In a daze, Nico looked at the flyer Imae gave him.

  

  ‘ Alchemy at

  the Park~~

  ??! ’

  The day she gave it to him, a miracle happened. Zhou—gave him an actual date to meet on to unravel the next rift. Instead of coincidentally trapping them together in rifts? He knew how to do this all along?

  As he shuffled alongside Kai through the park, a sapling ran up to the wolf.

  “Mr. Alchemist! Uhm— thank you for saving my house from the rift!”.

  She ran back to her parents picnicking farther in the grass. A vendor waved the Lycans down as they passed, beckoning them over to her stall. She complimented Kai for organizing care for her friends in the hospital and offered them both some beverages. An unseen person behind her whispered excitedly, asking if “that was the wolf,” to which she confirmed in an exchange of loud whispers.

  Nico’s eyes narrowed. This morning, he noticed Kai put on a wrist brace imbued with healing inscriptions. He stared at where it was hidden under Kai’s long-sleeve shirt, that a normal person would find too hot to wear in this weather.

  Kai noticed the fox looking and reassured him, “Don’t worry; it’ll heal fast.”

  Nico was super worried. Since Kai was doing solo fieldwork as well, there was a possibility he was hiding the severity of an injury. Well, Nico had gotten hurt too and hadn’t told Kai, but Zhou healed him at the observatory. Kai didn’t know about it, so this was not projection or hypocrisy.

  The fox’s thoughts drifted to how amazing an aether elemental was; otherwise, he probably would still be wearing an arm sling.

  ***

  Nico walked alongside him, lost in anxious thought as usual. It was better to let him spiral quietly; once spoken aloud, those thoughts became real, and the fox would lose sleep over them. It wasn’t annoying, just Nico living his truth, but Kai was too preoccupied today to offer a distraction. He had just received updates on one of the first rifts he had resolved in Tellur.

  Once unraveled, the rift they’d unraveled to cross the border ejected items belonging to a number of missing persons. These objects “ejected” by blinking back into existence where they were last left in the rift layer. Unfortunately, that meant they were buried in the swamp. Because the terrain necessitated a manual, boots-to-the-ground search, the official staff were not exactly tripping over themselves to take shifts. The effort was instead largely supplemented by a volunteer force of community members who had been waiting years for this chance.

  Even with this generous support, verifying the connections between the gear and its former owners was maddening. A substantial amount of reality had slipped into the rift over time, leaving behind a massive accumulation of tools and equipment trapped in the spatial distortion.

  It was a task for experts, and despite Tellur’s lack of a centralized alchemic faction, it would be insulting to assume the nation lacked independent alchemists skilled enough to handle the rift the Lycans experienced. As they walked through, the Riftborn simply stared, freshly intimidated by whatever had stripped their core guardian of its elemental breath.

  The Director didn’t need the full report; it was kinder to grant him a few more moments of peace before the official notification. The recovery had followed a logic everyone wished wasn’t true. The nephew’s badge had surfaced in an area of light mana decay, while the gear of alchemists missing for decades lay deeper in the swamp. To see a loved one’s life reduced to a data point within a pattern of disappearance felt inherently cold.

  Kai focused the conversation on the immediate logistical needs. “It would be beneficial if Nireya’s Alchemic Faction could delay the Forged Nation’s intervention,” he said, grounding the request in the instability of the border rift. “The portals in Tellur will remain unreliable for several days.”

  The Director accepted the advice with few words. Kai remained on the line, allowing the space left by the loss to sit between them.

  “I am sorry this was how he was found,” Kai offered into the quiet. After a long pause, the Director finally spoke, expressing his gratitude for the recovery. To be given the task of bringing such a person home was, as Kai affirmed, a profound honor.

  ***

  As the sun set, Kai rushed to track down the scent of marigolds. Two weakened core guardians were egregious enough that he didn’t feel completely evil for dragging someone into a sudden 4:45 PM meeting. Well… that wasn’t completely true. But he at least knew Effie cared enough about the instability in Tellur that she’d likely forgive the intrusion after a few lunches.

