Chapter Thirty-Eight: Growing Affection in Residence (Part One)

If I had known from the start that Sage Song’s so-called “great idea” meant I would once again be saddled with mountains of quartzite to grind into lenses, I never would have entertained the notion of helping him improve his eyesight with a telescope.

The nearsighted elven ranger seemed quite confident in his assumptions. He emptied nearly every last coin from his pockets, purchasing a vast array of alchemical ingredients for refining glass. I maintained he was spending far too much merely to test a hypothesis—just a third of those materials would have sufficed—but Sage Song, looking thoroughly dejected, replied helplessly, “May as well spend it now; if I leave anything, Feiyin will wring it out of me sooner or later anyway.”

I couldn’t muster a strong enough argument to refute him.

Once we’d gathered everything we needed, we made our way to Edgewell’s laboratory and commenced the soul-crushingly tedious work. “Soul-crushing” and “tedious” were apt descriptors, but only for me. To craft a telescope, I had once single-handedly worn down nearly an entire mountain, toiling in this cramped, shabby lab, the hardship and dullness understood only by the omnipresent, omniscient supreme deity, Darimos. Now, faced once more with the magic furnace that looked uncannily like a giant coffin, I could not suppress a powerful sense of psychological dread; the road ahead seemed a boundless darkness, draining all hope, making me wish I could toss myself in with the glassmaking ingredients and melt away into oblivion.

Yet the carefree elven ranger showed not a shred of sympathy for my misery. It was his first visit to an alchemist’s home, and everything around him fascinated him. He bounded up to Mr. Edgewell, nearly pressed his face to my teacher’s nose to get a good look, then promptly sprayed him with startled spittle, exclaiming, “Pfft… Einstein? He’s the one teaching alchemy?!”

It was clear Sage Song had mistaken my teacher for some other gaunt, wild-haired, bright-eyed, eccentric old man. I must admit, if an old man possesses all those features, the difference between them is indeed negligible.

Sage Song sprawled across the table, watching Edgewell conduct his explosive experiments with great enthusiasm, utterly oblivious to the danger descending upon him, and kept bombarding him with all manner of odd questions: “Hey, Jeff, what’s in this?” He grabbed a small vial filled with black, granular material, pinched out a particle to toy with, and turned to ask me.

“Mouse droppings,” I replied, glancing back to see the overly curious elven ranger actually licking my teacher’s biological catalyst.

“Ah, ptoo ptoo ptoo ptoo ptoo…” Sage Song hurriedly tossed the mouse droppings back onto the table, then pointed to a basin-sized tool at his feet and asked, “So… what’s this for?”

“That’s a small rotary solid pulverizer. It grinds large, hard objects into powder. Usually, we just call it the millstone.” I kept working, only briefly glancing back.

“And what’s this?” Sage Song picked up another gadget from the table.

His barrage of trivial questions wore on my patience, but I forced myself to explain, “Mr. Edgewell calls this a molecular polymer of calcium carbonate and silicon dioxide. In ordinary terms, we call it ‘stone’…” I shook my head in exasperation. “...Even with your poor eyesight, you should at least recognize this, right?” I simply couldn’t fathom where his boundless curiosity originated.

Upon hearing my impatience, Sage Song finally quieted down, wandering the lab and inspecting every tool with keen interest, as if he might discover some hidden amusement invisible to me. His silence did not last, however. Before long, he could not resist asking, “Jeff, I promise this is the last question. I just can’t figure out—why does your teacher’s face look so dark?”

“That’s because… ah, careful!”

Boom! Before I could finish, an inevitable explosion occurred on Edgewell’s workbench—a blazing fireball and billowing smoke burst forth, enveloping Sage Song, who had stuck his face in for a closer look.

When the smoke cleared, Mr. Edgewell cheerfully glanced around and, with his trademark simple smile, said—perhaps to himself, perhaps to my elven friend—“Don’t worry, it’s just a minor mishap.”

“…Now you know why his face is always so dark,” I remarked.

Sage Song’s face was smeared with grease; he exhaled deeply, shooting a jet of black smoke, then nodded woodenly.

This little mishap did nothing to slow my progress. Having nearly gone mad crafting telescopes before, and with my alchemy skills approaching level seven, producing and purifying glass was, though tedious, a straightforward physical task with little technical challenge. Before long, the ore and ingredients Sage Song had purchased were transformed into small chunks of “pure glass.”

The real headache lay in grinding the lenses. Sage Song needed two concave lenses, thin at the center and thick at the edges. Unlike crafting a telescope from blueprints, I had no idea what the finished lenses should look like—success depended entirely on my elven friend’s subjective judgment. Each time I produced a lens, he’d hold it to one eye, squint the other, and peer through. His gaze was vacant, like a stagnant pond, utterly devoid of life. He’d shake his head in disappointment and ask me to grind it thinner—until, inevitably, the lens shattered from overwork.

I’m not sure if my increased alchemy skill improved my command over materials, or if prolonged practice made me more adept at lens grinding, but I was relieved to find my success rate had markedly improved. No longer did I clumsily smash the glass into shards on the grinder. Instead, my technique became lighter and more precise, adjusting angles delicately and feeling subtle changes with my fingertips, causing imperceptible transformations in the glass.

It was a marvelous sensation. Though the glass barely changed—just a slight thinning at the edges, invisible to the eye—my fingers grew ever more sensitive, able to detect the tiniest variations in the lenses.

With Sage Song’s constant adjustments, the lenses grew thicker and thicker, soon surpassing even my shield in heft, though he still felt they were too thin. I wondered how thick a concave lens he truly needed; if he meant merely to improve his eyesight, it seemed a waste. If he made the lens large enough to cover his entire face, its protective value might rival that of a sturdy steel helmet.

When grinding telescope lenses before, I’d noticed something curious: convex lenses magnify objects, while concave lenses shrink them. Yet now, this principle seemed nullified by the immense thickness of these lenses. Peering through them, I saw only a dizzying, chaotic world—a swirl of blurred colors twisting together into a distorted, oppressive realm, enough to make one’s head ache. It was the perfect tool for self-torment; wear it over your eyes and you could faint from dizziness without even trying. And yet someone claimed it could “improve vision”? Truly, this world is so vast that encountering the strangest of people is inevitable.

After hundreds of failed attempts, I’d all but lost hope in our endeavor. I continued, partly because my ranger friend was so enthralled, and I didn’t wish to spoil his mood; partly because I noticed my alchemy skill slowly advancing with each lens I ground—since it wasn’t my money at stake, I treated it as free practice. I felt guilty for profiting off Sage Song’s resources, yet could not help but relish such a fortunate, costless opportunity.

(How frustrating—why can everyone guess I’m making spectacles?)