WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: LilGuyBlastoise
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◈ The Economics of an Alchemist ◈
Chapter 7
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“Big brother, I’m off.”
“I’m heading out too!”
After a hearty breakfast, his siblings left for work and school.
The house fell silent.
Jaeha opened the windows to air the place out. After pulling a cold cola from the refrigerator and drinking it, he went into the living room and leaned back on the sofa.
‘Can alchemy really be used in the real world?’
The thought had filled his mind while he prepared breakfast for his siblings.
Alchemy had limitless potential, but he had no idea where to begin if he wanted to recreate it in reality.
The scrap paper he had torn up and thrown away. The Transmutation Array he had drawn on it was imprinted in Jaeha’s mind like a photograph. But understanding it and recreating it were two different matters.
This was nothing like making the supersaturated sodium acetate solution used in click hand warmers.
It was like an ordinary person looking at the circuit board of a cutting-edge electronic device. They could see where the lines connected and bent, but they would have no understanding of the principles behind how it worked.
Even more discouraging was the fact that the Transmutation Array itself had been a failed creation that ended in an explosion.
The dreams did not give him Edwin’s knowledge. They only gave him fragments of information from Edwin’s intense thoughts while deeply focused, along with what he had taken in through his five senses.
The materials were another problem.
Jaeha had no idea what the blue ink Edwin used to draw the Transmutation Array, or the golden catalyst he used to activate it, were made of.
Could he even obtain them on Earth?
“Phew...”
Jaeha sighed, his chest tight. Then he suddenly realized that he was trying, one way or another, to bring alchemy into reality.
He did not know the principles. He did not know the materials. They might not even exist.
In the past, he should have dismissed it as insanity. He needed to work for tomorrow’s survival, and he had no room to spare for the alchemy of another world when he did not even know whether it would work.
Yet now, his heart pounded madly whenever he thought of alchemy.
A faint, humorless laugh escaped him.
Jaeha decided to admit his feelings honestly. He wanted to use alchemy to become a predator ruling from the top of the capitalist pyramid.
That was all there was to it.
‘I’ll recreate alchemy in reality.’
Having made his decision, Jaeha rose from the sofa and went to his room. He sat at his desk and opened his planner.
Once he had set a goal, he needed a plan.
On the first page of his planner, he wrote down two absolute rules.
[Maximum permitted investment: 30 million won]
[Deadline: 6 months]
To survive in the capitalist ecosystem, he needed clear stop-loss lines.
First, an investment of 30 million won.
Ten percent of the money he had on hand. This was the cost of testing the hypothesis that alchemy might be reproducible in reality.
If the hypothesis proved correct, he was fully willing to make a second and third investment.
Next, a deadline of six months.
Spending any longer than that would be like a perennial exam taker clinging to a test they could never pass.
‘The sooner I succeed, the better.’
Jaeha was almost certain that the strange events happening to him were side effects of the anticancer drug.
He could not rule out the possibility that they would disappear as soon as he stopped taking the medicine.
Once he set his stop-loss lines, his racing heartbeat settled. His boiling thoughts cooled as though someone had dumped ice water over his head.
Jaeha placed his pen on the second page of the planner.
‘There are three essential tasks to solve.’
1. Find blue ink or a substitute.
2. Find a golden catalyst or a substitute.
3. Understand the principles of the Transmutation Array.
Once he wrote them down, every one of them seemed daunting.
They were not things he could find with an internet search. Tasks that would be difficult to even begin with only real-world knowledge.
‘I need more information.’
Jaeha’s gaze turned toward his bed.
It was safe to assume the hypothesis was true: memories and emotions immediately before sleep determined the content of his dreams.
Until now, he had been no more than a passive viewer staring at a screen without knowing which movie would play.
That had to change.
From Edwin’s life, he had to become an editor who relentlessly cut out only the information he needed.
Turning back to his planner, Jaeha moved his pen busily. Whenever he got stuck, he spun the pen between his fingers and sank into thought.