  Effie remained quite gracious even as Kai’s arrival made the entire greenhouse staff nervous, knowing his business would likely force everyone into overtime.

  “I understand your concern, I really do…” Effie trailed off in thought, her antennae shaking in soft resignation. “But I just don’t have the authorization to identify rifts or their internal workings like that.”

  It was an interesting choice to minimize her involvement with the phenomena while heading a department dedicated entirely to collecting environmental data on mana stability.

  “Ah, sorry; my wording made it sound like I was asking you for an official rift identification,” Kai amended. “Rather, I know your department utilizes data collected from rifts. It’d help our survey to connect with the alchemists who collect that data for you.”

  Effie agreed that corroborating information with regional experts would be useful, but she remained firm. “I understand and I agree, but I’m just not authorized to share their contact information with a government contractor.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “That’s understandable.” Kai looked across the stacks of paperwork and office supplies roughly piled on her desk; while the clutter was personally stressful for him to witness, he could see the inherent logic behind how things were accumulated. “Are the alchemists also contracted from other nations?”

  “Ah no, we actually have a small but thriving alchemic community here!” Effie brightened immediately. “We try our best to hire local.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Kai said, ears lifting slightly. “Speaking of, since we’ll be here for a while—” He reached forward and lifted a passionately designed flyer from the top of a nearby stack, turning it so Effie could see. “I was looking for volunteer opportunities to share what resources I can with Tellur’s alchemic community.”

  “Oh then this would be perfect!” She nodded, impassioned enough that she had to push her glasses back up. “It’s a weekly program where local alchemists promote alchemic literacy to children and the elderly.” She handed the flyer back with a warm smile. “I’m sure they’d love your support.”

  ***

  The organizers of Alchemy at the Park were extremely accommodating, clearing their schedule so Kai could appear as a guest speaker at a park centered in the heart of the community. On a sunny weekend, he watched saplings, fledglings, and little gems eagerly demonstrate their skills while their parents looked on, openly proud. Many of them worked in alchemy themselves and seemed slightly starstruck to host someone from Eclipse Guild. Several even offered him high-grade manasteel items as welcome gifts, insisting it was the least they could do to thank him for his time.

  It was hard to turn down their kindness, and just as hard to accept it, knowing what those materials usually cost to acquire. The Forged Nation kept export prices high enough that most regions had to be careful with their use. But interestingly enough, even the children here wore multiple pieces of manasteel.

  As the event wound down, Kai stayed to help the organizers clean up, expressing his desire to continue supporting their work even after he left Tellur. The Viridfolk, touched by the gesture, wouldn’t hear of him eating alone, and insisted he join them for dinner and drinks so they could take him to the must-sees of Tellur. The table grew as the night went on, with more alchemists dropping by specifically to meet the visitor from Lumere they’d heard so much about. They shared their favorite local spots with him, eager to make sure he saw the best of their home. A few Viridfolk even offered to take him off the main tourist paths to the alchemic market where the locals actually shopped. Kai accepted perhaps a bit too eagerly, but he was genuinely grateful; he was absolutely tired of the places the Governor kept dragging him to.

  ***

  Nico came to the office visibly shaken. He had unraveled a second rift, layered beneath one that hid a defunct mana monitoring station. When reality restored, it came back unevenly, fractured in a way far worse than what followed the first unraveling. The lush, buzzing marshlands they had only just recovered collapsed almost at once, leaving cracked, depleted earth spreading outward in every direction. By the end of the debriefing, Nico had fallen silent, his eyes unfocused. Kai moved closer and set a steady hand on his friend’s back.

  It was a place with a painful history, documented in its most fundamental form by ambient mana surveys. The Forged Nation had long built a business on the fact that rifts naturally formed everywhere. Their strategy was always the same: offer aid to nations struggling with rifts using their hoarded alchemic resources, withdraw once dependence had formed, then return to extract the land for everything it was worth.

