The inside of the crafting hall was the first building that seemed small on this campus. It wasn't actually any tinier than the others mind you, but it was so swarmed with people that it just felt...cramped. A huge variety of people in costumes that almost beggared the imagination were mixed throughout the entire area, some in groups, some in pairs. The paired ones seemed to be wealthier students talking direct commission, the groups looked like poorer students who were pooling their money to get something for their most valuable member.

Shadowthorn brought us to the first counter from the back on the left side, where an older girl with light blue hair in a braid and a white lower face mask was sitting looking bored. Shadowthorn grinned as we approached. "Lapis!" The girl looked up and her eyes sparkled. She waved excitedly, before turning to shout for someone else and a big Asian man with green hair and eyes made his way over. The two of them headed over to where our guide was standing excitedly.

Lapis, the blue haired girl, threw her arms around Shadowthorn. "Annie! It's good to see you! I thought you turned down the offer to go faculty, what are you doing slumming it here with us rookies?" Her eyes were bright and happy as she talked, and I saw Callie tense slightly at the familiarity. I winced internally, I imagined seeing another girl being mentored by Annie in this situation was probably a bit painful.

The large man with green hair rolled his eyes. "She's here with rookies of her own Lapis, that much is obvious. He held out a hand to me, since I was closest. "I'm Rustle. You folks must be VIP's if you have Annie showing you around. An alumna from the top fifty is nothing to scoff at. Clearly she brought you to the best workshop so you could see how the pros work. I'm one of the best around at Alchemy, and Lapis is a master of enchanting with water type materials!" His voice was confident and assured and I perked up a bit at his statement, this was my first time meeting an alchemist.

It did bring up an obvious question though. "Workshop? So you guys start your own sub groups in the crafting hall?" I realized I was being rude and tacked on hastily. "I'm Solomon by the way. We're new students over from Velan." I held out my hand and he shook it once firmly.

He chuckled. "I have no idea where that is. But yeah, you can go solo, start a workshop with others, or join the Creation League that the faculty runs. Workshops have more freedom than the League, but they have to split the contribution points for the rankings. Solo crafters have an advantage in terms of point intake, but they can output way less. Both independent methods require you to supply your own materials though. The League supplies the materials for you, and you keep all the points, but you have to submit a certain number of League commissions on top of your own workload every month to stay in."

Lapis snorted. "It's a fancy way of saying you're getting a part time job. Basically workshops are more balanced, solo work favors quality, and League work favors quantity." She clapped her hands together once in excitement. "Hey, I know! Since you're all newbies why don't we make you something as a welcome gift. Nothing crazy, Rustle has a knack for Seven Star Construction Pills though, and we have a ton of materials for them because he gets so many orders. It's a G rank medicine, but it only gives ten points of Creation so it's low tier."

I didn't know too much about Alchemy other than the fact that it was extremely dependent on materials. Enchanting was mainly dependent on stats with materials supporting, Inventing was the most economical using both aspects to their fullest, but you couldn't control what they did really, so it was considered kind of a moot point. Alchemy was almost entirely material dependent, but you had to refine and manipulate those materials to get what you wanted out of them. Specific stats and attributes could be gathered to make the same medicine from different but similar materials, unlike Inventing. That was as much as I knew about it.

When I mentioned that Rustle smiled. "Yeah Alchemy seems complicated on the surface, but it's pretty straightforward. Like the Seven Star Construction Pill. It's made from G rank materials, but it doesn't give a hundred points, instead it can be used by people at the G rank. H rank pills don't work on G rankers very well, not enough Impact to affect them. Of course, you can have the opposite problem, taking pills much too high rank can seriously injure or kill you, but almost no one would waste high rank medicine on a lower ranked Ascendant anyway."

He gestured us behind the counter. "Here, if you want you can watch. The Construction Pill recipe is pretty well known, and none of you seem like alchemists anyway so I'm not worried about trade secrets in this case. How about it? Want to see a live demonstration?" They seemed like nice people, and they obviously wanted to impress Shadowthorn, so I saw no reason to turn it down, when I turned to look at her she shrugged.

I gestured for him to go ahead. "Sounds good then. I'm curious to see what Alchemy is all about." We followed him inside a back room behind the counter and waited as he started sorting through ingredients. Mostly the things he took out were odd plants or powders. "So, I'm curious, you mentioned the rankings, how do those work? How do the test rankings effect your ranking in the faculty." I was curious about this because the Might test had rankings but I knew the tests weren't the only way to get contribution points.