A little later, Jaeha closed the planner and stood up. He was done thinking in the corner of his room. It was time to go outside.
‘I need to find a workshop first.’
Avoiding his siblings’ eyes was important, but there was a more fundamental reason.
He had clearly seen what happened when alchemy failed in his dreams. He could not conduct such insane experiments in the middle of an apartment building.
He needed somewhere nobody would care whether there was a loud blast or a revolting chemical stench.
Jaeha pulled a black cap low over his head and picked up his wallet.
The sparsely populated outskirts of the Seoul metropolitan area. An abandoned factory or old container warehouse near Gimpo or Paju seemed suitable.
* * *
Three months flew by.
The first thing Jaeha did was find a workshop. An old container on the outskirts of Gimpo, near a deserted waste treatment site. The rent was 300,000 won per month.
It was the perfect secret workshop, where nobody would care if explosions went off or toxic gas rose into the air.
He commuted in the old compact SUV he had bought secondhand during his construction laborer days.
He often could not make it home and slept on the creaking camp bed inside the container. There were many days when he lacked the strength to return home after overusing the All-Seeing Eye.
Whenever he stayed out overnight, he gave his siblings vague excuses. He had often been away from home before, so they did not particularly suspect anything.
He thought only about alchemy all day. Even that was not enough, so before sleeping, he always spent time meditating to ensure he had the dream he wanted.
There were results. Memories of Edwin attending the Academy, discussions with classmates, and more.
On especially lucky days, the tutor who had helped Edwin awaken the All-Seeing Eye appeared. Lessons with the tutor, who taught the basics of alchemy, were like rain after a drought.
Of course, there were plenty of duds too.
Those were cases where small events from daily life had triggered the dreams.
The day Jaeha gulped down horribly bitter espresso to wake himself up, Edwin tasted an unbearably bitter herb and kept dry-heaving.
The day Jaeha ate spoiled gimbap and got an upset stomach, Edwin spent the entire night running to the bathroom.
Over time, he learned some tricks.
For example, he kept woody perfume on hand so the room would smell similar to the study where Edwin received lessons from his tutor.
What Jaeha found most effective was actually studying.
He began again with middle-school-level science.
His memory had improved dramatically after the clinical trial. He could recall what had been written on any page and line of a book as though looking at a photograph.
Starting with high-school-level material, there were things he did not understand one by one. For now, he simply memorized them.
Through that process, Jaeha was able to assess himself coolly. He was not the sort of genius who could derive new theories through what people commonly called “intuition.”
Combining the knowledge he gained from Edwin’s dreams with his efforts in reality, he chose the first alchemy he would attempt.
Reverse Transmutation.
A destructive act that collapsed molecular lattices. Breaking something was easier than assembling it. Alchemy was the same.
The material he would use was graphite, mechanical-pencil lead.
He chose something unlikely to cause serious injury even if he failed. If Reverse Transmutation succeeded, the pencil lead should collapse into black powder.
He had no choice in the method of transmutation.
According to the knowledge from his dreams, there were two main methods of drawing a Transmutation Array.
The first was Direct-Contact Transmutation, which inscribed the array directly onto an object.
It had high energy efficiency and allowed precise control, but it had a fatal weakness. A Transmutation Array was a kind of formula. The more difficult the phenomenon it was meant to cause, the more precise its structure needed to be. Naturally, the array had to become larger.
A 0.5 mm mechanical-pencil lead had no space to draw an array in the first place, so Direct-Contact Transmutation was immediately ruled out.
The method Jaeha would attempt was Induced Transmutation, in which he drew a Transmutation Array on a two-dimensional medium and placed the object on top of it.
It was an improved method developed by alchemists to overcome the limitations of Direct-Contact Transmutation.
Because energy had to be projected, the formula was more difficult. However, Jaeha intended to perform Reverse Transmutation rather than Transmutation. The added difficulty was minor enough to ignore.
Besides, if he truly managed to implement alchemy in reality someday, this would be the main method he needed to use.
