In preparation for Zef’s decision to go through with taking the pill, they once more drew upon Makhus’s know-how. Despite his still far-from-ideal state, he gladly drew up two full sheets of the same talismans he had used to seal what Zel had regurgitated when she drank the Necrobeast Elixir into a solid, sealed ball.

He agreed with the caveat that it would take him around two hours to get done, and upon their return from an appropriate-length hike to pick the seals up, Makhus commented: “It really is awfully convenient that I have all this Rubedo to use up. It’s not quite as good as actual blood, but with the sheer quantity of the stuff it doesn’t matter…”

“These will soak up impurity and curl up into little balls as they near their capacity, with multiple of them spread out in a contiguous patch making bigger balls and containing more impurity than the constituent seals could individually. The sect should have a means of disposing of alchemical waste, but if it doesn’t, just store them somewhere away from the sect so they can denature without leaking into the leyline crossroad.”

Alongside these seals, they also tapped into the apothecary’s supply of common universal remedies, among these being a drug designed to reduce a fever and the eternal mainstay of Liquid Vigor, this variant flavored with mint and honeysuckle.

If she were forced to describe the ordeal simply and truthfully, Zefaris would’ve called it underwhelming.

Ozmir really hadn’t lied a bit, having prepared for her several overwhelmingly sweet, spiced, and fragrant pastries, which burned medicinally on the way down. The scent and flavor of herbs and flowers drowned out all others mere minutes afterward, lingering in wait to serve as a bulwark against the familiar taste and stench of blood, mud, gunpowder and trench foot when she did actually take the pill.

It started with the stomach cramps, as she soaked in the bath in the elder’s quarters with Zelsys sitting on the edge with a pile of impurity-sealing talismans to her side.

Nausea soon replaced cramps, her nose grew stuffy, and the overpowering urge to cough filled her throat. Moments later, she was hacking up great globs of spirit-tar the colour of an oil slick… And somehow, Ozmir’s pastries clung on for dear life.

She felt a fever creeping it, tapping into the first Liquid Vigor bottle to suppress its symptoms. After rinsing her mouth out to make sure she wouldn’t swallow a mouthful of spirit-tar, she chugged half the bottle’s contents and found their effects to be lesser than expected… But it did have an effect, which was something.

One after another her worst memories of the war were dredged up, and one after another, they sparked a grim sense of solace.

Remembering all she’d gone through and achieved back then, even watching her comrades die before her and the complete gutting to her old marksmanship style that losing an eye was - she didn’t regret any of it, knowing that it had all made her who she was today, led her down this path, but moreover...

...It was all long in the past, done and over with. This realization had only truly dawned on her in the dungeon, that trying to cling onto her past would only lead her to reopening old wounds.

All the wounds she’d grinned and bore her way through for a kill.

All the times she’d stuffed mostly-drained fuel cells down her clothes to avoid frostbite from laying in the snow picking off clueless rice farmers in ill-fitted brown uniforms.

All the things she’d seen which at the time strained her perception of reality, which she had built the persona of an ultra-professional soldier to cope with.

Damn near every notable negative event she’d experienced since her decision to enlist, the ambition’s coals having had smoldered within her for as long as she could remember having ambitions, but whose flame was truly ignited to the point of action by teenage spite clashing against punishment for her reckless violence against the leshy.

To dwell upon things that had failed to bring her down would have been pointless, even if she couldn’t just toss them all away.

It seemed so obvious in retrospect.

When her mind flooded with thoughts of death, mortality, and the possibility that she could die any day, Zefaris couldn’t even bring herself to consider them in earnest. They just sort of slipped by when she broke out laughing about how absurd it was that some part of her still clung onto such futile fears and fatalistic ideals. Her whole life path was one walked hand in hand with the reaper, of course that risk was ever-present; the dungeon’s trials had only helped her grasp it in concrete terms.

The entire time Zel kept throwing out talisman after talisman, at first clumsily. However, she quickly realized that with a single fold down the middle she could flick them much more quickly and precisely. After several hours of the ordeal, Zel had fished up a small pile of balled-up talismans, remarking that it just smelled like Ubul’s Tomb as she playfully tossed them to the side.

What little tar the seals didn’t catch washed away into the drainage channels at the edge of the bath, somehow drawn in, meaning the water remained clear enough that Zefaris could draw direct connection between unpleasant memories floating on by.

Not long into the ordeal, boredom settled in. With Zef being in no state to do anything physically demanding or get out of the bath, Zel took the opportunity to make a show of leaving, only to return barely ten minutes later, trailing fog with three brand-new pulps in one hand and a waxpaper package that concealed assorted confectionery in the other.

Two were short story anthologies in the same vein as the pulps she’d already read, even including various lore blurbs at the ends of individual stories, while the remainder were martial arts manuals. One was the sect’s own “How to Hit and Get Hit”, while the other was far more… Mystical in nature.