Past the marsh lay a stretch of woods, and the ground climbed steadily underfoot. Following this slope upward would bring them to the ridge where the dragon had made its lair.
But before they went another step, Dar suddenly stopped short, glanced left and right, and in a moment had stepped around a large tree; then he stood there staring down at the ground, dazed and abstracted.
Xia Ya walked over after him and looked where Dar was looking — and there on the ground, plain as day, lay a corpse!
The corpse looked about seven or eight parts out of ten like Xia Ya did right now: charred black all over, burned past recognition, its original features impossible to make out.
To judge by the state of the fellow, he must have been burned crossing that marsh, dragged himself this far, and then died of his injuries.
Something about Dar's expression seemed off. Xia Ya noticed and asked, "You know him?"
"He was one of the mages I ran into." Dar actually sighed, his eyes going dark and distant. "He was the one who suggested burying me in the ground."
Xia Ya yelped, "He's burned to a crisp like that and you can still recognize him?!"
Dar snorted, gave Xia Ya a rather contemptuous look, and pointed at the corpse. "First: most of his clothes burned off, but from what's left you can still just make out the material. Only mages wear a leather robe like that. Second: there's a charred wooden staff beside the body. I can tell it's walnut — the wood they use specifically for making mages' wands. Third: his right hand has only four fingers. That's an easy trait to remember."
He paused, and then Dar smiled. For that instant there was something soft and sinister in his smiling eyes, and he said slowly, in a flat, indifferent tone, "Fourth: any bastard who does me wrong, I'll know him even if he's burned to ashes."
By the last sentence, that look had even Xia Ya's nerves crawling. He shivered, feeling that the way Dar's gaze had slid over to him was somehow uncanny, and hastily put on a fierce scowl and glared back.
Dar didn't take up the staring contest. He merely smiled, turned his head aside, crouched down, and reached out to grope over the corpse.
At the sight of what Dar was doing, Xia Ya's eyes lit up!
That's right! Mages are all rich men — maybe this dead bastard is carrying something good. He had barely finished the thought when Dar indeed pulled a sheepskin packet out from inside the corpse's robe.
The sheepskin packet had been worn against the skin, so although the man was burned black, the clothes over his chest and belly hadn't burned all the way through. Parts of the packet's outer layers were scorched too, but when it was opened, layer by layer, the contents were completely intact.
Dar had opened only two layers before Xia Ya snatched it out of his hands, shot him a savage glare, and barked, "Hey! You're my servant now — everything we find belongs to me!"
Dar didn't argue. He smiled faintly and stood off to one side with his hands hanging at his sides.
When the sheepskin was fully unfolded, inside lay a small yellowed booklet of a few dozen pages, bound in leather. Besides that there was a transparent sphere the size of a thumb; whether it was glass or crystal, there was no telling.
Xia Ya opened the booklet first. The yellowed pages were crammed with tiny, fly-speck writing, and beside some of the text were little illustrations and annotations — Xia Ya was dumbstruck, because he couldn't read a single character of it.
Dar saw his embarrassment. His eyes flicked over the booklet in Xia Ya's hands, and he smiled contemptuously. "That's Magick Tongue, the language reserved for mages of the Byzantine Empire. It's only taught in the church, and it's called the divine tongue. As a rule, mages' notebooks, magic incantations, and a great many of the church's precious doctrinal classics are all recorded in it. Common folk can't learn these letters."
Xia Ya flushed, then glared at Dar suspiciously. "You can read it?"
"Hmph." Dar gave an unhurried, unruffled huff, neither confirming nor denying.
So the bastard does read it... Xia Ya thought, annoyance flaring, but he couldn't bring himself to swallow his pride and ask. He bulled ahead instead. "So you can read it. Big deal. Your lord here simply never studied it. If I had studied it, I'd read it too. What's so special about that."
Just then the wretch, who had finally calmed down from her earlier panic, overheard the two of them and timidly broke in. "Um... Magick Tongue. I can sort of read a little of it."
"Oh?" Xia Ya's eyes lit up at once and his face split into a grin. He stepped over and patted her. "Ha! Good, good, good. A fitting first spoil for yours truly, Xia Ya."
