“Mmm…”

The feeling came back like a long-lost tide, my limbs paddling through a nameless liquid, slow as syrup, yet I couldn’t grasp its weight. All around was ink-deep night.

If I had to say it—yes.

It felt like swimming through darkness, a cold river with no shore.

In that black water, Lingcai chased her own name, gathering stray shards. When those jagged fragments stitched into a torn tapestry that was mostly whole, clarity rose like dawn fog burning off.

Right. I should be one of the most famous Alchemists in town.

Back then I was supposed to be dashing and bright, a rising Alchemist with admirers like moths to a lantern, clever gorgeous disciples at my side, and a fiancée waiting back home.

Then why am I here?

As the thought surfaced, her body began to take form. Her shape flowed like liquid in a glass, settling into a petite, adorable girl. The voice echoing in her head thinned and cleared like a silver bell. Gold hair drifted from her back to her chest, a sunlit ribbon sliding forward.

“An accident! It was an accident! So that accident wasn’t a dream!”

She grabbed her head and screamed into the sea of night, her cry rippling like stones dropped into deep water.

“God of Alchemy! I swear I’ll never study human transmutation again, that forbidden art! Please let me go back!”

At her plea, the darkness tore like cloth, and a single beam cut through. In that gentle light, a warm human outline rose like a candle behind frosted glass.

“So the God of Alchemy is real…” Lingcai breathed to the glowing silhouette, her words fluttering like moth wings.

Splash.

Ice-cold liquid slapped her face, cutting like winter rain. She blinked, and the “God of Alchemy” resolved into Princess Korol holding a hose, her expression as sour as storm clouds over stone.

“Can’t say if the God of Alchemy exists,” Kelor said, hip cocked, hose in hand like a coiled serpent. “But today I’m about to become the God of Tap Water.”

Lingcai looked around. The white glue had melted under the spray, thinning into a milky gruel that pooled across the floor like spilled congee. Her clothes were soaked, heavy as seaweed, still smeared with streaks of pale paste. They wouldn’t be wearable anytime soon.

“Change later. I’ve sent Xiaoxue to fetch you something,” Kelor said, twisting the valve shut with a metallic click and letting the hose drop like a snake gone limp. She dragged a chair over and sat, calm as a judge under a lantern.

Lingcai blinked, misty and lost. “Talk about what?”

“I did my homework.” Kelor’s gaze pinned her like a hawk’s shadow. “You’re not just any Alchemist. Human transmutation breaks ethics and law. All texts about it were sealed in the lowest vault of the Grand Library. So tell me—how did you gather your material?”

She had already suspected rot in the wood. Decades ago, the National Alchemy Bureau collected every scrap on human transmutation, burned what had to be burned, and sealed the rest under lock and archive. There shouldn’t be a single book wandering the streets.

Unless the Grand Library had an inside leak, carrying forbidden pages out like smuggled fire.

That fear was the hook; now she wanted the fish.

“I developed it myself,” Lingcai said, plain as rain.

“By yourself?” Kelor’s disbelief was a cold knife, yet she kept her tone smooth as ice.

“Uh… not exactly.” Lingcai fished for memory like pearls in mud. “My disciple helped for a while. But before we got results, she vanished. Just left, alone.”

Kelor’s suspicion deepened like a well. Human transmutation took the condensed wisdom of masters, a mountain of work across physics, chemistry, and biology, hammered for a century before it looked complete. Even if Lingcai lived a hundred years, one mind alone couldn’t forge that blade.

“Then why develop it? What was your aim?” Kelor tested the line, voice light, eyes heavy.

“Because…” Lingcai hesitated, heart fluttering like a trapped bird. Then she pressed her palms together and begged with a temple’s solemnity. “Promise you won’t roll your eyes if I say the truth.”

“We’ll see.”

Kelor already sensed the smell wouldn’t be saintly incense.

Lingcai drew a deep breath, the kind that dives before the wave. “I wanted to open an alchemy workshop.”

In truth, while she was still studying at the Alchemist school, she’d opened her own workshop nearby. With tools like a treasure chest and a school reputation polished like jade, her shop swallowed the local market like a tide. Wealth and experience piled up like bricks.

Then one day, everything flipped like a table.

An Alchemist from the East arrived as a new student, name unknown, wind at his back.

He brought not only skill sharp enough to match Lingcai’s, but—an entire flock of tiny girls, none taller than four and a half feet.

They were just a group of ten-something girls, but each had her own color, bright as a string of paper lanterns. Some were lively, some quiet. There were elfkin, and there were beast-eared cuties. Their presence set the school boiling like a kettle. The student council even made ads for them, turning them into city-wide idols overnight.

Worse yet, that Eastern Alchemist opened a workshop right across from Lingcai’s. Those overnight starlets became the mascot girls at his door, smiles like candy, bows like butterflies.

Customers surged like a spring flood toward the tiny girls. Lingcai’s shop echoed with crickets and dust.

She tried everything to rescue the boat before it sank. But the only hires she could get were tall, mature beauties, statuesque as cypresses. Even they couldn’t turn the tide from the rival’s shore.

“They really like little girls that much? Is that necessary? Isn’t bigger supposed to be better?”

She reached that point with a choke in her voice, tears shimmering like dew.

“Uh… yeah, I agree…”

Kelor made a small, grim gesture toward her chest, outlining the cliff-flat terrain with a wince.

She coughed twice, face slightly red, voice careful as a cat walking on porcelain. “So… don’t tell me… you did all this for that…”

“I want to win!” Lingcai’s words flared like sparks in dry grass. “He beat me with a pack of tiny girls! If I can’t recruit them, I’ll make one myself! I’ll take years if I have to! What’s mine, I’ll win back!”

Her fire blazed high, then guttered like a lantern in rain.

“…And then, in the middle of it, an accident. I turned into the girl I was making. The human transmutation research got exposed. As punishment, the Bureau pulled my Alchemist license… Why am I this unlucky…”

You did this to yourself.

Kelor swallowed the line like bitter medicine. Instead, she rested a hand on Lingcai’s head, gentle as a palm leaf.

“It is unlucky,” she murmured, soft as warm tea. “Don’t cry, don’t cry.”