobas will know,” Malphas shrugged. “They are unruly creatures, not well suited to mass conflicts, as they require near constant direction.”

So there could be spider monsters tucked away in the pens, awaiting a special occasion. I wasn’t sure if I was happy about that or not. The liquid in the flasks settled down into something that looked like tomato soup, enough to fill three bottles.

“How do I know if it worked?” I asked, holding one bottle up to the light. It looked very much like I would have imagined a healing potion was supposed to, but for all I knew, it was pure poison.

Malphas tapped the glass with a talon. “A failure would be obvious. The result would be dull, dun, and stink of sulfur.”

“Let’s test that out,” I said. The Darkvision Potion required a golden carrot, which I crafted and processed in the same fashion as the melon, before hurrying up to wait. We needed more base elixir, which took about five minutes to brew before the carrot paste could be added to the mixture. It took even longer than the healing potions, and the result was exactly as he had described, a smelly mess. Smoke was rising from the brewing stand before it was finished, and I poured the aborted potions out over the edge of the cliff.

“You have insufficient skill,” Malphas said, which translated to my Alchemize ability not being high enough for me to make anything more interesting than the healing potions and the base elixir. Rather than waste my limited supply of Bedlam wart powder on more failed attempts, I used everything I had to fill bottle after bottle with the base. It took a full hour, most of which I spent grilling Malphas about the other potions and their components.

At the end of the hour, Alchemize was up to level five. There was no more wart powder for me to use to grind the ability any further, so I tried the Darkvision recipe again. Ten minutes and one golden carrot later, I was rewarded with three bottles full of dark purple liquid that reminded me of nothing so much as grape soda. Darkvision wasn’t any use for me, Beleth had already given me that, but it was one step closer to invisibility. There were almost forty bottles of base elixir left and plenty of other ingredients.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s try everything that only requires one step above the base.”

Most of the other potions required monster parts as an ingredient. Troll blood would give me a Potion of Might, Voidman blood would give me a Potion of Leaping, and phantom membrane would give me a Potion of Feather-Fall. My personal favorite recipe, however, was for the Potion of Speed, which only required sugar. Ever since maxing out my Miner skill, I’d been able to harvest blood as well as skin and meat and bone, there just hadn’t been a use for any of it until now.

By the time we’d made all four, my Alchemize ability was up to level seven.

“Let’s see if we can find a spider,” I said.

We visited Bojack together. The horse demon was in his usual spot, keeping watch over Kevin. The former Dark Lord napped in his cell, while Bojack made notes in a spooky-looking journal. At some point, he’d brought a desk and a chair up to the passage that opened onto the prison cube so he could continue his vigil more comfortably.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Bojack snapped the book closed before I could see what he’d been working on. “It is none of your concern.” He said. “How is your progress?”

That was a more defensive response than I’d expected, but I wasn’t going to push the issue. The cover of the book was blank leather, and his hands were stained with ink. If my head demon was plotting against me, then there wasn’t much I could do about it. If he just had a hobby, then good for him, he must have been bored having a prisoner he didn’t get to torture every day.

“Making progress,” I said, “but we need a spider. Uh, vorokai. Do we have any in the menagerie?”

Bojack covered the book with one of his hands, making me all the more curious about what he had been doing. “There are three, each in a separate cage in the stables. The attendants will know where they are. They have to feed them.”

“Thanks,” I said, “you can go back to your memoirs, or whatever.”

He snorted at me, and Malphas and I headed down the mountain. The stables were a massive underground structure supported by thick columns of black stone running in twin rows down into the darkness of the cavern. Torches along the walls illuminated glyphs and carvings that gave off Lovecraftian vibes, and the sides of the cavern were sectioned off into pens for the monsters. It was even more crowded than on my first visit now that Gaap had returned with the army and we’d added the surviving mobs from Malphas’s force out of Nargul.

There was a team of human grooms that helped keep the place in order. Monsters didn’t require as much food as their size or their numbers would suggest, but they still had to be fed, or they would start eating each other.

Much of the product generated by the farms of Mount Doom went to satiating the beasts housed below it, most of which were omnivorous. If not for them, we could have fed half a nation.

I called over one of the workers, who looked very nervous to be in the presence of both a demon and a dark lord. He was young, and dressed in protective leather gear similar to the messenger outfits of wyvern riders.

“How may I be of service, my lord?” He sketched a bow.

“I need to see the vorokai,” I said.

His face paled, and he gulped. “As you wish.”

