The Runic Alchemist

It still took Damian another two months to fully grasp the chaos spell he had been shown. Learning from his previous mistakes, he limited the practical application to times when he was alone—either in his personal lab late at night or in the privacy of his room.

The chaos spell was nameless, so Damian referred to it as "The Eroding Spell" due to its ability to erode any inanimate object it targeted. He was cautious, refraining from using it for anything other than understanding its features and fully breaking it down. To his relief, the spell didn't affect living beings or any tool or weapon imbued with mana. It seemed the spell's eroding function was inherently incompatible with anything possessing a significant amount of mana.

What irony that the spell itself used a shit ton of mana to activate but couldn't go against it..

Eventually, Damian isolated a key feature of the spell that allowed for transformation itself, carefully removing the eroding element entirely. It took a lot of practice but Damian finally was able to make the Arcane Synthesis copied spells in his mind to come out, turns out it's literally a copy paste thing and was really compatible with his World Shaper Hands runic circle-drawing abilities.

When Damian attached the section of transformation in a basic water-ball spell, the empty space for runes which used to be for decay in Eroding spell, got instantly replaced with a mini runic circle of healing spell that was recorded by his Arcane Synthesis skill effect. And voila.. Comes out a tiny water ball that has healing properties.. It was slightly more yellowish than normal clear water but it barely healed much.

So Damian modified the water ball spell to make the size of water ball smaller than a bottle cap, and indeed the light yellow hue turned to a more bright golden. Still it wasn't enough. It still barely healed anything at all.

Arcane Synthesis, thankfully, only recorded the essence of a spell rather than its specific effects. For instance, when it captured the healing spell, it recorded the spell's overall ability to heal injuries rather than its application to a specific part of the body. Similarly, when it recorded the mimicry spell, it captured the spell's transformative capabilities rather than its individual effects on Damian.

Testing this further, Damian swapped the Arcane Synthesis data with a mimicry spell that granted night vision, recreating the runic circle. The transformation spell consumed 10% of his total mana with each cast, making it far more mana-intensive than conjuring. He drank a small droplet of the mimicry-infused water and darkened his room to test its effectiveness. The result was disappointing—only about 20% of the original spell's night vision strength.

Unwilling to just let it go, Damian used a lot of light mana stones, crushed them with his Mana Extraction skill, and drew an advanced healing spell with the golden mana dust, keeping Arcane Synthesis active. Damian immediately did the whole process again and managed to transform the water ball into a pure golden, oil-like liquid the size of a tennis ball.

The result was a potent healing potion—the most effective Damian had ever seen. His assistants caught the floating ball in a glass beaker as Damian collapsed from mana exhaustion.

The spell's potency came at a steep cost: the more powerful the spell, the more mana it required to transform it into a consumable product. This first batch wasn't entirely consumable, either; the potion's immense healing power caused severe mana deficiency for anyone who drank even a sip. However, it worked flawlessly for third-rankers. The Spellsword elf tested it by drinking a mouthful after inflicting a small cut on herself. The potion not only healed the wound instantaneously but also erased old scars that had resisted the best healing potions money could buy. The downside? It consumed 80% of her massive mana pool in the process. Continue your adventure at empire

Recognizing the potion's limitations, Damian sought to create a more balanced solution. Just like Glimmerglass that he had used so long ago in Pyron, there were many plants who did the same as infusing mana into water if boiled together. Mainly of Etherfern, Lumina Bark, Crystaberry Bush, Elderglow Root and Solarvine. There were also non magical plants from earth that were here able to store mana inside, mainly Moss, Rosemary, Aloe Vera and Lotus. Some were more potent, some less, some had elemental mana and some were even poisonous but all contained mana inside in some shape or form.

Domain selected some of these plants that worked well together and dried them in direct sunlight, then crushed them into powder, boiled them in water, and filtered the mixture through cloth and paper, acquiring the oils that these plants infused with mana were left with in a big amount. Why do such a lengthy process one would ask..? Simple, because this was the only way in which extraction of potent mana in liquid form was possible, and it wasted next to very little mana in the whole process. Making it the most efficient process of mana liquid extraction. Then taking a lot of Glimmergrass, since it was the most common thing for mana and boiling it with a lot of water, he made a good amount of lightly mana infused water.

He then combined the mana oils and the healing potion oil with lightly mana-infused water at carefully controlled temperatures to create a cauldron of healing potion. After some trial and error, The final product was a balanced potion capable of fully healing any injury for second-rankers while consuming only half their mana. Though it couldn't regrow limbs or fix genetic defects, Damian believed that a more potent potion might achieve such feats—it was just their body could not compensate enough mana for it. Even after giving the healing oils so much inherent mana from the plants oil and Glimmergrass it still took the patients little mana in use and if they couldn't spare mana then the nutrients of the body itself.

But that was healing spell problems, Damian was much more interested in the mimicry spell granting products.

And so he needed to make another batch with a good mimicry spell, of course unlike the giant advanced healing spell, he couldn't do the mimicry spell in giant form. So he wrote another report requesting tons of dark mana stones so he could confirm his theory, and to his surprise they didn't even ask him to explain—his devastatingly potent healing potion had left a significant impression. Half of his first batch was taken by the queen and stored in the royal treasury, despite Damian's protests about needing to test its shelf life. So he just let them go and did his shelf life check on the other half.

Head researcher Erdan had his eyes popping out of his skull when they were delivered a trunk full of dark mana stones. That box alone was worth their 3 years of combined annual budget for the full research facility.

Damian also understood he wouldn't get such a chance again so instead of using it to store the data of a simple night vision spell, he delayed the experiment and researched a lot about mimicry spells. This involved gathering a wide variety of animals and monsters from across Eldoris, much to the amusement of the kingdom's citizens. His reputation as a "mad lad" quickly evolved into whispers of him having a "fetish for weird monsters." Thankfully, Damian rarely attended royal functions or noble gatherings; otherwise, they would point at him and call him "the weirdest man alive.".