Trafalgar stopped in front of Director Selara’s door and knocked. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

No answer came.

He waited a breath longer, heard the faint hum of machinery from inside, and opened the door himself.

A long worktable ran through the middle of the room, drowned beneath notes, tools, and three different things bubbling at once. At the far end, beside a machine made of crystal tubes, rotating rings, and a copper core that pulsed with green light, stood Selara.

Her platinum-blond hair was as unruly as ever, falling down her back like something that had never known a comb. Emerald eyes flickered behind the strange lenses resting on her forehead, and both gloves were stained with enough alchemical residue to make the word clean feel irrelevant in this room.

She was leaning over the machine, adjusting a set of runes with a thin silver rod when she noticed him.

"Oh! You’ve arrived," she said at once, as if she had expected him to appear the exact second she looked up. "Good, good. I was starting to think you’d grown polite and decided to wait outside forever."

Trafalgar closed the door behind him and walked closer.

"You told me to come in the morning," he said. "So here I am. Well? Did you find anything?"

Selara’s mouth curved.

"Many things, actually. Far too many for a single vial, which is very rude of it." She lifted the yellowish vial from a holder built into the side of the machine, turning it toward the light. "This little horror kept me awake the entire night. There aren’t many alchemists in the world who could produce something of this level."

Trafalgar’s attention sharpened.

"Function?" he asked. "What function?"

Selara glanced at him over her shoulder, pleased that she was the one holding the answer.

"It’s a potion designed to refine thought itself," she said. "A crude way to explain it would be this: it stimulates the mind, sharpens the pathways of memory, accelerates processing, and raises the ceiling of the drinker’s intellect. Permanently, if the body survives the refinement properly."

Trafalgar stared at her.

"What?"

"Yes, yes, I know, very dramatic," Selara said, waving the rod in one hand. "But that is what it does. Drink this, and your mind doesn’t simply become quicker for an hour or a day. It changes. It rises. The effect roots itself into the brain and stays."

Trafalgar frowned.

"Something like that can actually be made?"

Selara gave him a look that hovered between insulted and delighted.

"And why wouldn’t it be?" she said. "If the theory exists, if the materials exist, and if the person doing it is talented enough, then of course it can be made." Her smile thinned into something more pointed. "The real question is whether anyone sane would pay the price."

Trafalgar crossed his arms.

"How much?"

Selara laughed softly, as if that part amused her the most.

"How much? Trafalgar, to produce a vial this small, you’d burn through fortunes. Hundreds of thousands of gold as a starting point. More realistically, millions once you account for failed attempts, stabilizers, and the kind of ingredients no one sells unless they’re desperate, criminal, or both."

His brows drew together.

"Hundreds of thousands for one vial?"

"One?" Selara repeated. "No, no. You’re thinking too kindly of the world." She held the vial between two fingers. "To finance something like this, you might need to liquidate the value of fifty legendary-grade items before you even reached the point where the brew stopped trying to collapse in on itself. This is not a potion made by a talented scholar in a neat room. This is obsession with funding."

Trafalgar looked at the liquid again.

"So who could make it?"

Selara set the vial back into the machine and tapped the side of the copper housing once. The rings around it spun more slowly.

"Very few people," she said. "Me. Me, if I was willing to ruin my month. Me again if I hated myself enough. And an old man living at the far edge of the world."

Trafalgar’s expression shifted.

"An old man?"

Selara nodded.

"My master," she said. "Or he was, once. Human, like you. Brilliant in the most exhausting way possible. He was a great alchemist. A real one, not the kind who learns recipes and starts preening. But he grew bored of everything eventually. Discoveries, commissions, titles, recognition. He threw them aside one after another." A faint pause followed. "I haven’t seen him in a century, so for all I know he’s dead. But if someone made a potion of this caliber, with this particular kind of madness built into it, then it could only be him."

Trafalgar studied her face.

"So you have no idea where I can find him."