He had found substitutes for all the key materials needed to draw a Transmutation Array.
First, the blue ink.
At first, he thought every ink used to draw a Transmutation Array was blue. That was not true. The inks came in many colors: red, white, black, and more.
He had found a clue to their nature two days ago, in a dream where Edwin made ink with classmates at the Academy.
They dissolved silver in nitric acid to make a transparent liquid, then mixed various mineral powders into it to create ink.
A process that dissolved silver in acid and dispersed it as ions. It was eerily similar to the principle behind metal ink manufacturing.
Jaeha immediately opened a browser and searched for conductive silver ink.
For a moment, he imagined laying out ultra-high-purity ink used in semiconductor manufacturing and experimenting with it, but reality was an imposing wall.
Less than 100 mL cost several million won.
With his tiny budget, he could not burn millions on a few bottles of ink. He found and bought reasonably priced conductive silver ink for individual use.
Next, the golden catalyst.
The material used to make it was definitely something that did not exist on Earth.
A mineral with an unchanging luster like gold, a density greater than lead, and the ability to create fine vibrations by itself at room temperature while emitting blue phosphorescence.
The substance alchemists in Edwin’s world called Aether. No mineral on Earth could have all those physical properties at once.
Jaeha did not despair.
He constantly considered something else that could replace the golden catalyst.
The change in his thinking came like lightning.
It happened while he organized the delivered inks.
‘Silver is the most conductive metal. Then maybe...!’
The sight of Edwin experimenting on a piece of steel flashed through his mind.
The crackling blue spark that flew the moment the golden catalyst touched the ink. The sharp tearing sound that scraped at his eardrums.
It was chillingly similar to an arc discharge, a phenomenon created when voltage tore through the air.
Then perhaps the catalyst’s true nature was a power source that kick-started the circuit called a Transmutation Array by suddenly pumping it full of high-voltage electricity.
If so, Aether could be replaced.
‘Today, I’ll prove that hypothesis.’
Jaeha laid a rubber sheet over the workbench and began drawing a Transmutation Array with a pen filled with conductive silver ink. His movements were mechanical and cold, as though he would allow no error whatsoever.
At the array’s center, at the invisible singularity that twisted the binding force of matter, he placed a small handful of 0.5 mm mechanical-pencil leads.
“Phew...”
Jaeha breathed out and put on work goggles to protect his eyes. He stripped the insulation from a copper wire connected to a battery, then brought it toward the Transmutation Array.
Click.
As he flipped the switch, blue sparks flew from the end of the wire. A powerful current raced through pathways formed of silver nanoparticles.
Wheeeeee!
A high-pitched sound that seemed to tear through the air stabbed at his eardrums. Mist rose over the Transmutation Array, and its geometric patterns began to glow.
Jaeha’s All-Seeing Eye captured that moment.
A massive wave of light swept across the previously quiet microscopic world. The energy circling through it was no longer mere electricity. It was closer to a storm trying to forcibly rewrite the blueprint of matter.
The carbon atoms making up the pencil leads began to tremble precariously like candle flames.
‘Did it work?!’
The moment he thought that,
Boom!
A sharp blast sounded, followed by a flash that stabbed his eyes. The acrid smell of burning rubber hit Jaeha’s nose.
“Cough, cough!”
Startled, he stepped back for a moment, then waved away the smoke and examined the workbench.
It was horrific. The Transmutation Array he had drawn so carefully had failed to withstand the overload and turned into something like charred coal. The rubber sheet was grotesquely warped as well.
It was a failure.
And yet, a smile hung on Jaeha’s lips. His eyes shone with an almost strange vitality.
“...It was possible.”
The experiment itself had failed.
But he had clearly seen it. The moment electricity passed through the Transmutation Array, an alchemical phenomenon had activated. Confirming that alone was more than enough gain.
Jaeha opened his planner.
Over the two absolute rules he had written on the first page, [Maximum permitted investment: 30 million won] and [Deadline: 6 months], he drew large red Xs.
The situation had changed. The stakes had to change too.
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