The library was an enormous hall near the edge of the Academy’s territory. It was over ten storeys tall, with an entrance like a courthouse and a sandstone hall that stretched off toward the border marker—a ring of poplar trees that ran all the way around the academy’s edge, which radiated an ancient power that Wulf couldn’t identify. He probably wouldn’t have even sensed it in his last life.

  The library’s doors were wide open, and thank the Field, because they were five times his height, and he wouldn’t have pushed them open on his own. Maybe with a golem to help, but even that was debatable.

  A pair of non-Ascendant guards in heavy plate armour and chainmail hauberks stood on the inside of the doors, watching him suspiciously. They held spears and shields marked with the green, eight-pointed star of Istalis, and short swords hung at their hips.

  “Decently guarded,” he muttered. But then again, looking past the vestibule, there were hundreds of shelves on the first level alone. All the manuscripts in here were probably worth the yearly output of a small nation.

  As soon as he tried to walk into the library’s main hall, the guards crossed their spears in front of him. “Where’s your rank-badge, son?”

  Wulf gulped, then looked down. He didn’t have one. In the chaos of his resurrection, he hadn’t even noticed.

  “I, uh, left it in the dorms,” he said. “Sorry. I’m a Low-Wood, if that makes a difference.” He held up his bracer and showed them the slip of parchment. “Does this help?”

  The guards sighed, then pulled their spears back. “Bring it next time, alright?” the other guard said.

  “Thank you!” Wulf took off into the library before the guards could change their minds.

  He didn’t need anything complex. Though there wasn’t an alchemy department, there had to be some sort of text on alchemy here.

  The library had an enormous atrium down its center, running from the bottom floor all the way up to the skylight above. The different floors all had different subjects, and there were plenty of tables and chairs scattered about (most occupied, of course, by other students).

  The first floor contained mostly introductory manuscripts, which was all he needed. He walked at a brisk pace, boots clacking on the marble floors, and stared at the labels on the shelves. Golem Studies, Golem Engineering and Modification for Artificers, Field-Based Magic Basics, The Oronith Crew, and Theory for Rangers.

  The farther down the hall he walked, the more frustrated he grew, until finally he reached an entire segment of miscellaneous books. For nearly a half-hour, he walked up and down it, running his finger along the spines, until he reached a small, beaten-up manuscript with a faded cover and tattered pages. The cover read: Introduction to Potion Alchemy.

  Perfect.

  He hunted down a librarian—an old woman in a white robe, with long gray hair and pointed ears. She wore a steel vambrace with a piece of enchanted parchment on it, whose ink had shifted to display an inventory of books. He asked, “Excuse me, miss, may I borrow this book?”

  The librarian squinted and pushed her glasses higher up on her nose, then leaned closer and said, “That old rag? You may, but all books have a two week deadline, and I’ll expect even this one back by then.” She tapped her vambrace. “I will know, and I’ll need your name.”

  “Wulf,” he said.

  She stared at him blankly. “Full name.”

  Oh. Whoops. He hadn’t exactly frequented libraries in his old life.

  “Wulf Hrothen of Carolaign, ma’am.”

  “Thank you.”

  At that, a few heads perked up from a table nearby. Someone whispered, “It’s him.”

  Oh no. Wulf turned and took a step toward the library doors, about to leave, when the students at the table hopped up. They were first years, judging by their rank—Low-Woods, all of them.

  He didn’t recognize any of them, though.

  “You’re the guy who beat Lord Harrel, aren’t you?” a boy asked, clutching onto his textbook and an ink quill.

  “Uh, yeah.” Wulf turned and was about to walk away, but he stopped himself. His promise hadn’t been to sit in his room and make potions—that’d hardly be any different than the life he lived before. He swivelled back to face the students. “Yeah, it was me.”

  “Can you tell us about Carolaign?” a girl with long black hair asked. “We’ve never been there. Is it full of warlords? Do you guys dress in furs? I heard you lived in tents and are complete nomads. Is it true?”

  Wulf chuckled. “No, no.” With a sigh, he said, “Admittedly, the villages are small, but we’re farmers, and there are permanent settlements. And we produce a third of the confederacy’s grain. But yeah, it can, uh, get a little rough with the bandits sometimes, and…”

  “Oh, don’t pester him, Lianna,” another girl said. “I’m sure he’s been through a lot there, a lot more than us.”

  Well, that was true. But not necessarily about Carolaign. His childhood had been mostly peaceful.

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  He shrugged. “I’m sure everyone has their troubles.” He gave a slight smile, then said, “Nice to meet you, though. I—”

  “There he is!” someone shouted from down the hall.

  Three boys marched down the hall toward him. The librarian turned toward them and raised a hand to shush them, but stopped at the last moment and pulled back.

  These boys were dressed like the others—white tunic, brown pants, shiny black boots—but they also had a second pin beneath their Low-Wood badges. A circle with an arrow through its center.

  “Fletchers,” Wulf muttered. No wonder the librarian didn’t want to be on their bad side, if what the headmaster said was true.

  “He’s the guy,” one of the Fletchers said. He had short blond hair and pointed ears, and green, plant-like markings ran along his high cheekbones. An elf. As it turned out, them being immortal was a complete myth, but they made excellent Rangers.

  “Hey, hey.” Wulf held up his hands and backed away. None of them had golems, but he didn’t know if they were Mages or not, and he didn’t need to get in another fight, not when the headmaster had let him off lightly.

