Chapter 2241 Late Night Alchemy Lessons
--- Lily ---
Lily was sitting on a chair made of shadows and watching Appoline work. With ingredients aplenty, and Lily no longer tired, she was keen to continue her lessons. Kat was watching the door and just running through her katas, which was... nice to watch but not with an audience behind the door. Best not to tempt anyone else to go watch her girlfriend move through exciting motions. Even if they were meant to be proper martial arts.
"So... how many of these plants can be used for healing potions?" asked Lily.
"Basically all of them," answered Appoline.
"Hmmm... how do you decide which ones to use then?" asked Lily.
Appoline nodded, "A good question. It’s... less relevant for healing potions but it does still come up somewhat. The idea, is that when you make the core you want to... tune it to the correct idea. The core of the potion should embody what you want the potion to do. The more esoteric an idea, the harder it is to tune.
"The best way to do this is to start with an ingredient that’s already most of the way there. So you pick a plant that’s particularly good at natural healing. Either of itself, or one with some sort of mechanism to heal others. For healing, you can also work with ’growth’ and ensure that it’s direct into ’regrowth’ and then ’healing’ which are all similar concepts that tweaking them isn’t hard.
"A potion recipe is about working out how all of the essences connect. What cancels out what, while merging other things together to nudge it all into the correct idea. Water and fire essence can turn into steam... or you can use them to cancel each other out. Of course technically you can trim away the excess, but that’s a slightly more advanced technique. Ensuring you remove just what you don’t need is hard and you end up with a lot of really weak potions if you can’t do it properly.
"This is why you have different shapes for the collected essence. Let’s say that... you have a proper healing plant as a base, and then you have a second that’s good at growing rapidly. You might turn that into a net so that the growth ’surrounds’ the healing to encourage it to spread out. But then you may need to add a more ’energizing’ plant to ensure the regrowth doesn’t rob you if your fat stores in the healing process,"
"Minor tangent," Lily asked after Appoline paused. "Why wouldn’t you use failed healing potions as a weight loss agent?"
"You can do that... but it tends to be rather uneven. You also need an injury to heal, and the sort of people that like to buy beautifying potions tend to not get injured all that much. Some of them are willing to suffer for their beauty... but most of them are not quite so literal about it. Routinely stabbing someone in the stomach to ensure they no longer have a bit of pudge is considered fairly extreme. Plus, you’d need to be careful not to have it scar so you couldn’t stab them too much, and if you’re not careful there’s still a chance that it’s uneven..." Appoline shook her head.
"My point is that it’s possible, but there are far too many downsides for a sane person to be happy with. If you were willing to go through such extreme persistent pain for days and weeks on end to ensure that it was done properly... just workout! It might take a bit longer but it will be cheaper than the healing potions and far more reliable," Appoline explained.
"Can you use them for workouts?" asked Lily.
Appoline glanced at Lily for a few seconds before answering. "You can... but not super well once you get to Rank 1. It tends to result in uneven muscle gains if it even works at all. Not all that worth it. Especially as it’s hard to properly exercise once you step into Rank 1 and recover faster. Once again, it’s not super worth it."
Lily nodded. "Alright, sorry for the tangent. Back to how you can make healing potions out of anything?"
"Not quite anything, but yes we can return to that," agreed Appoline. "As I was saying, the shapes help cancel out or merge the various effects. Ideally you want to make something far greater then the sum of its parts, but other times you just need to accept that you’re losing a lot in the process if you want something particularly powerful or niche.
"Notably, ingredients of the same type don’t tend to scale well. It’s purely additive, and you start to find that you end up with extra things that you can’t use. Like, let’s take thistle weed for example. It’s a hardy plant that can grow just about anywhere. Cracking open the thick spiky leaves reveals a gel like substance that can be used to help with small wounds and sunburn," Appoline began. *Sounds like Aloe vera.*
"The issue, is that the gel is also toxic to ingest and the whole thing is covered in spines that secret an extremely concentrated version of the gel that’s actually poisonous. Not deadly sure, but it increases skin irritation instead of easing it. If you just keep dumping thistle weed into a cauldron and breaking it down, what you end up with is, depending on the amount used, either a healing potion that heals you, but also makes the process exceptionally painful, or it simply becomes a poison if you ’fold’ things wrong into the core.
"It’s not strong of course, but it’s definitively NOT healing," explained Appoline. "What you actually want is something softer to help balance it out. That’s the sort of issue you get with overusing the same ingredient. Everything has multiple uses, and its by layering things together that we focus down onto JUST the part we want."
"Hmm... so it’s the differences that really make the potion work?" Lily mused.
Appoline nodded, "Yes. All of the greatest potions are made by taking a handful of powerful ingredients with a key feature, and complimentary secondary ones, that either combine into some other useful aspect of the potion or simply remove themselves from the mixture. Though, please do note that when I say ’removed’ you do still get some ’potency’ from it. The effects merely cancel each other out."
Lily nodded along. "Alright, and so even though you have a bunch of ingredients that CAN become healing potions, not all of them mix together ideally to create good stuff? Like, the skill here is making the best potions from the ingredients you have right?"
"Correct," agreed Appoline. "Some measure of skill ensures that less essence is lost so skill will always be a factor, but yes, that knowledge will also play a large role."
"I see... is it better to make a bunch of potions all at about the same power level, or do you focus on like... tiers of ingredients? Or what about making a bunch of rather good potions, and then accepting a few trash ones at the end with the leftovers?" asked Lily.
"Depends on who you’re asking for. Me personally, I do the best job I can with the ingredients I have, which means the answer changes. For a novice, you should either try to make the best potions you can, simply by picking the ingredients you think work together and then just dealing with what’s left. Personally, I essentially ’make’ several potions in my head. I try out all the combinations I can while making a potion or two with the ingredients I have the most of.
"I can work out exactly how many potions here I can make above an acceptable level of quality, and in this case the best way to make use of the ingredients is to go for that last example you gave. Though in this case, I likely won’t bother making those ’trash’ ingredients at all, simply saving them for another time," explained Appoline.
"Is that hard? It sounds hard..." asked Lily.
"Extremely," agreed Appoline. "You can’t simply pick a handful of ingredients, make the best potion, and then try to make more with the rest, slowing marking out which ingredients are going to be used when. That will give you acceptable quality potions and usually at least a few disappointing ones. What I do means that you need to pair every ingredient with ever other ingredient and think of all the possible combinations.
"Think of it a bit like a guessing a passcode. Though in this case, my experience lets me eliminate plenty of poor combinations and work out which ingredients are close to being interchangeable with each other. It’s quite difficult to do, and really not a skill that comes up often. Simply working out what’s common in your area, and then working those ingredients into your potion making will usually serve you better,"
Lily shrugged, "I tend to move a lot so not sure how well that will work for me."
Appoline shrugged right back, "Then you’ll need to get better at alchemy won’t you?"