  Tellur’s alchemic resource was bog ore, which the Virid inscriptionists told Kai about with prideful indignation. It was the raw form of manasteel, enriched by decades of resting in their very own mana-dense swamps. Effie corroborated this in her own way, sending him datasets on mana corrosion in areas with high concentrations of the mineral, along with long-term graphs tracking how those variables shifted together over time.

  The logs Nico recovered from the monitoring station went further than corroborating her findings. They implied a cause for the unexplained trends Effie’s documentation left unresolved: core mana, the alchemic resource the Forged Nation hoarded throughout its history.

  ***

  As the two exchanged their morning greetings before another round of tedious update meetings, the Governor initiated a handshake. The moment their hands met, he slipped another ingot into Kai’s palm. Kai tilted his wrist to let the metal slide down his sleeve, catching the gold—dense enough to rival the Governor himself—inconspicuously in an inner coat pocket.

  “Hopefully our survey, conducted on behalf of Nireya’s Alchemic Faction, hasn’t been too disruptive to operations in Tellur,” Kai said with a reassuring nod.

  “Hmmm, about that—” the Governor lifted his chin to artificially look down at Kai, stopping himself mid-sentence even though no one had come close to interrupting him. Kai ignored the performance and proceeded with the presentation.

  The powerpoint Kai’s aide made clearly laid out that the Governor was going to be thoroughly fucked if someone (Kai) didn’t handle the increasingly high-grade rifts (by erasing them from the official records). The Governor shook his head with arms crossed in a show of concern.

  “Have any problems come up? I’m happy to clear up misunderstandings with Central, provided you send me the appropriate contacts,” Kai offered.

  A glint lit the Governor’s eyes as his mouth curled into a grin. “Yes, I’ll have my aide send that information right away.”

  He snapped his fingers at the young staffer who stumbled into the room with a stuttering “yes, sir.” Moments later, while the meeting was still in progress, Kai received an email: a full list of people the Governor had been bumping elbows with at Central.

  Is this guy an idiot, or a double agent?

  “This should be sufficient. I’ll follow up with you once I’ve sorted things out,” Kai said.

  “Ah, but unfortunately that will have to wait until I return.” The Governor pressed his knuckles to his chin, pretending to have remembered something poignant. He definitely had been waiting to bring up the topic the entire time. Kai indulged him.

  “Oh? Are you being summoned somewhere?” Kai asked, nudging his glasses back up.

  “Yes— summoned to vacation!” the Governor laughed, delighted by his own joke.

  Kai nodded along as the man steered them into a familiar game of competitive travel one-upmanship. Kai let himself lose, watching the Governor glow with pride as he bragged about the beauty of Forged Nation’s islands, which Kai had “yet to experience,” and how he visited every year for the Lunar Fall Summer Festival (exclusively celebrated by Tellur).

  The idiot praised his own golf game, claiming he was dearly beloved among the Sages of the Forged because of his impeccable swing, and magnanimously promised to put in a good word for Kai. But only if Kai’s swing met their standard.

  Kai joylessly closed the meeting with the usual hollow assurances of collaboration.

  ***

  Kai stepped into a quieter room for his next call, another update with the Director. There wasn’t much to report from the meeting with the Governor, despite how much the Governor liked to measure himself against Sage Aster. Kai noted that if the Director was seeking clarification on recent Sage activity, individuals within his own department could likely speak to it in greater detail than the Governor could.

  The Director agreed. He said he would have his staff pass along what they knew. A soft sigh followed, along with a remark about the relief of no longer having to deal directly with the Governor.

  He then reminded Kai that attention shouldn’t rest on Aster alone. Even Arcanite Sages unaffiliated with the Forged warranted monitoring. Zhoumin, in particular, had drawn interest for some time, given his tendency to surface in regions where rift activity reached unusual or unprecedented levels, well before what had occurred in Ruzen.

  Those incidents were best kept out of circulation, the Director said. Specifics tended to invite copycat behavior, and Zhoumin in particular had proven a media darling.

  Kai agreed. Lumere had also taken note of Zhoumin’s habit of chasing anomalies, he said, and appreciated the reminder to remain watchful.

  The Director ended the call without further comment. The line went quiet. There were still no updates on the missing alchemists.