“You would turn this one into a toad?” Morkal asked.

  It took Jessica a second to realize ‘this one’ was how Morkal referred to a discrete instance of herself.

  “So long as you can turn back it’s pretty genius, right? Adventurers are looking for a seven foot-tall monstress, not an amphibian.”

  “We would find it uncomfortable to be vulnerable for so long. Toads are prey to things other than adventurers. Moreover, we do not possess the formula to brew a potion to return this one to its original form.”

  “Have you tried to make one?”

  “We have not.”

  “Why not?”

  “We did not plan to turn our enemies back into their original form.”

  “What if it got used on you?”

  “That would be unfortunate.”

  Jessica rolled her eyes. Unlike John, Morkal’s intelligence was more like her own: Lots of esoteric knowledge, not a lot of common sense.

  “Theoretically, could you make an antidote?” Jessica said.

  “It is possible, but inventing a new type of potion is difficult. It happens rarely. Once in a century, for the ancients have already created much of what can be. We did not create the first toad potion, we merely learned its recipe.”

  “Do you have the recipe on you?” she asked.

  Morkal raised her hand and pointed to a book bound in flesh. “In the grimoire.”

  She found the recipe with Morkal’s help, though the monstress was less helpful with the book’s archaic verbiage. Some of it she guessed purely by the descriptions of preceding steps like a chemistry-themed logic puzzle. Eventually it clicked that what the book was describing was a two-step precipitation of toad blood and dissolved back into a solution of something called ‘nyxium.’

  “Whatever we’re precipitating out of the toad’s blood can’t polymorph someone on its own, which means it’s an emergent property of this nyxium stuff. Is nyxium used in other polymorphing compounds?”

  Morkal did her weird eye-fold stretch of surprise and said, “It is used in many brews which change the nature of a thing. It possesses immense potential, for it has no character of its own. It is everything and nothing. It is made not of water, fire, wind, nor earth.”

  “What if we combined the nyxium with something we precipitate out of you? Does that make sense? Essentially we’d be making a Polymorph Morkal potion,” Jessica asked.

  “Your theory is interesting, reincarnated one. But we find it suspicious such a simple solution has gone hitherto undiscovered.”

  “We could test it on a regular toad first.”

  There was, at this point, the awkward question of what they were going to use for ‘essence of Morkal.’ Jessica tip-toed around the matter of biology until Morkal offered her ichor.

  “Your what?”

  “Our ichor,” Morkal replied and then vomited glowing garnet liquid onto a glass plate.

  Jessica stared. “Your… ichor.”

  “It is how we digest bones. Do not touch it. It is highly acidic.

  “And you’re sure this will have some solute we can use?”

  “It may.”

  That was as useful an answer as she could expect from fantasy chemistry.

  Jessica got a sense for Morkal’s chemistry knowledge by the monstress proposing they neutralize the acid and boil to dryness to obtain salts of whatever was inside the ichor. To accomplish this they slowly poured Morkal’s ichor into a glass bowl of water under the fume hood and added ammonia. Just as Jessica was about to ask how they were supposed to measure pH, Morkal began muttering a spell.

  “What are you—”

  Morkal raised a finger to shush her. After incanting for a minute, an hourglass appeared above the mixture filled slightly above the middle.

  “A thimbleful more ammonia,” Morkal said.

  “So you’re allowed to do magic but I’m not?”

  “We did not know you were a different sort of reincarnated.”

  Jessica sighed. “Maybe we can figure out how to reverse that potion too.”

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  “Maybe,” Morkal replied, opening its mouth-slit to speak.

  They poured the neutralized ichor solution into a cauldron over a flame and waited for the salts to precipitate. While they waited, Jessica asked Morkal about herself.

  “How long have you been alive?”

  “A thousand years or more. We do not know precisely. Time, like an ocean, becomes too dark and too deep in its depths,” Morkal replied.

  Jessica whistled. “Damn! So you would’ve been around for the Demon King stuff? What’s the deal with all that? All I’ve gotten out of John is there used to be a Demon King and then Emperor Floridaman killed him.”

  “The Demon King was never meant to be slain.”

  Jessica glanced up from the boiling pot. “What do you mean?”

  “The Demon King was summoned into our world at the same time as the first reincarnated. We thought they came together. We still think this. Not only Morkal, but other beings from before the Demon King. We—the trees, the monsters, the elementals—believe something occurred in your world which created the Demon King in ours, though we know not what.

  “Before Him, before your people, there was magic, but no system. The reincarnated arrived with levels and abilities and this is how they utilize the magic of the Tapestry of Causes and Conditions. We took your system by severing your tie to the Tapestry.”

  “The same place your hive mind comes from?” Jessica asked.

  “The same. It is the source of all magic, systemic and primordial.”

