Beast Slayer Online: Initialization
Copyright© 2026 by CaffeinatedTales
Chapter 72
For a witcher, this was little more than strong spirits with a medicinal bite.
For an ordinary human, though, the potion would still leave them dizzy and sick to the stomach, even if it did not kill them outright. The real problem was concentration.
Lannor pinched a dried honeysuckle petal between his fingers and frowned at it. The medicinal compounds in crude materials were not distributed evenly. According to Bordon’s notes, the useful essence of this particular honeysuckle gathered near the outer edge of the petal, furthest from the stem. The lower fifth contained barely anything of value.
And that was only within a single petal. Flowers from different regions varied even more wildly.
Alchemists compensated through instinct and experience, adjusting quantities by eye and feel until the final potion reached a workable concentration.
Back in China, traditional medicine adapted into modern pharmaceutical methods relied on molecular extraction, isolating active compounds into nearly pure substances pressed into tablets. But in the world Lannor now inhabited, talking about molecular engineering bordered on fantasy.
After a brief silence, he made his decision.
“Mentos, if we abandon our existing chemistry-based methodology and instead follow the local alchemical framework directly, how quickly can we learn?”
“Estimated completion time for complete mastery of Swallow production: approximately ten hours of practice.”
Most of those ten hours would not be spent brewing, but cataloguing medicinal content and building an experiential database.
A conventional alchemist devoted the better part of a lifetime to identifying herbs. They had only ordinary human senses to rely on, memorizing scent, texture, color, moisture, bitterness. Miss practice for a day and the hands dulled; miss three and even the mind lost its sharpness.
But Lannor and Mentos could treat every petal of every flower as an independent sample. One sack of dried blossoms gave them more raw data than a human alchemist might accumulate across decades.
After all, ordinary alchemists only discovered whether their instincts were correct after the potion was complete.
Wasn’t experience the goal? Then this was experience taken to its logical extreme.
And Mentos’ perfect memory meant Lannor would never suffer skill degradation.
The method resembled training an artificial intelligence to play chess or go. Forget theory, forget elegant understanding. Feed it samples. Endless samples.
“We’ll proceed this way, Mentos. If we eventually develop a more precise method, we can return to rigorous chemistry. Right now we need workable potions, fast.”
Command Update Directive: Received Support Mode: Transitioning ... Status: Completed Instruction: Initiate Ingredient Identification Objective: Expand Data Capacity From Arya’s perspective, Lannor suddenly abandoned all the impressive glassware. Instead, he dumped the entire sack of raw ingredients across the table, petals, leaves, roots, stems, then leaned over them one by one. He watched them closely, sniffed them lightly, even touched some with the tip of his tongue.
A witcher’s heightened senses proved terrifyingly useful in laboratory work.
As more herbal data entered the database, his Alchemy proficiency climbed at a visible pace.
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