  Besides, he was starting to get a headache, and he needed some time to just relax and process the events of the past few days. “I’ve got no issues with you guys, alright? Unless you want there to be issues.”

  The three of them stopped right in front of Wulf, staring at him. He was slightly taller than them, and his shoulders were slightly wider than theirs. But everyone was watching, and the Fletcher kids had to know that, too.

  A different Fletcher with dark skin and wolf ears atop his head said, “Watch your back. You don’t mess with Harrel and get off without a scratch. He’s friends with Umoch.”

  “Well, then rest assured, because the headmaster docked me two ration credits a day.” Wulf kept his expression completely blank. “Who’s Umoch?”

  The group of Ascendants at the table gaped at Wulf in disbelief, and the Fletchers looked like they were about to explode. Wulf let a grin slip onto his face, but truly, he had no idea who Umoch was.

  “The son of Sir Umoch, head of the Central Fletcher’s Guild,” said the elven boy. “He’ll hear about this. And he knows about you.”

  “...Right.” Wulf shrugged, then turned away. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  Without another word, he walked down the hall, heading straight toward the library’s entrance. Sure enough, the Fletchers didn’t have the guts to follow.

  ~ ~ ~

  As Wulf was walking across campus, he began reading the potion alchemy textbook. It began with an epigraph:

  [Alchemists] are rare, and powerful [Alchemists] are even rarer. But with the help of my writings, the keen student will craft enough liquid strength to topple mountains, transmute scrap into gold, and alter the fabric of the universe to seat himself at the very top.

  — The Great Alchemist Panne

  The book then went into a lengthy description of some potential alchemy applications. There weren’t very many that humans used in the modern day, save for potion making, but that was simply because human alchemists weren’t very common, and powerful human alchemists were a once-in-a-millenia occurrence.

  But elven alchemists, while middling in strength, were excellent crafters. Instead of smithing, they used alchemy to transmute standard certain wooden materials into weapons (which the textbook promised to get into later). Glass-smithing, it seemed, was also within the purview of alchemy.

  Smithing. Not glassblowing. No, the textbook didn’t elaborate.

  But Wulf wasn’t interested in all the crazy applications, yet. He had to start small—with potions.

  He didn’t get far into the textbook before it recommended a distillation setup—pretty much every potion he tried to make would need it. If he distilled an ingredient down to a higher concentration, it would invariably raise the quality of the ingredient. Depending on the alchemist’s skill, they could raise an ingredient’s quality by an entire Tier.

  So he needed equipment.

  On his way back to the dormitories, he stopped by the Artificers’ labs. As he understood, it was a relatively new building, constructed in a modern style—blocky white stone, with lots of windows, and a roof that overhung the pathways and carriage loop at its front. A few wagons waited in front of its main doors, offloading lab supplies for Artificers to practice with.

  Wulf walked in the front entrance like he belonged, radiating as much confidence as he could. On the inside, the building was bland and brutalist. There was an atrium for students to gather (which they did), and labs with glass walls all along the edge. It might have been early in the semester, but labs had begun. Some of the rooms were already in use.

  Artificers in white coats and heavy helmets screwed together metal constructs, some carved runes, and in the high-level labs, practiced repairing life-size Oronith components. One room contained an entire stone finger, and a team of artificers worked to repair the rune lines at its joints.

  Wulf picked an empty lab room in the corner, then pushed open the frosted glass door. Since he didn’t have a rank badge, he’d simply tell anyone that he was a teaching assistant if he got caught.

  The lab room had two main rows of tables with stools behind them. Drawers lined the walls. He picked a drawer, opened it, and hunted through. Artificers wouldn’t need to work with many liquids, but sometimes, paints and solvents were important for their constructs.

  At the back of the drawer, he found two glass flasks, and he plucked them out. Then, from a different drawer, he retrieved a simple metal holder for them, and a small burn-box—a metal and mesh container designed to hold a fire without spreading sparks everywhere. Useful for Artificers’ work, but also for his work. Thankfully, this one still had Middle-Wood Tier phoenix dust in the bottom. When he lit it, it’d burn for hours.

  Phoenix dust was somewhat rare, but since Istalis had begun farming them, it was significantly less expensive. It wouldn’t be a huge loss for the Academy.

  With his equipment in-hand, he needed to make just one more stop before he could return to the dorms.

  ~ ~ ~

  Wulf hid his stolen flasks, frame, and burn-box behind his textbook as he trekked across the campus. When he reached the mess hall, a large but nondescript building at the very center of the academy, with hundreds of chimneys on its roof and round windows on every wall, he stepped off the walkway and circled around its back.

  Behind the kitchen, where the cooks dumped their leftover cooking water (including some low-purity mana water, for the occasions that they fed the third and fourth years mana-infused food), was a patch of weeds.

  They shouldn’t have been anything special, but they’d been growing beside the chimney for years, getting watered with low-strength mana-water.

  He bent down and plucked a set of dandelions. Their heads were going to seed, but he needed the stalks and the leaves.

  When he gripped them tight and concentrated on them, the ink in his enchanted paper shifted, and displayed a new message:

  Dandelions (Low-Wood Quality)

  A plant grown with no love, scorned by all who see it. No effect.

  But at least the Field recognized it. Anything could become magical if given enough mana, but that was the trick. Rarely did a plant harvest enough mana in its life to become powerful.

  Tucking the stalks and leaves into his pocket, Wulf set off toward the dorms. He had everything he needed to get started.