Making potions is wrapped in mysticism. A little-known secret we alchemists like to keep is that it is incredibly incredibly easy to make a potion that has some powerful and fantastical effect. The real challenge is pruning (neutralizing) every single nasty side effect. As well as finding common magical materials instead of rare ones to make the process repeatable. That's why witches are shunned. Sure they can fly on a broomstick after drinking a potion made on their kitchen countertop but really, is the green skin worth it? It makes you look like a goblin lady. Leave potion-making to the professionals; it's an exact science – not making soup from random weeds.

An excerpt from the textbook "Potions 101 The Exact Science of Magic" distributed in all alchemy academies.

Amy: I’m really sorry :/ your “flying crystal” didn’t actually put up that good of a fight. I think it was just a bad matchup?

Amy: I sent some of my Reelers – okay I think I have to describe my dungeon a bit more first. You won’t get the full picture if I don’t :/.

Amy: So, I have these monsters I’ve called Reelers – name hasn’t been confirmed yet. They are creatures created with long thin appendages of a combination of Living Water and the core's magic bound to a sack that has a core and some organs that help it…basically, they are like octopi with extra-long water tendrils that can create more tendrils from the water around it using magic. They live in this room with several holes into a giant pool of water underneath it and like to grab anything that walks by to play with.

Amy: They really are quite playful. Anyways it grabbed your crystal and pulled it underwater a few seconds after meeting it. I don’t know if your crystal could have dodged it if it had known the arm was coming but it was super-fast.

Amy: Apparently you added fire to your monster? Well the Reeler that grabbed it to play with noticed them right away and got kind of angry. Your crystal can move underwater by the way. Just not nearly as well as in the air I think the water was just slowing it down instead of blocking it.

Amy: The Reeler smashed all 4 spikes off the crystal by hitting it on an angle repeatedly and then started to play catch with it with the other Reeler…I’m really not explaining this well I’m sorry Innearth. I think it was just a bad matchup. I can’t even say my monsters are much stronger they might have had an even fight above the water but as is the crystal didn’t have much chance.

Amy: It was super durable though! I was hoping to send it back to you while it was still alive but couldn’t nab it while the monsters were playing, and they like to pretend they can’t hear me when they found a new toy.

Amy: Also weird fact when it died it kind of grew after it shattered? Several chunks of it fell to the bottom of the pool of water and grew a bunch of small crystals afterwards did you mean for that to happen?

Amy: Are you mad? You aren't responding so you're mad right...

Innearth: No. I’m okay sorry for not answering I’m just a bit disappointed. I thought as soon as I added Rank 2 mana it would make the monster much much stronger and it doesn’t sound like it was that good of a plan.

Innearth: I guess the basis behind it was still sound though I think I might tweak it a bit...the growth is just the living crystals in it they didn't work as a unique material. Pretty sure they are harmless.

Amy: I feel like I should give you some advice seeing as how I’m still the older and wiser core…

Amy: I read it in a guide I bought here but basically mana can be used to create, control, or provide an attribute/effect to something. Rank 1 mana is better for creation but worse for "control" while Rank 2 is better for control and worse at creation.

Amy: Um. So basically, you should focus more on using Rank 1 mana to create your monster and just use Rank 2 to enhance it somehow.

Amy: Um. I hope this is helpful I’m still really sorry. I can't tell how attached you were to it but you did seem excited when you told me about it.

Innearth: No again don’t worry about it. Really honestly, I kinda expected it to die. I’m just annoyed it did so in a pathetic manner. If you ever want to send me one of your monsters, I’m sure I can do the same for you – I’m also willing to send you another monster to review once I get a few more going and it hurts less to lose the work.

Amy: Don’t worry about it! And I don’t really feel insecure about my monsters so it's not necessary. Hey! I have some more advice. Have you tried making composite materials yet? They are super useful.

Innearth: No I…Just advanced. I didn’t even know it was possible until I read a primer a few hou…I think it's been a day now time flies wow okay. I advanced a day or so ago.

Amy: Ahh. That makes me feel worse about breaking your cute little flying rock. You just got here.

Innearth: Don’t worry about it. Please. You just sound patronizing.

Innearth: Hey listen, I’ll keep in touch, if you have any problems I can definitely try to help! I want to pay you back for some of the help you’ve given me.

Amy: I’ll think about it. Talk to you later?

Innearth: Yeah okay. Talk to you later.

Pulling back he returned to focusing most of his attention on the crystal pillar room. While talking to Amy he had finished growing the rest of the pillars.

Okay, there are places to hide and distort and confuse potential adventurers. Let's see. I think I want to make this silver and the rest of my snakes’ home. So, I need more. I should add ways they can get around better.

Shaping the floor he littered the base of several of the more opaque pillars with small entrances then dug small tunnels for each of them. Hopefully, any adventurer that jumps in after them will have a disadvantage as they crawl. Anyone dumb enough to crawl down here deserves to die...this is an adventurer-free zone!