Rustle didn't look up as he sorted out materials but he answered anyway. "No. The Creation ranking is based on the test exclusively, same with the other faculties. I was talking about the campus ranking, which uses contribution points you can get from any of the faculties. The faculty rankings are actually relevant there though, because being high up in those gives you contribution points on it's own. Being highly ranked in multiple faculties is the best way to drive up your campus ranking. Even better than doing tasks, but it's not really common to see people use that method because it requires a ton of emphasis on one stat to maintain a faculty ranking."

It also explained how Shadowthorn, who had only been top one hundred in Perception, had managed to come in forty second on the rankings. She must have been doing quite a few tasks to push her points up. Finally Rustle finished gathering that materials and placed them all down next to a big black metal pot. He rapped on the side of it. "Ok, good to go. Now, first thing to know is the basics, so this is a cauldron. You need a decent cauldron for alchemy. They're designed to resonate with the skill better. If you use a bad cauldron or something else you get half the results for twice the effort."

He put one hand on the cauldron and focused, and the thing started to glow green. Only dimly, but enough to see...something happening. Then, with his other hand, he started to toss in ingredients, lecturing casually. "Normally you need to prepare ingredients in special ways to maximize their use, but I've made these pills so many times I can do it with just my Alchemy skill. I can slowly filter out the portions of the medicinal essence that isn't needed because of my constant practice and familiarity with the ingredients."

Once everything was in he put his hand on the other side and the glow intensified. "You can look inside if you like. It's pretty interesting for beginners." I leaned forward to see the inside of the cauldron and blinked. He was right, it was interesting. The glow from the cauldron was rising up in wisps from along the inside, creating a sort of gelatinous cloud where all the ingredients were suspended. As the energy pumped in the cloud roiled like bubbling water, moving the ingredients around inside. Occasionally, red wisps would puff out of the top, what I assumed were the unnecessary portions he was getting rid of.

As the process went on the gelatinous cloud was forced into a tighter shape by the new wisps of energy from the cauldron, becoming denser and denser as the crafting progressed. Each time one of the red wisps was spat out the green light from the cloud became deeper and more vibrant. Finally, after about twenty minutes Rustle gave a grunt and the wisps amplified. There was a bright flash from the cauldron as the mass of energy was condensed the last little bit into a sphere the size of a gumball and popped out the top, propelled by the fading wisps.

Rustle casually reached out and caught the thing, holding it up for us to inspect. It was...green. There were some swirls of blue in there too that reminded me a bit of the grass he had added first, and some purple specks that looked like the powder he'd added last. It was beautiful. I also understood now why he hadn't minded us watching, because that whole process meant absolutely nothing to me in terms of applicable knowledge. It was a very pretty lightshow but if you weren't an Alchemist you wouldn't learn a thing from seeing it happen.

He tossed it to me. "Consider this a welcome present. I have one for each of you actually, but the other two are from my stockpile." He chuckled ruefully. "I don't feel like doing that two more times." Which was fair. I could see from his slight shaking and the sweat on his skin that he was exhausted. I wasn't sure how many times he had done that today already, but I was pretty sure that wasn't the first. I hadn't considered the drain from Alchemy, but assuming it was similar to enchanting even a G ranker would have a limited capacity.

A fact Shadowthorn seemed to realize. "Well, I think we've gotten as much as we can from the crafting hall for now. I wasn't planning to make this a day trip anyway, i just wanted to show you some of the interesting things while we were down here. Why don't we head back and leave them to their projects." My lips quirked at how much she sounded like a parent there, but she was right so I followed behind her as we headed back up to where the skyride was parked. The path back was easy enough to find since we hadn't gone too far from our original location, and we made decent time getting back to the field where we had touched down. Once we were there I mulled over my experience for the day.

I enjoyed coming to campus. I couldn't wait to learn more about the place and really get some use from my abilities here. Wishes would definitely net me some interesting things in a place like this. As we walked I put my hands in the pockets of my suit and balked a bit when I felt a piece of card stock under my hand. I pulled the card out, curious where it had come from, and froze. The card was a single piece of white paper with a black symbol on it, a skeletal hand clutching a stylized heart. Across the surface, scrawled in what looked like actual dried blood, was one word. "Heretic." Well shit. I just knew that couldn't mean anything good. Why did this nonsense always happen to me?