"I have no idea," Selara replied. "He moved like smoke when I knew him, and that was a very long time ago." She folded one arm beneath her chest and tilted her head slightly. "Why do you want to find him?"

Trafalgar did not answer immediately.

"If I tell you," he said, "you might end up involved in this. And if I ever ask for help because of it, you’d be tied to the whole thing."

Selara answered without hesitation.

"That sounds like a logical exchange. Go on."

That caught him off guard enough that he actually paused.

He had expected resistance.

Instead, she simply waited.

Trafalgar narrowed his eyes slightly.

"You’re sure?"

Selara let out a small, impatient breath.

"I already told you yes. Now I’m curious. That means you’ve already lost." Her mouth curved again, though the amusement in it had sharpened. "Tell me what that old lunatic has done."

Trafalgar’s voice lowered.

"He used the vial on a void creature."

The room changed.

It did not erupt or freeze, but something in Selara’s posture tightened so completely that the air around her seemed to lose its looseness. The silver rod in her hand lowered a fraction. Even the humor left her face all at once.

"He what?"

Trafalgar held her stare.

"He used it on a void creature," he repeated. "That thing has intelligence now. Real intelligence."

Selara went quiet.

This time the laboratory did not feel chaotic. It felt dangerous.

When she spoke, her voice had lost every trace of playfulness.

"...That is grave."

"That’s why I want to find him," Trafalgar said. "The fact that he knows enough to create something like this is already bad. Using it on a void creature makes it worse. And anyone willing to do that can’t be thinking clearly."

Selara’s expression darkened further.

"No," she said. "He isn’t. He never was, not in the way ordinary people use the word." She lifted a hand and rubbed lightly at her temple. "He was confined more than once because of the things he tested. People with power decided it was safer to lock him away than leave him near a laboratory."

Trafalgar clicked his tongue softly.

"If he was that insane, why the hell is he still alive? And how can you be so sure it was him?"

Selara’s eyes went to the vial again.

"Because alchemy has handwriting," she said. "Not literal handwriting. A structure, some habits of the alchemist. The way one mind forces impossible ingredients to coexist. The layering in this potion is ugly in exactly the way his work used to be ugly. Three essences here should have rejected each other and torn the whole brew apart. Instead they were bent into obedience. Brutally. Efficiently. Arrogantly." She exhaled once. "That part feels like him."

Trafalgar said nothing.

Selara removed the goggles from her forehead and set them down on the table with unusual care.

"This is bad," she said. "Far worse than a forbidden experiment hidden in some cave. A void creature with intelligence..." Her jaw tightened faintly. "That crosses into betrayal. Not to a family but the whole world."

Trafalgar watched her.

"You’ll help me find him?"

"Yes."

He blinked once.

"You’re really sure? You told me before you didn’t have time, that the Academy was already eating your life."

Selara gave a short, humorless laugh.

"The Academy can survive a few weeks without me pretending to respect forms and schedules." She leaned back against the edge of the table, eyes on the vial rather than him. "And in this case, I have my own reasons."

Trafalgar caught that immediately.

"Because he was your master."

Selara nodded.

"I have a long history with that man." Her voice turned quieter, though it lost none of its edge. "If you want, I can tell you."

Trafalgar’s thoughts shifted at once.

’Information about a legendary character... and about Selara herself.’

He knew a great deal about many people in this world from the fragments he had carried with him before waking in this body, but Selara’s past had always remained strangely thin.

And if the old man truly was behind this, then anything tied to him had stopped being curiosity and turned into something useful.

Trafalgar inclined his head.

"Yes," he said. "I have time."

For the first time since he entered, Selara looked less like a director, less like a walking alchemical disaster, and more like someone about to open a door she had kept closed for a very long while.

She gestured toward the chair across from her worktable.

"Good," she said. "Sit down, Trafalgar. If I’m going to talk about that demented old monster, I’ll need something stronger than patience."