It only took a moment of looking to find a clean piece of paper and a sharp-enough pencil, both buried under the topmost layer of clutter. Now all he needed to do was figure out what the cipher’s key was and follow his training, and if he did everything right, he should be able to decode the dead man’s notes.

No particular word came to mind, until he looked to the homunculus again, its eyes still vacantly staring at him. “Albedo shows the way, huh…” he ruminated, and just like that, he realized his mistake. The homunculus had outright told him the key to the cipher.

Makhus took hold of the journal that most grabbed his attention, a leather-bound thing whose outer binding was clearly worn down and whose clasp had clearly been ripped off and replaced at least once. The very first page was filled to the brim with neat and practiced handwriting, and he tried it on the first sentence of that very page.

What came out of the decoding process wasn’t modern Ikesian. It was an old dialect that was almost exclusively understood by the many old families that lived in southern Ikesia before the unification, whose cultural legacy made up the backbone of the union as it became under the Sage of Fog. In other words, it was an antiquated tongue almost exclusively spoken by people very likely to be patriotic for Ikesia.

Makhus was not from one of these families, but he felt himself fortunate, for the very man who he had named himself after was also the man thanks to whom he understood this dialect. This man he so deeply respected was a nobody, just a lower middle-class librarian that liked his home city-state very much, as people of his generation did.

But he had taught him to read and write Old Ikesian, so that little Makhus could read the old alchemy textbooks that were still written in this dialect.

And so it was that he could now read this encoded journal, which spoke of such things that he risked execution just by reading it.

Whosoever reads this journal, know that I hold no regrets for my actions, that I was of sound mind throughout all my life, and that I have never so much as considered suicide. If you are reading this, I have either been slain in defence of my homeland or by the treacherous hands of anti-Ikesian operatives.

Three years before the unification, I took part in an alchemist’s convention at which I met a man who I believe later became known as the Sage of Fog. He revealed to me no secrets of the Fog, no grand design of alchemy, but he planted in my mind a seed which has sprouted into a grand design of its own.

Within these pages, I intend to detail the process of creating a homunculus capable of surpassing the greatest heroic bloodlines of the old powers.

For hours that, to him, felt like mere minutes, Makhus continued to feverishly decode page after page of the journal.