While Fluid Alchemy used recipes just like Stable Alchemy, the recipes in Fluid Alchemy were generally open to interpretation. They did sometimes call for specific ingredients, but most often they simply called for an item with a particular symbolic unit in its mosaic. With enough dedicated study (or wild abandon), any item could be used as an ingredient in just about any synthesis.
(Although unsurprisingly, this was correlated with a much higher incidence of kabooms.)
Because of this mutability, many different substitutions were possible with even the simplest recipe, and every change had the potential to produce different effects which might then lead to the manifestation of new traits. With care and precision, it was also possible to isolate and transfer traits from one item to another, even down a long chain of transmutation, and through several different syntheses. Traits could also be refined, becoming more potent, or modified, and there was also the possibility that unusual combinations of traits might trigger interactions that were not unlike those of the symbolic units, producing wholly unique outcomes.
And unlike Stable Alchemy, which generally only involved transmutation in the final step, Fluid Alchemy involved active transmutation throughout the synthesis process. Ingredients were either partially or wholly transmuted into different things, altering their innate nature and symbolic units multiple times in a single synthesis. Each ingredient moved through many transitory states before finally being locked down into the desired outcome.
But in a strictly practical sense, Fluid Alchemy had so many moving parts that there were significant opportunities for failure. Still, even when taking into account all of the challenges it presented, Demi found Fluid Alchemy fascinating.
If a student dedicated themselves to understanding how its rules worked, then the possibilities for what could be synthesized were essentially limitless.
It gave her a tingling feeling just thinking about it.
But she did realize that infinite possibilities were not necessarily practical, at least not in every circumstance. For most people, in the predictable experience of everyday life, the solutions of Stable Alchemy would certainly suffice.
After all, a significant portion of the food supply was processed by means of alchemy, to say nothing of all of the other common medicines and ordinary tools that were required in quantity each and every day.
It would be a problem if alchemy ateliers across the globe were constantly exploding, or if the production of everyday items required so much skill that the supply could not keep up with the demand.
“But that just means you have to use the right tool for the right job!” Demi said aloud with a decisive nod.
Of course, the Council of Demi agreed with her.
For this reason, and others besides, high alchemists were considered somewhat peculiar by the world at large. They weren’t disliked, but the consensus was that they were bound to act and think in eccentric ways. The general public had no idea how Fluid Alchemy worked. For them, it truly was like magic.
Only not really, because magic seemed to be a thing that most people more readily understood.
It was all a little strange for Demi, but perhaps that was to be expected, since she had fifteen pages of skills that she did not yet understand.
Because both types of alchemy required so much time and study, people generally devoted themselves to one or the other, lest they fail to learn anything of substance from either. There was no rule that a person couldn’t learn both; it was just ridiculously difficult.
(Which just made Demi even more determined.)
And of course, despite all of the potential difficulties, the sort of alchemy that Demi set her heart upon mastering first was Fluid Alchemy.
(If she was going to carry on living in a magical world, then she felt obligated to pursue the best of what was on offer, regardless of how difficult it might be. Besides, it was alchemy. Of course she was going to study the most interesting kind of alchemy first. And, she rationalized, Stable Alchemy had been practiced for ages. Tata had been sick since before Tina was born. If there was a solution to be found in Stable Alchemy, then surely the dryads would have found it already.)
And so, she happily buried herself in piles of books about Fluid Alchemy.
Besides the more ordinary Fluid Alchemy theory and beginner recipe books that Demi had expected to find in the lending library, there were also many journals and treatises purportedly written by the Shadowstep Alchemist himself.
—And once Demi began reading them, they did have a very particular style.
These were definitely all written by the same person, Demi decided almost immediately. That was a good enough sign to her that they were authentic.
Besides, why would a goddess, and one that was clearly a fan of the man in question at that, deign to have pseudepigrapha or even forgeries in her collection?
The Shadowstep Alchemist’s journals, letters, and personal notes soon rocketed up Demi’s leisure reading list, coming second only to the light novels about him, and sometimes vying even with them. The one thing that kept the light novels consistently at the top of the list was that often the most interesting bits of the Shadowstep Alchemist’s journals and letters were censored. Well, they were personal documents after all. It was reasonable that they had been censored for privacy reasons.
And The Shadowstep Alchemist light novel series was always there when Demi needed it. The volumes in the library now counted all the way up to fifteen, although Demi still coveted the ones she did not yet have.
It was more encouragement to work harder.
Demi appreciated their style, aesthetic, and substance.
There was a moment in the first volume, when, following the prophecy that had been given at his birth, the protagonist Grey Thornwood (who was still a ten-year-old boy) glimpsed a vision of an older version of himself: a middle-aged man with dark hair streaked with white, handsome due to his half-elven heritage, but with a face marred by pain and loss. It had made her heart skip then, and it still made her heart skip now when she thought about it (and was probably a large part of why she was still carrying volume 1 around with her in her pocket, along with that napkin she had accidentally stolen from Hollyhope’s table).
This glimpse of the man that the boy would become was also one reason that Demi was so focused on getting her hands on later volumes of the series!
(She was hopelessly consistent in her taste and entirely unapologetic with regard to it.)
After all, even though the novel series followed the Shadowstep Alchemist from his early youth, even as a child he gave the general impression that he was an old man. He was serious, reticent, diligent, and wary of others. Although he was slow to open up to other people, once he had, he was thoughtful and sensitive. He felt his responsibilities keenly, and did not break his word once it had been given. Although he appeared cold, he had a passionate heart, and he loved books, poetry, and the natural beauty of the out-of-doors. He was unimpeachably loyal, intelligent, pragmatic, and even as a boy, incredibly well-read.
He was also competent, and more than capable of disposing of his enemies.
Or to put it more succinctly: He was her type.
Most particularly when considering the glimpse of his future self: He was her type.
She was incredibly weak versus handsome old men, especially those with difficult pasts and wounded hearts.
It was entirely because of her experience with the novels that Demi came to think of the Shadowstep Alchemist as “the handsome old man” in her own mind. It even bled over into her historical research, her readings on local politics, and of course, into her reading of the journals and notes of the man himself.
She just couldn’t help herself. He didn’t really seem like a “Grey Thornwood” after all, no matter how nice a name that was. He was instead “the handsome old man.”
No matter how much difficulty Demi was having with a recipe or new technique, with research, with her duties as the president of the Rosebrook Canal Authority, or even her farmwork, if she just took a break and immersed herself in the dramatic world of The Shadowstep Alchemist, she could energize herself, and then approach the challenges of her life with new eyes.
Hollyhope was right, Demi thought, gently touching the book in her pocket. You really have been here the whole time, whenever I needed someone to lean on.