Each hole was roughly 12cm in diameter…plenty of room for his snakes to slither through but unlike his fear…much too small for adventures to crawl through in the manner he was imagining.

He sent Silver and the other snake there and then tried to figure out how to send the living crystal version over.

Trying to command it in any way didn’t work but when he started spawning fire slimes every few meters like a trail of blazing breadcrumbs the snake happily attacked them all the way to its new home.

As a bonus, a few worms came as well – attracted by the same bait. For the most part, he was ignoring them as a lost cause now that he was older however. Snek all the way now.

Happy with the setup "for now" he would have started populating it with more crystal snakes, but each took nearly his whole pool to make – core included. Currently, it took close to 30 minutes to regenerate back to full, so it was definitely doable! It wasn’t even excessive considering! He just wanted to experiment a tiny tiny bit first. No time at all and then he would properly populate his floors with monsters.

Yep. That’s the plan. He lied to himself before casting aside the task and turning to something more interesting.

Now! How should I go about adding elements together? Trying to imagine every iteration of every physical element added to every other physical element along with every combination of 2 mana types he could use – Currently: “Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Crystal, Life, Death, Kinetic, Mental” – quickly became impossibly tedious to even imagine combining.

Nah after a certain point that becomes less experimentation and more grunt work. I should be smarter about this.

Checking the market for an example, he bought the “Recipe” for “Health Liquid” for yet another pure core and stopped expanding so he would regenerate while reviewing the procedure. Everything seems so expensive when I have to use cores to pay for things – I could have made a monster with that! Grumbling to himself at the very real cost of each of these expenses he considered what he would have to do.

First, he had to use water. Actual “physical water” this time! Then, gathering Life mana and Water mana separately, he had to push them into the water simultaneously – ideally at the same spot.

Quickly checking his inventory and changing the sorting from his “Pure element” display to one with raw materials he found he had gathered roughly 40g of water from all the experiments using Water mana and dying water monsters over the past few weeks.

Because he hadn’t quite figured out how to make physical elements from the building blocks he had gathered yet – only dismantle them into smaller and smaller components – he needed to use some of the physical materials he had picked up.

Taking part of it out of his inventory he held a small drop in the air then gathered the two types of mana.

Before long there were 3 floating balls in his experimental room – one a suspended drop of water and two incorporeal hazy spheres of green and blue respectively. Trying to overlay them and then push, he flung all the elements together and hoped for the best.

The Water mana hit his ball of physical water first and seemed to get stuck, before the ball of Life mana coming up behind it hit the same spot sucking both into his sphere. The final result had turned a deep emerald green tint and had expanded by nearly 4 times what his previous ball had been.

Okay…so I’ve done it. I don’t fully know why I had to use Water mana with water…should already be there. Seems kind of redundant if you ask me. I feel like I could have just used Life mana on a single element liquid and got the same result…why did I have to mix them?

Staring deep into the ball of magical liquid he tried to make sense of what it was showing him. He half expected the green Life mana and blue Water mana to be all tangled up inside the material – maybe the Life mana connected to the hydrogen and the Water mana connected to the oxygen…but that’s not what it looked like after the material had been made. Instead, it was a single wavy, twisty, green flavoured mana that stared back at him.

So, it's actually a new mana type? Can I copy this and use it with one element?

Trying to make mana that turned into this new flavour of Life+Water mana was both confusing and unfruitful. Like, he could imagine it was possible, but it didn’t just do what he wished, and he had little to no affinity for this new type of mana.

So basically, I can make this mana in a recipe but not from scratch. It's probably the same for all of these “combined mana’s” but I should probably check if a crystal or earth combination is impossible to recreate as well.

Curious he looked around trying to find something to use his healing ball on. None of his monsters seemed injured, unfortunately – Lazy buggers – so he directed Silver over to where his golems were staking out an entranceway.

She slithered over curious and unsuspecting, halfway through the entranceway she seemed to sense the sharp point before she should have been able to. Dodging suddenly to the side with a jerk, she let the sharp point of the golem shank clang against the ground. Oh right, she has a core and should be able to see in all directions. – go Silver!

Angrily whipping around to face her attacker Silver darted forwards, smashing her point into the golem's body again and again. Unable to rearm itself and flailing its stubby little legs the unfortunate golem tipped over, exposing its belly before being smashed again and again in its least armoured area.

Finally, with a crack, Silver managed to puncture the offending earth body. Her coned head slightly bent at the tip and her actions slightly dazed but triumphant. In its dying moments, the golem seemed to be…trying to use mana? Faint slivers of stone were starting to form in the air.

A glint of the earth core inside seemed to revitalize Silver however and she once more smashed in – puncturing the core and releasing a pulse of energy that washed over both her and the floor.

Other than a small shiver as the mana washed over her scales Silver didn’t have much of a reaction but the floor was stiffened and haphazard lines appeared, radiating out from the release of energy like a weird reverse crack. Bumps upward instead of holes downward.

The stone spikes clattered to the ground beside the body, dissolving into a faint powder as they never realized their potential.