It was a long walk to the end of the cavern, the hoots and moans of the mobs following us as we passed. The vorokai were housed in three large cells cut out of the back wall, closed off by steel bars as thick as my arm. It reminded me of the setup I’d used to farm shamblers in my original shelter.

The spiders weren’t exactly spiders. They struck me as a kind of hairless tarantula, only they were as tall as a horse, and with the inclusion of their long legs, they were larger than even the biggest troll or chimera. As soon as we approached, one of them dashed itself against the bars of the cage. It glared at me with white, faintly radiant eyes that were arranged around its head in a way that suggested it had a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision. Instead of a carapace, it had thick, leathery skin similar to the trolls, with deeply striated musculature visible beneath. As if that wasn’t enough, it also had a tail like that of a scorpion.

The stinger bobbed and swayed, its bulbous end too thick to pass through the bars.

Malphas raised one hand and spoke a few words in the demonic tongue. In response, the vorokai hissed like a teakettle and backed up.

“How else may I be of service?” the worker asked in a small voice.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “you can go. You’re going to have one less of these things to look after in a minute.”

He bowed and made a hasty exit.

The cage didn’t require a key. There was a lever built into the stone beside to unlock the door.

“When I go in there,” I told Malphas, “I want you to shut the gate behind me and let the monster do what it wants.”

“That is unwise,” the demon said. “Even the former lord was wary of these entities.”

I lifted my visor and started downing potions. Swiftness tasted like an energy drink, while the Potion of Might was closer to a protein shake. Leaping didn’t taste like anything in particular, maybe a little minty.

“Push it back,” I said. “I want to test these out.”

A quick check of my status screen showed the active effects.

Level: 27

Progress to next level: 7%

Attributes:

Might: D

Speed: D-

Presence: F+

It didn't look like a huge difference, about half a letter grade for Might and Speed. A set of timers had appeared in the bottom right corner of my vision, opposite where the heart bar showed up, counting down a ten-minute window. It was kind of distracting.

The vorokai scuttled to the back of the cell. It had an uneven number of legs, and the way it moved was even more erratic and unnerving than you would expect a giant spider to be. When I unlocked the gate, it strained, clearly wanting to lunge, but Malphas held it in place. Lowering my visor once more, I stepped inside with the monster and drew Caliburn. The demon shut the gate behind me.

The vorokai came at me like a scuttling tank, threatening to overrun me and get me under its fangs. I jumped to one side, flying a full twenty feet to slam into the stone wall. My armor absorbed the impact, and I managed to land on my feet. The combination of a boosted Might and the Leaping potion was more effective than I’d anticipated. The spider spun, its tail jabbing forward, and I hopped out of the way. I definitely felt faster.

My blood was pumping, and my head was light. The monster’s movements seemed slow to me, awkward, and when it struck again, I swiped at the incoming tail with my sword. The xanthium blade bit deep, leaving its stinger hanging by a stripe of leathery skin, and the vorokai hissed furiously. The sound made the hair on my arms stand on end. As sure as I was of my armor’s capacity to absorb damage, this thing was still scary. There is something primordial about the fear of spiders, and the vorokai was an absolute nightmare. Though I might have had a soft spot for monsters in general, this one could go.

It lunged again, and I tried to hop onto its back, but the leap carried me over and behind the mob. As it spun, I severed one of its legs, splashing myself with black blood that steamed and sputtered like acid. It reared up, an intimidating post as its broad body took up my entire vision, but not a smart move. I stepped in and jammed my sword into its exposed underbelly, and the monster spasmed. It came down on top of me, but I could stand under its weight. As its fangs latched onto my armor, I proceeded to ruin its guts with my sword.

The spider continued to fight, even as blood and gore poured out from the wounds expanding in its stomach. Its struggling threw me off balance, and I stumbled, losing my sword inside of it. The sound of its fangs scraping the orichalcum filled my ears, and I grabbed it by its bulbous head to throw it off of me. As it fell onto its side, I felt exhilarated, impossibly strong, unbeatable. It was probably a side effect of the potions, as I had taken the magical equivalent of a dose of PCP, but being able to go toe to toe with a monster like this was intoxicating in its own right.

As its limbs flailed, I planted my boot on its skull and heard a crunch. My heart bar told me it had managed to do a little damage, but nothing to worry about.

“The eyes!” Malphas croaked from outside the cell. “Don’t destroy its eyes!”

It rose again, and I summoned Kevin’s sword. The cell, having been designed to hold a mob this size, offered space for a swing. The buster sword split its skull with enough force to travel through and embed its tip in the floor. The vorokai was finished, its legs splaying out, and its blood gathering in bubbling pools that ate away at the stone.

The potions worked.