  It sounded like online schizoposting except it was real and let psychopaths like Akuhara live out whatever fantasies they wanted. The thought made Jessica feel even more vulnerable.

  “Do you know what this Tapestry thing is exactly? Besides, like, a well of magic?”

  “It is a realm of spirit and thought of which our material world is no more than a dream or an echo. All that appears to our eyes as solid dissolves into gossamer strands of potential. Eternal things emerge for a time from its weave then retreat into eternity. Magic is simply a borrowing of what could be from what always will be.”

  Jessica’s head hurt trying to figure out how much was cryptic bullshit and how much was actionable knowledge. It was probably useful to think of it as a physical law which hadn’t been empirically elucidated yet.

  “How exactly does it let people violate the conservation of mass? I mean, that’s basically all magic is, right? Just a violation of entropy?” Jessica asked.

  “Your terms are strange. If they aid you in grasping the Tapestry, so be it, but be wary of attaching importance to words which are imperfect reflections.”

  “Sure. But how does it make something out of nothing?”

  “The Tapestry does not make something out of nothing. It borrows from the spirit.”

  Realizing she wasn’t going to get a real answer, Jessica let the subject drop. In all likelihood there wasn’t a real explanation. Despite her not-so-fantastic experience, she was beginning to accept this was very much a fantasy world. Impossible things were real here. Or, rather, ‘magic’ was an irreducible physical law whose rules could be uncovered the same way any physical law could.

  “You do not understand,” Morkal said.

  “No, but I’m getting there,” Jessica replied. “Now, how about this Demon King? What was he like? What did he do?”

  “He was an Adversary.”

  Jessica waited for Morkal to explain the verbal capitalization she put on ‘adversary,’ but she did not.

  “An adversary… Like, he was evil?”

  “No. Not as reincarnated understand evil. He was not separate from you. He came with you to this world because you needed Him. Our world, in all its sublimity, would bore you unless you invented an Adversary. By this desire an Adversary was created to give form to your struggles. However, the Demon King was not meant to be slain.

  “With no outlet for your aggression you turned it elsewhere. Against others. Against yourselves. By defeating the Demon King, the adventurer Magnus Oftampa released this aggression into the world. It now suffuses everything, for it was born from the Tapestry and thus inseparable from the myriad things.”

  Jessica was falling asleep. Between her long day of work, her hike through the woods, her sore muscles, and Morkal’s smooth, motherly voice, whatever the hell the monstress was talking about was turning to mush in Jessica’s mind.

  “Okay, so where were you in all that, Morkal?”

  “We served Him,” Morkal replied.

  Jessica woke up. “You served the Demon King?”

  “We were his Chief Alchemist.”

  “Wow… Wait, didn’t you say you’re thousands of years old?”

  “We were around before the Demon King and we are around after.”

  Jessica had no idea how to feel about that. She didn’t care one way or the other about the Demon King or his minions, and the adventurers who fought him weren’t exactly the most upright people based on the examples she’d encountered, but the idea that he was a neutral punching bag rang hollow. If that were true, the Serf family wouldn’t have referred to his downfall as the beginning of an era of peace. Something wasn’t adding up.

  “What did you do as Chief Alchemist, exactly?” Jessica asked.

  “We prepared weapons of war and medical supplies for His soldiers. We created potent elixirs for his seers and sages to investigate the Tapestry. We created tinctures to aid in interrogation and torture. We were neither good nor evil, nor would we claim to be one or the other. These categories are important to adventurers. Not to us.”

  “Hmm,” Jessica said. The word ‘torture’ especially stood out to her.

  “I don’t buy that good and evil mean nothing to you, Morkal. Why would you rob adventurers of their powers if you didn’t think they would use them for evil?”

  “The reincarnated do not use powers for evil,” Morkal said, her dark red eyes cold and dispassionate as they bore into Jessica’s. “On the contrary, you often use your powers in ways you think are good. But you borrow too much and too quickly. You have an innate desire to seek equilibriums purely to disrupt them. This is why you came with your systems of levels and experience. Numbers aid you in your quest to find and penetrate the physical world. We take adventurers’ powers to slow this inevitable collapse.”

  Something about the way Morkal was throwing around the word ‘you’ irritated Jessica, as though Morkal thought humans from Earth were a hive mind like her.

  “You yourself said the Tapestry of Blada-blah is eternal and infinite and all that. How can humans be draining it?”

  “You are not draining the Tapestry,” Morkal said. “It is the physical world you ruin by introducing too much of the Tapestry. You will turn everything solid into liquid chaos and in this flood we will die. This is why we stand against the reincarnated.”

  Jessica was about to continue arguing when she realized the pot had finished boiling. Gazing into it she found a pile of blood-red salts. Essence of Morkal.

  Morkal stood. “We shall prepare the nyxium.”