Project: Gamer Ver. Error, File Not Found
Anime Adjacent Entry: 068
Disclaimer Me Do: I own nothing you recognize. And most of what you don't recognize, I still don't own.
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25/7/1993
Sunday felt like a good day for what Areru had planned. In part because of the rains that were hitting the coasts of the country.
Tropical Storm Percy.
It would do a better job of hiding Areru's activities than plotting and scheming, trying to perform his ritual in the dead of night. Like most mages that have decided they were going to do something stupid tended to do.
Areru was actually working in the middle of the afternoon. It was a little after eleven thirty, actually, when he found a cave that was large enough to meet his needs in the forested mountains to the west of Okayama City.
He wasn't going to get to work on things close to home. That was just asking for trouble.
The interior of the cave wasn't large, but that was fine. Areru didn't need it to be. Just so long as it was big enough...
The teen looked around a bit more, ensuring there were no hidden animals that he would need to worry about, and immediately got to work. First and worst was building the proper environment-
Which did not take much work, really. He used Elemental Master to raise a rectangular platform in the middle of the cave, then smoothed out the floor around it. It didn't need to be perfect, just something he could work with.
His next order of business involved chalk. And lots of it. The mage got down on his hands and knees as he crawled and scooted around the cave, creating a relatively large set of sigils and symbols. The outermost symbol was a triangle, with circles drawn at each of the corners. Inside of the triangle, a circle was drawn around the table he'd raised with four additional circles placed upon its cardinal points at North, East, South and West.
Around the East circle, four smaller circles had also been drawn.
One ritual, one wish, and two specific transmutations to lead up to it.
Reaching out, Areru's hand clasped around thin air-
An instant before his other half, still at the house as the rains started to come down, teleported a hefty sack into his hand. Opening it, the mage pulled out four glowing crystals. Red, blue, green and yellow.
Fire, water, wind and earth.
The four elemental crystals were placed within the smallest set of circles and the mage licked his lips.
He... didn't actually remember where he learned the recipes from. They were part of the Alchemy skill, a part that was far more involved and complicated than just mixing herbs in water and feeding magic into them to create a potion.
Transmutation, Conversion, the concentration and transfer of strange, esoteric traits into materials that shouldn't possibly hold them. It was one of the various skills, truly an art form, where science and magic blended together into something beautifully and deliriously insane.
A part of Areru hoped that his efforts would fail, that what he remembered would have just been the mad ravings of a broken mind. That he would need to put together a different, alternative ritual.
But, placing his hands upon the chalk circle with the four elemental crystals within, Areru fed a drip of magic into it-
And the rings lit up, the components drawn to the center and fusing together before his very eyes!
The results were... pretty. And, if Areru were blind to magic, unimpressive.
Inside of the Eastern circle, twenty-six clover-shaped gemstones sat in a pile. Picking one up, Areru examined it, took note of its features.
It... looked like a quartet of little hearts, each one a different color of red, blue, green and yellow, had been fused together.
An Alchemic gemstone, an object that, derived -from- nature, could not have been formed -in- nature.
A Crystal Element.
Which meant that the next recipe was also likely to work.
Areru sniffed and got to work.
In the North circle, Areru placed the Red Stone he'd recovered from the Youma. A sort of vitality concentrate, pure life extract. And it hadn't cost the lives of dozens of men and women being condensed. Just Areru's dignity.
In the South circle, Areru placed a skeleton key made of Adamantine metal. A curious choice, really, but it was a piece that helped to insinuate that Alchemy was more than just a magical science. It drew upon properties that weren't always physical, borrowing from the metaphysical and conceptual to create a new whole.
The West circle... wasn't filled, yet.
Areru hadn't harvested the material for it. And it could wait a moment longer.
Maybe two.
Stepping out of the circles entirely, the half of Areru at home began to send over the coins and ingots that he'd made while the Areru in the cave began to pile them up, checking and double-checking that everything was where it was supposed to be.
This...
Areru wetted his lips, dry despite the humidity.
The magic he was about to do... it wasn't something that could be hidden. He was going to draw a lot of eyes. More than he was expecting, he was sure. After all, he somehow doubted that Kanto and Kansai were the only two organizations in Japan.
But he could either hide and cower...
Or he could push forward and deal with the consequences as they came.
Areru started with the platinum ingots. Two point five kilograms, two-thousand and five-hundred coins worth of metal. He closed his eyes and focused, pulling at the magic within his soul. His lips moved in a silent chant as his hands moved in strange, arcane patterns while he wove his magic into strange, unnatural shapes-
And then closed his right hand into a fist and thrust it forward, to the pile of platinum-
And, in a flash of light, the shiny ingots were replaced with ten rough diamonds, each one roughly the size of Areru's clasped-together hands.
That...
Areru... giggled.
Duplicraft... an ability that increased the amount of items he gained from magical crafting...
Worked with True Creation.
With a wide smile on his face, Areru repeated the process on the rest of his materials, his giggling swiftly rising to a crescendo of mad cackles!
He... could work with that.
He could definitely work with that!
But, well, that would be a concern for later. At the moment, Areru only needed one such diamond, not forty. With that in mind, the teen carefully placed the diamonds in the sack from earlier, along with the twenty-five excess Crystal Elements, and sent it back to the house before his other half sent him a fresh sack.
He had a feeling he was going to need it soon.
Setting the empty sack aside, along with the remaining diamond, Areru pursed his lips, closed his eyes and sighed heavily before opening his eyes and looking at the empty portion of the Alchemy circle around the dais.
