Sokram gave Haramin the same orders he gave to Shidreth, but also wrote a Rune on her belly.

  The rune’s rosy glow flared briefly as it sank beneath her skin.

  When Shidreth inquired about it, Sokram explained bluntly, “Don’t want you guys having babies in my lab. You can mate freely like this, but this rune will make sure she doesn’t end up getting pregnant. You wouldn’t want your children to become lab rats, would you?”

  "No, Master,” Shidreth said, acting meek and suppressing his hatred.

  Sokram blinked.

  That tone of submission from Shidreth sounded foreign, almost wrong coming from his snarling mouth.

  The signs of Haramin's greater intelligence also didn't escape Sokram's notice.

  Her shocked gaze as Shidreth acted so meekly to ensure her survival made it clear.

  Yet, it was clear Shidreth was much smarter.

  “Teach her well how to do a proper job.” Sokram stood up and started to leave.

  Shidreth surprised Sokram once again by thanking him, his back twisting into a pathetic, jerky imitation of a polite bow. “Shidreth thanks Master Drak, truly.”

  Sokram only gave a brief nod in acknowledgement and left with Kasine and Hannah in tow.

  Once they reached his lab upstairs, Sokram was surprised to see that the reason they hadn’t gone home was that they were concocting as many pills as they could.

  “You two are quite eager, hm?” Sokram joked.

  Then he explained about the pill, “You two, when using it, should do so in complete isolation in a place no one will bother you. Because if you forcefully stop the effects of the pill after the initial digestion, you will have to wait until the next Level of Existence to take another.”

  “How do you know that?” Kasine raised an eyebrow as it was a recently developed pill that hadn’t been used by any humanoid yet, besides the goblins.

  “I noticed it in Haramin’s Core; even if I had allowed her to handle the pill by herself, she wouldn’t have exploded. But until her body reset through advancement, the pill would remain in her body, nullifying any other cultivation pill she ingested,” Sokram explained, confident he could prove it that way too.

  With his achievements so far, they wouldn’t doubt him either.

  “Good to know then, Kamus and I will have to wait to use ours, unless…” Kasine looked at Hannah with eyes full of hope, but Hannah shook her head.

  “Tsk, party pooper!” Kasine crossed her arms and pouted.

  Then, pointing at the tens of pills they concocted together, she asked, “Can I at least take some for my family?”

  Sokram looked at the pills, then picked one and carefully inspected it.

  Rolling the pill between his fingers, he frowned at its awkwardly large size, around three centimeters in diameter, 'too large, too soft.'

  And its pale green hue, which betrayed the pill’s weak effect.

  Sokram looked at Kasine and shook his head, “No, these can be gifted or sold to others. Your family deserves something better. Do you two have time?”

  “I have all the time in the world, darling,” Hannah answered, knowing that the pills they concocted weren’t the best.

  And seeing his confidence, she knew he had a way to improve their results.

  Kasine looked at him curiously, a little insulted as she was also an alchemist.

  But seeing Hannah wasn’t bothered in the slightest, Kasine merely nodded, “I might even get you another day away from Kamus's training.”

  “Deal.” Sokram leaned forward. “Let us start. How much do we have left of the ingredients we need?” He asked, looking around.

  Before he could check the rings where he stored his ingredients, Hannah handed him one of hers.

  Checking it, his grin broadened greedily, “Wow, I guess we have more than enough, haha. Well, let me set up the formation.”

  “Formation?!” Kasine and Hannah asked in unison.

  “Yep, this formation will allow us to work together, with me controlling the spell while the two of you empower it. This way, the pill's grade and potency will increase by leaps and bounds.” Sokram explained, but it was the confidence in his voice that sold it.

  He went to set up the formation, but Hannah stopped him.

  Sokram looked at her curiously, but only saw her with open arms for a hug.

  “Congratulations on another groundbreaking discovery, darling. Nana is very proud to have worked with you on this, and thanks to you, I even got a Galactic Title.” Hannah hugged him tightly.

  “This is just the first of many, Nana. I promise you.”

  Sokram let the hug linger, inhaling the faint, earthy scent of Hannah's robes.

  The maternal warmth of her embrace was a soothing balm, and he thought to himself, once more, that it was for moments like these that he came back.

  Back then, after he lost all his loved ones, he had only Nhiria to celebrate his achievements with him.

  Now he already had some of them walking with him.

  Soon, he would have all of them, and the vow he made to himself kept echoing in his heart and mind.