Bringing over the drop of healing liquid to “reward” Silver for her valiant fight, the drop landed on the tip of her head before seeming to flow into her, spreading throughout her whole body.

Maybe the Water mana helps distribute the healing energy from life?

As the healing energy flowed throughout the snake's length small scrapes and cracks sealed over, her cone also straightened back into a point as if it had never been bent in the first place.

Okay...So that's how effective it is. Does what it claims to and pretty well too! I feel like I should focus on the magic rock that was forming though.

Why hadn’t he demonstrated that ability until now? Is it because this was a life and death scenario? I should definitely keep monsters in combat with each other as training in the hopes more show signs of abilities…

Wish I stopped Silver from going for the kill now… I wanted to see where that ended up. Earth magic because he has an Earth core? Is it harder for the pure cored monsters to use magic because they don’t have an affinity? I could try making a bigger pure elemental golem or something…Anyways I’ll put a pin in that as something to experiment with in the future. Now I just have to figure out how to make more materials in a similar way.

The memories that came back from the golem were long and vivid...but not as useful as he had hoped. The golem had, for the most part, spent its life thinking simple thoughts and even in death, it hadn't known what it was doing to make magic. It simply acted instinctually a faint tingling sensation spreading out of its core before its life was ended.

What do I need the most? Probably a bendable flesh that’s strong enough to be worth using. I also don’t think I can use the last of my water. Wish I had another example to go off of, but I’ve already wasted too many cores and time buying combinations.

...Okay so Water mana helps make fluids but that’s not necessarily what I want. How about I mix it with earth so it's more solid? That should be fleshy but strong.

Not sure what physical elements to go with he sorted his inventory in a few different ways till Silica popped up. Oxygen and Silicon yeah sure. Pulling it out he started the process of gathering both Earth and Water mana before adding them simultaneously to the lump of quartz.

Unlike how smooth the Life and Water mana had bonded to H2O Earth and Water did not like being pushed into the material at the same time.

Cracks continuously shattered and broke the crystal apart as he tried desperately to add them evenly until he was left with a mess of small grains of a white powder. He pulled them around and they sort of clung together, but it wasn’t where he thought they would end up.

Sand :/ I wonder if I can make anything out of this?

Pulling the lump apart and pushing it back together the sand lumped, and bits constantly fell off of it being caught by Innearth. He nearly constantly needed to keep it from falling apart.

Maybe if it had a glue? I haven’t wanted to use liquid metal because it doesn’t have enough form for flesh but maybe it will work if it has this sand suspended in it.

Quickly making a stream of liquid metal and dribbling it down onto the sand he watched as it clumped more and more, becoming like wet sand and then stopping as it started to slurry slightly.

Not really expecting much from his lump but wanting to see it through to the end he debated giving it a core then finally decided he wasn’t going to waste more effort on the creation than he already had and gave it life as is.

He watched the lump pull itself up and then start to slowly drag itself along the ground. Bits of sand left on the floor behind it seemed to magically fade in its wake, until he watched it encounter one of his worms. The worm turned curious and then stabbed the weird looking slime its head reaching all the way through it and poking out the other side in confusion. A second later and the sandy lump seemed to constrict, the worm popping with a quiet blip and disappearing within the sand's body.

The sandy pile pulled apart into two separate piles, ripping apart the worm and depositing its rings on the floor while seeming to consume the liquid metal before rejoining and continuing its exploration of its new home.

Okay...that’s slightly more exciting than I thought. It's not like my worms are my strongest monsters but I did spend a lot of time improving them.

... it's a pain when they die by something thrown together...Yeah, no it's fine, I’m using a stronger concept it makes sense. Bet Silver would wreck it.

Anyways on to material combination attempt 002.

Trying again with quartz he made a ball of Crystal mana and a ball of Water mana. I had higher hopes for this version anyways!

Combining the two, hopeful it would make a perfect material, the newest tool in his arsenal was made.

Liquid Crystal was a strange beast. Instead of being half liquid and half solid, it was fully liquid but with a directed structure. Moving in axis the liquid would flow at a slightest prod. But pushing it from the side was met with firm unyielding strength.

Moving the pile around in a spiral he found that the direction it was headed in could curve slightly and the thinner it stretched the more it could curve in a direction like a bent wire.

However, squishing it into a perfect sphere on the other hand seemed to momentarily break its “one direction is solid one direction is liquid” form. As soon as he let go, it extended out again, this time facing a different direction around 45 degrees off from his first attempt and flowing into a tube.

Trying to pull it around he stretched the tube thinner and thinner so he could decrease the radius he had to pull it around before he managed to link one end back to its tail.

This ring seemed to be…interesting but not immediately useful so he tried pushing the two sides inwards to break it.

Resisting his mental straining with almost the strength of Earth mana filled iron, it finally snapped and merged back into a single tube.

Even though it wasn’t actively giving off fire, and even though he had just made a healing liquid this…“Liquid Crystal”…was the most magical feeling material he had made yet. He didn’t quite know how it would fit into a monster, but he wanted to do it justice.