He needed to fix that. And he needed the subject of today's ritual.
-----
Poking his head into the living room, Areru confirmed that Ryoko and Reis had settled in to catch the latest episode of a K-drama that was airing on the television set before he used Standstill and teleported to the cave with Ryoko's body in it.
Pressing a finger against the mottled, withered skin, he teleported again to the same cave his other half was working in. This time with Ryoko's empty body coming alongside him. She dropped down-
Into Areru's waiting hands. He only carried her for a moment, adjusting his position really, before laying her body down on the dais they'd raised.
That was the easy part, unfortunately.
Letting Standstill drop, both halves of Areru were hit with a brief wave of vertigo as the time-stopped memories were hammered into his greater self.
"...I don't want to do this part," one Areru admitted as his body began to elongate, as scales wormed their way out of his flesh.
"Neither do I," the still-human half of Areru admitted as he reached down to his side and extracted a knife, its edge gleaming brilliant blue.
The draconic half of Areru dug his claws into stone as he tried to force himself to hold still as the knife hesitantly crept towards his face-
-----
Ryoko felt a shiver pass through her and the astral projection looked around in confusion.
That was... weird?
The woman looked down to Reis, the little white dragon's tail thumping against the floor as the show started with a recap of where they previous episode had left off.
It was the strangest thing...
She could almost swear she could hear screaming.
-----
Areru's shoulder slammed into the wall of the cave and the dragon sobbed, at least as much as he could. Blood did not drip from his face so much as it poured.
His other half had dispelled before completing its grisly task. Areru... he couldn't handle feeling what he was doing twice. He couldn't handle experiencing the agony of his poor choices from both ends.
The only solace for the sobbing, crying dragon was that he was already regenerating.
Areru coughed, blood spraying from his throat, pouring from the hole where his tongue had been removed. He hacked and wheezed, red spittle coating the walls of the cave as a new muscle pushed its way out to replace the old one.
Stepping forward, his legs trembling as he forced himself not to collapse, Areru dropped an eye into the Western circle of the greater transmutation circle and hobbled onward. In the north-western circle of the greater triangle, Areru placed another eye.
Then he carefully, blindly stumbled over to the north-eastern circle and dropped the dragon's tongue into it.
He hated rituals. He despised them!
But he couldn't think of a more effective means of accomplishing his goals. None that he could make work, anyway.
A blood price...
A blood price, voluntarily paid...
Areru's mind refused to complete any thoughts as colors and shapes assaulted his newly-forming eyes. He couldn't think, agony and fire filled his veins.
And yet, a part of his mind still stayed on task. The dragon placed one bloody claw against the inner transmutation circle and it lit up, already primed off the magic in his blood. Light filled the cave and Areru released a low, keening whine as his new eyes lanced pain directly into his brain.
The dragon panted and struggled to stay on its feet as twenty-six crimson stones, bound in silvery-blue Adamantine, formed overtop of Ryoko's body.
Philosopher's stones. True Philosopher's stones.
Bottomless magical batteries, catalysts that would allow almost anything to be converted or transmuted into anything else, exemplifying and amplifying whatever properties were already present and taking them to new heights.
The dragon's jaw hung open, its gaze distant and listless as it moved without thought, following actions that had practically been pre-programmed. It plucked twenty-five of the Philosopher's Stones off of Ryoko and placed them carelessly in the sack he'd had sent over earlier before it disappeared, Teleported back to his room at home.
He wasn't done.
He didn't want to continue.
But he knew, deep in his heart, that he wouldn't have the courage to make a second attempt at this.
Approaching the southern point of the triangle, Areru made sure that the diamond he'd soon need was close at hand before he sat up straight. He breathed in deeply, actively suppressing the bloody cough that threatened to send him to the ground.
Two more steps, the dragon told himself as he looked down at the circle.
Just two more steps.
Areru placed his claws against his chest and inhaled, once-
And rammed the tips of his claws into his chest, screaming the entire time. His mind went white in agony and black clouds filled the corners of his restored vision. His tail thrashed and his free hand slapped and slammed into the stone floor-
Until, with a wet rip, Areru tore his own heart free of his chest.
The dragon's claws spasmed, threatening to crush the beating muscle before the twitching digits released and dropped the heart into the bottom circle.
Areru screamed, he cried and screamed and roared. Blood poured from the wound as his heart beat upon the ground.
He couldn't think. He couldn't-
One claw grabbed the diamond, almost forgotten amidst the viscera and pain.
"I... Wish..." Alchemist rasped in draconic, the breath struggling to come free from his paralyzed lungs. "That my friend, my Ryoko... had..." he coughed, fighting to get anything else out, but forced himself to continue as blackness claimed his vision. "Had... the traits... of all I freely... offer..."
The dragon dropped, his head slamming against the ground as the ritual markings around the cave lit up. The diamond in his limp claw turned to dust, and the various tissues that he'd sacrificed to fuel the magic dissolved into golden motes of light. They drifted to the center and coalesced above Ryoko's body before siphoning down, into and through the Philosopher's stone which was, itself, absorbed into her body.
Areru couldn't see, not really. The world had gone dark, its color lost as everything was replaced with the second-worst pain he'd felt across multiple lifetimes.
But some part of him, distant and untouched by his madness, felt a tiny spark of hope as Ryoko's chest rose and the woman's now-draconic heart beat.