  Sokram barely let go of Hannah when Kasine also hugged him, “You'd better marry my granddaughters so I can truly call you my grandson! Still, I’m very proud of having you call me Nana, haha. And yep, thanks for the title, especially since I was merely riding along to learn from you two.”

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  “Nope, you two have been an immense help; I would have spent many weeks in this had it not been for you two, maybe even months. Thanks, Nana.” Sokram hugged her back for a while and then went to set up the formation.

  He crouched, fingers slick with blood-ink, tracing intricate spirals that shimmered on the lab's floor faintly under the lab’s magi-lights.

  The dark red liquid laced with Mithril’s cold gleam and Diamond dust’s sharp sparkle, the special blood-ink he only used for the most potent runic spells and enchantments, formed a complex design.

  He also wrote many runic symbols around and inside the array, intertwining their intent and empowering the formation further.

  Hannah could barely understand it, but when thinking about how he could have improved his understanding of runic language, she remembered: the Arch Mage’s Tower.

  Once the array was ready, he drew a triangle in the center of the circular array.

  Connected to three points of the array were three outer circles, also surrounded by runes.

  Each outer circle was perfectly aligned with each corner of the triangle.

  Inside those circles, Sokram wrote one runic word in each: Power, Wisdom, and Knowledge.

  Sokram told Hannah to sit at the Power circle, Kasine sat on the Wisdom, and he would sit on the Knowledge one.

  “Are you sure this is right? Shouldn’t the older one be seated at the Wisdom?” Kasine tilted her head, her mind scrambling against the myriad of complex symbols.

  She could barely grasp anything besides what Sokram had adapted for her Spirit Magic.

  “Yes, but she is the strongest of us. We need her to empower the spell so the pill can have a good effect on those of your level and at least one Level of Existence above.” Sokram explained while adding a cauldron to the center of the array.

  “If I were to concoct the pill, it would be useful for me and maybe those one or two Levels of Existence above my own, but it would be useless to you.”

  Then he filled the cauldron with a portion of the ingredients Hannah gave him.

  “Enough for more or less fifty pills.” Sokram mused aloud.

  Kasine and Hannah’s eyes widened, but seeing how serious he was, instead of taking it lightly, they prepared themselves mentally for a very heavy spell.

  Once Sokram sat down, he explained, “I’ll activate the spell, and for now, all I need is that you don’t hold back the mana the spell will ask from you, alright?”

  They nodded, and Sokram, taking a deep breath, activated the spell.

  To Kasine and Hannah’s surprise, they barely even felt any mana coming out from them.

  “Hahaha, look at your faces, I’m sure you thought this would cost a lot of mana, but all I did was turn on the fire, hahaha.” Sokram joked.

  Kasine was about to go over and pinch him or something, but she couldn’t move.

  “Yep, can’t move, that’s why I asked if you had time, I’ll be borrowing your power for the time being. You should focus on keeping your energy pools full.” Sokram shot them a grin, the grin of a child doing something naughty without asking.

  “Hmph! This better be good, to think all I had to do was sit here…” But then something crossed Kasine’s mind, “Wait, could you have used Beast or Chaos Cores instead?”

  “Yep, why do you have any above Exalted?” Sokram looked at her with pleading greed.

  “…No… I don’t.” Kasine looked away, teary-eyed, her wolf ears deflated in exaggerated embarrassment.

  “Pfft! Haha,” Hannah failed to stifle a giggle, causing Sokram to raise his brows in surprise.

  Hannah rarely opened up to others, and yet she and Kasine seemed to be developing a real friendship.

  To Sokram, whose face morphed into a wide-eyed, surprised expression, all Hannah offered was a shrug, “What? She’s funny.”

  Sokram shook his head, holding back a grin that was tugging on his lips, and continued the concoction spell.

  Soon, steam curled upward from the cauldron, carrying scents that mingled with a low vibration hum from the glowing runes.

  The air thickened with the sweetness of crushed petals, the damp musk of roots, and the sharp bite of medicinal weeds, all mixed with the acrid smell of alchemic reagents, began to permeate the air.

  Sokram turned to Kasine, his eyes narrowed with caution. “Prepare for a medium pull.”

  “Yes, Captain!” Kasine answered cheerfully and closed her eyes.

  Lines of light crawled up the array, and Kasine felt the first tug.

  Gentle at first, then steady as a heartbeat.

  She focused solely on replenishing her energy pools.

  Inside the formation, she realized that even doing that was easier.