The wretch hesitated, a little embarrassed. "I really can only read a tiny bit. I've never looked at any books on magic — only some of the church's religious classics. I studied a little, that's all."
Xia Ya had already stuffed the booklet straight into her hands. "Never mind that," he said magnanimously. "Just see what's written inside."
The wretch bent her head and studied the writing on the title page, hesitated, and said, "Mm, this seems to say...
<i>A Lexicon of Magical Mate...
</i> Mate—" Here her face went red; reading was clearly still a struggle.
"<i>A Lexicon of Magical Materials — Volume Three: Materials Specific to Alchemy</i>," Dar said from the side, arms folded, entirely at his leisure.
"What is alchemy?" Xia Ya's face was eager, his eyes shining. "Is it a kind of magic for refining gold?"
Clearly, this bumpkin's knowledge of magic was pitifully thin...
Before the wretch could speak, Dar couldn't help but sneer, "Gold? Ha! If an alchemist mage heard you say that, he'd kill you out of sheer fury."
He paused, sighed, and looked at Xia Ya with something like pity. "Alchemy is a branch of magic. The 'gold' in it means all the magical metal materials. Ordinary metal generally repels magical elements, so only metal refined by special means can be imbued with magic. In the broad sense, alchemy means refining all kinds of useful magical implements — for instance, using special methods to imbue metal with magic, which is what we usually mean by weapons, armor, and other gear with magical enhancements.
And in the broadest sense the concept has since been stretched: every method of making magical implements is now called alchemy. Making a magic cloak, a magically imbued ring, even making magic scrolls — all these crafts are called 'alchemy.' Two hundred years ago even 'potion-making' was folded into the category of alchemy. Legend has it that at the very pinnacle, an alchemist who becomes a grand archmage of alchemy can craft artifact-grade magical equipment of immeasurable power. Unfortunately, word is that no alchemist mage that formidable has appeared on the continent for a very, very long time.
Alchemy is the hardest of all the magic systems to learn. To practice it you must have a broad grounding in basic magical theory and be thoroughly versed in every other school of magic; only with that scholarly foundation can you produce magical materials and implements of the different schools.
A qualified alchemist mage is, in principle, an expert in several schools at once — at the very least, utterly at home with the uses and properties of magical materials. That's why it's so hard to learn, and why, by now, alchemist mages on the continent have grown fewer and fewer.
Most important of all, alchemist mages generally pour all their energy into studying the magical materials of the various schools, and possess no powerful combat skills of their own. And unless they cultivate to a profound level, they can't craft powerful magical equipment either. Simply mastering the theory of every school of magic takes up almost an ordinary mage's whole lifetime; true mastery is harder still, unless one's talent is extraordinary. Otherwise it's nearly impossible to cultivate to any depth.
Most important of all, even if you can endure the solitude and are willing to grind away at alchemy, unless you cultivate to a high level, the value of your alchemy can't show at all — an alchemist who can't produce powerful magic weapons and implements is at most a learned scholar of magical theory.
Nowadays alchemist mages on the continent are fewer and fewer, because the discipline is too impractical: it swallows enormous amounts of time and yields very little. Word is that these days, among the magic instructors at the church headquarters in the royal capital, a few are alchemist mages — but they have no real fighting strength, so they can only stay at headquarters doing the professorial work of teaching and training apprentice mages.
At present, the very few alchemist mages on the continent can at most imbue ordinary weapons with a bit of magic, turn out low-grade weapons or gear with magical properties, and make scrolls of limited power, but to a real mage these have little practical value. And those magically imbued weapons and armor are always appallingly expensive; unless you're a rich man, most ordinary warriors can't afford them."
Listening to Dar hold forth, Xia Ya was left dumbstruck, and asked without thinking, "Then alchemist mages have no future at all, do they? Is anyone still willing to learn a trade like that?"
Dar glared at Xia Ya with the look one gives an idiot. "Of course there's a future. If an alchemist mage can cultivate to true master level, he can craft powerful magic weapons of terrifying might. But... that's nothing but a flower in the mirror and a moon in the water, like..."