"And speaking of Alchemy textbooks, I already have one, don’t I? It’s the one you sold me, ink still warm like a receipt fresh from the press."

"Ah—right."

Sandryon’s face lit up like a lamp catching, a delayed flash of realization. "If I’d known you owned a business in the real world, I wouldn’t have taken just 400. Count your blessings like coins in a jar."

"So you’re hiking the price on the spot like a street vendor flipping the sign?!"

They hadn’t known each other long, but Yekase had Sandryon’s temperament mapped like a coastline. The respect she had for this de facto Longlifer Alchemy master drained away like tide from a reef. An ageless penny-pincher counting beads on an abacus—impossible to feel reverence for that.

"Speaking of Alchemy, I’m trying something," she said, a seed of an idea nudging up through frost.

"What kind of try?"

"In Ancient Alchemy there’s a major branch called Transmutation, kind of a prototype for modern Alchemy. But I noticed something: Transmutation arrays—like all Ancient Alchemy—must be hand-sketched on the spot, quick as lightning on a drum. Modern Alchemy, though? You can cast with a pre-printed array on paper, like stamps raining from a press."

It was like eight schools had been tossed out until only one remained, and that one sprouted a possibility the prototype never showed—no, not absent, just never discovered, like a spring sealed under rock.

Professor F caught on in a heartbeat, mind sparking like flint. "You mean Ancient Alchemy can also be fired from printed arrays. Back then, conditions weren’t met; modern Alchemy happens to meet them?"

"Exactly. And the answer’s simple—"

Back in the Renaissance, when Ancient Alchemy bloomed like tapestries under candlelight, the machine that could ‘draw’ arrays—the first Western printing press—was a tortoise pushing a millstone. Far too slow.

Europe gave itself a neat answer and laid the fault at the altar of sincerity, then passed the story down like a warped hymn. No, it didn’t pass long before Newton carved a reform like a river through stone and rolled out modern magic. Almost no one kept digging into Ancient Alchemy, let alone appeal the printing press’s case.

"Wait, so you plan to have a machine draw the array to trigger Ancient Alchemy? No. That’s sacrilege. That’s taboo, like soot on a shrine!"

"See? That’s the attitude. You roadblock to science, you staff-waving mystic, you TCM fangirl!"

How did we get to TCM… Professor F, conscripted as straight man, murmured from the side like a breeze under a door.

Yekase slapped the table; her words struck like thrown pebbles on a still pond. "Alchemy isn’t some super-class Infinite Power. It’s a material discipline, so we study it with material methods."

"I can’t accept this. We’re through. I’m cutting ties like a blade through a ribbon!"

"Hah, knew this day would come—so I prepared. Right here, you’ll see the future of Ancient Alchemy."

With Sandryon crossing her arms, cheeks puffed like a sulking pufferfish, Yekase reached into the portal crate and pulled out—

A Polaroid camera, simple as a brick with a grin.

"Welcome to the future. Sorry, you can’t stop me; this train’s already out of the station."

"Hmph. What’s this trinket supposed to be, a toy with a lens?"

Yekase gripped the camera. With her other hand, she pinched the newborn photo stub poking from the slot. She yanked down in one sharp rip like pulling a banner from a pole.

Out slid a photograph of an array.

Sandryon recognized it at a glance. "Hello World… drawn decently standard. So what?"

Arms still stretched like a gymnast holding a pose, Yekase didn’t pull the photo free. She poured sorcery into the camera and the photo at once, like water into matched cups.

Colorless ripples shimmered across the picture like heat over a road.

Sandryon’s narrowed, dismissive eyes snapped open like shutters. "…Sorcery fluctuations?!"

It took. The sorcery went straight in like dye soaking cloth.

Western magitech crawled for centuries, slowed by religion’s hand and another blunt truth: sorcery won’t stay in dead matter. Only with modern Alchemy can you pin a trickle of effect onto an object, and even that needs maintenance like a leaky roof.

But the photo pulsed with a sorcery wave, which meant—

From that flat, low-res picture, a sorcery-made array rose like a moon over water, hovering a few centimeters off the surface, turning slow as a prayer wheel.

"Primordial Array, Hello World_1."

Yekase announced it with a grin bright as a match in a cave.

Professor F reached out on instinct. His fingertip slipped through the array like mist and touched the photo beneath.

Sandryon couldn’t hide the wonder in her voice. "It… activated? It actually—"

"Fast, accurate, no distractions. Three conditions met in one stroke. Turns out machines are better than people at firing Ancient Alchemy," Yekase said, crisp as a bell.

"Th-this…"

Even well-traveled Sandryon was left gaping, words fluttering out of reach like startled birds.

For centuries, Ancient Alchemy’s lonely march had been about refining arrays and structures, scraping tiny gains in efficiency like gold dust from a river pan. Its heirs memorized forests of runes and connection keys, wearing that burden as a badge modern alchemists couldn’t lift, proof of talent carved like seals on jade. No one ever chased convenience at the root.

Professor F couldn’t hear the fine gears turning; Alchemy meant little to him. He could only marvel that Yekase, a materialist dabbling in idealist tech, had think-it-through mojo like a thunderbolt under clear sky.