  Hannah looked at Kasine wide-eyed as the energy around her formed a subtle vortex. Ambient Mana and Aura knit together, swirling like twin ribbons around her.

  “Oh, it works, hm? We will be able to use this when digesting the pills, might even speed up energy gathering further.” Sokram nodded approvingly as if it wasn’t premeditated.

  “It’s the formation?” Hannah looked around the drawn array, once again trying to decipher the complex runic lines, as she tried to figure out what Sokram did.

  “I’ll draw the schematics for you later, Nana. There are one or two runes I might need to fix first.” Sokram told her as he used Force to stir the mixture inside the cauldron.

  His gaze didn’t waver; his lips moved in silent command as he shaped the energy.

  “For now, focus on your pools; your part is next.”

  Sokram cast the spell, and the mixture from the cauldron floated, forming a sphere of liquid. “Nana Hannah, focus now. You will feel a big pull of mana, but you've got to keep up.”

  Hannah, contrary to Kasine, felt her mana sucked out like water through a siphon.

  Her breath hitched.

  Despite the formation's aid, a cold, hollow ache began to spread through her Mana Heart as she was barely able to keep up with the expenditure.

  Every heartbeat echoed in her ears.

  She closed her eyes and focused entirely on refilling her mana pool as fast as she could.

  As Sokram controlled the spell, first, he created a nucleus of gravity in the center of the liquid sphere.

  Once the sphere smoothed into a glassy perfection, three rings of energy flared to life.

  One red, one blue, one green.

  Each pulsing with raw incandescence.

  These lights began forming runes that flashed and vanished in a rapid, silent cadence as the rings of light spun around the liquid sphere.

  The three energies overlapped each other as each ring spun around the mixture from different angles and in different directions, increasing the potency of the concoction without consuming more energy from Kasine and Hannah.

  Once the energy levels reached their optimal point, Hannah and Kasine no longer felt bothered by the energy pull as it lessened considerably.

  Opening their eyes left them awed by the surreal light show the spell was creating.

  Still, once they looked at Sokram, they saw that even for him, it wasn’t costless, as he was sweating profusely and focused on controlling the spell.

  Suddenly, a soft, low "Tac!" sound cut through the focused silence.

  It sounded as if something small and solid had just struck the metallic surface of the cauldron.

  And then another, and another.

  They both found that the source of the sound was inside the cauldron, but since they couldn’t move, they couldn't see what it was.

  Hannah, paying attention with her Dragon Sight fully concentrated, saw the moment a small pill shot out of the liquid sphere surrounded by lights that Sokram was controlling.

  After a couple of minutes, the cadence of “Tac!” sounds increased, almost resembling a hailstorm.

  By the time their counts reached sixty-three, the lights ceased, and the spell was cancelled, and so was the hold of the array over them.

  Sokram slumped down with ragged breaths, dripping sweat, but this time his head wasn’t even hurting.

  There was just a light buzzing sound in his ears, as he chuckled internally, ‘Haha, my body can’t keep up with my mind anymore.’

  Sokram flashed a satisfied smile at the two concerned grandmas and told them, “Go on, you can look at the finished product.”

  Turning to Kasine, he asked, “Can you smell it? It’s very close to perfection.”

  Kasine nodded eagerly, like a child whose grandparents just offered her a favorite snack.

  Hannah stood up and picked one of the pills.

  A complete contrast from the dense, pale green ones from their concoction.

  The pill gleamed like a drop of crystallized Vitha, its emerald depths pulsing faintly with trapped energy.

  Despite its size, it looked incredibly concentrated.

  Any alchemist knew that a pill that reached the translucent stage was nearing the legendary grade.

  Yet this time, Hannah wasn’t even that surprised, “Amazing formation. The fact that it can be used with beast cores makes it even better.”

  “Right?” Sokram smiled tiredly.

  Looking at the array and now knowing the strain the spell had on the mind, he already knew the adjustments he needed to make so Hannah and Kasine could also use it. “But I’ll need to make a few adjustments to it first. The only reason I didn’t pass out this time is because I have two Mind Locks lifted.”

  Hearing that, Hannah frowned.

  She had heard it from Moira but hadn’t had the time to sit down and talk with him about it. “You’re playing with fire, lifting those locks one after the other.”

  “Nope, I’m not. Had it been any other, that could be the case, but the mental gifts from my bloodlines allow me this much.” Sokram disagreed firmly, making his stance clear: Even if she disapproved of it, it was already done.