Heat blasted against Kaelen’s face the moment he kicked open the weathered shed door.
Inside the cramped outbuilding, red embers pulsed inside the hearth. The smell of burning spirit-charcoal and scorched copper hung thick in the air, drifting out through the cracked roof shingles into the morning breeze.
Old Barnaby stood beside the three-legged bronze cauldron, his single eye watering from the acrid smoke.
“You are back early, boy!” Barnaby barked, wiping soot from his beard with a greasy rag. “Did the Guild proctors throw you into the canal already?”
“I scored a hundred percent,” Kaelen said, dropping his straw hat onto an overturned pickle tub. “Then I ran here before someone asked me to explain how.”
After the fifteen-minute sprint from the Guild, he focused his inner vision and checked the golden timer hovering on the Fallow Slate:
[Track 3 Burst Window Active: 40 Minutes Remaining] [Current Conversion: 1 Minute = 112 Baseline Alchemy Hours]
Forty minutes left on the clock, Kaelen thought, stripping off his outer jacket. Forty minutes of 112x comprehension. If I waste this window chatting with Barnaby, I’m throwing over four thousand hours of master alchemy into the river.