"This is the struggle I waged to avoid memorizing!" Yekase declared, chest high like a flag.

"So the noble origin was—laziness?"

"You don’t get it. Laziness is the ladder of progress, like wheels under a cart."

Sandryon dropped elder dignity like a cloak and lunged for the Polaroid. Yekase of course refused; she lifted the camera high, and at a proud 162 centimeters she felt like a lighthouse against storm spray. Sandryon leapt and grabbed, fingertips only brushing Yekase’s elbow.

"Let me see, let me see!"

"Aren’t you the queen of roof-hopping and vanishing mid-sentence? Why not use that now?"

For once, Yekase found someone shorter than her. She teased like an older sister dangling candy, warm sunlight on her back.

"My staff’s in the entry locker! You’re exploiting the defenseless!"

…Damn.

So fragile, these Ancient Alchemists. No staff, no casting? Is a staff really that clunky—no wonder it got optimized away. The rude thought flashed like a fish in a pond.

"Then how’d you float down from the beam, and how’d you get up there?" Yekase asked, curiosity like a cat’s paw.

"The… skirt. Arrays carved into the lining. I used it just now; it’s recharging…"

This skill has a cooldown? So she’d been sitting up on that cold, hard beam forever, like a pigeon on a rail?

Yekase couldn’t hold it; laughter spilled out like marbles from a bag.

Even Professor F hid a smile behind his hand, eyes creasing like sun-cracked clay.

"All right, it’s just a normal camera. The array photo is something I drew at home and shot. No special build, no hidden gears. If you want to see, see."

When she’d laughed enough, Yekase lowered the camera, mercy like shade after noon.

Sandryon took it and turned it over and over, stubborn as a mule studying a mirror, before she finally believed.

"Hmph. Finding a knowledge blind spot buried for centuries in a single month—you’re something else. As the current face of Ancient Alchemy, I have to make a statement."

"You’re going to smite me for blasphemy?"

Sandryon shot her a glare sharp as a needle. "I’m going to supervise you personally and straighten your behavior. Today you let machines draw arrays. Tomorrow you’ll do something that offends the ancestors; I can’t even imagine the mess. And if you make some rookie mistake after this, you’ll make Ancient Alchemy look flimsy."

"…Huh?"

Yekase’s brain stalled like a cart in mud. She’d debugged a centuries-old system, and if she failed a language test later, that proved Ancient Alchemy was worse than high-school literature? What kind of logic was that?

Professor F clapped at the perfect moment, sound neat as cards snapping. "It’s wonderful that Ms. Fenxi is willing to advance together with the doctor. Perhaps you’ll be a bridge between East and West."

"Ms. Fenxi?"

Yekase looked at Professor F, then at Sandryon like a sparrow checking two branches.

Sandryon lifted her skirt hem a fraction without shifting her seat, a curtsey as precise as script. "A pleasure to meet you, Ms. Yekase. My name is Sandryon di Serpiere de Fenxi, from faraway Italy."

"Far in time or far in distance?"

"Both."

That long, knotted name won Sandryon a strand of dignity back, like a ribbon tied right. Yekase gave two soft ohs as Sandryon offered a hand.

Awed by the ceremony, Yekase searched her mind for the grandest greeting she knew. She pinched those pale, scallion-slim fingers and rose to lightly touch them with her lips.

"Wh-what are you doing?!"

Sandryon jerked her right hand back like she’d been burned, clutching it to her chest.

"Hm?" Yekase blinked. "A hand-kiss…"

"Idiot! I knew it. Let you out in public and Ancient Alchemy’s reputation would sink in two days like a stone in a well!"

"Uh…"

Baffled by Sandryon’s sudden hop, Yekase shot a look to Professor F, who was snickering behind a polite hand, for rescue.

He leaned to her ear, voice low as a secret in a library. "A hand-kiss is only for married women. She just wanted to shake your hand."

"Err… But in those fantasy webnovels, the disposable Euro nobles always debut by kissing the heroine’s hand…"

"You believe webnovels?"

"Fair. You got me."

Lately she’d been studying the art too well, constantly sneaking into Ling Yi’s room to read her light novels, the words burrowing in like ivy.

Her September after-hours schedule looked like a weather chart with the same cloud every day:

Sep 13, gaming.

Sep 14, gaming.

Sep 15, gaming.

Sep 16—Yekase, pull yourself together! Remember that dev plan? Tomorrow you self-study Alchemy. Memorize five runes.

Sep 17, novels.

…

The result: across the whole of September, she only cooked up one janky trick—using a camera to shoot arrays.

Is it janky? Sandryon was thunderstruck; maybe not that janky. But it was low-creativity, a little "unhealthy," like living on instant noodles.

It was about time to make a new invention… She thought that, but no good ideas came, so she drifted like a boat in slack tide.

Then, just now, her inspiration check finally passed, a window flinging open to sky.

"Load common arrays into the Polaris Staff’s chip, then have a floating laser draw them in the air on demand… That gives us Ancient Alchemy on tap, stable and clean."

"Tool-worship! Godless! That Alchemy has no soul!"

"No soul, sure. But it works."

Yekase’s voice was a nail driven straight. "We’re not like you. We get a few decades, not centuries. We don’t have time to chase the essence of magic."