I Revived My Maid, Now She Hungers for My Blood

Her voice smoothed out, crisp and clear. “It’s actually quite simple. Concentrated essence. This potion is a hyper-condensed crystallization of knowledge in liquid form. And not just any knowledge—it’s exactly what you’ve been craving: Wizardry.”

Pandora’s swallowing stuttered for a fraction of a second, but she kept gulping it down.

“The Ashen Echo Draught will implant this knowledge straight into the deepest recesses of your subconscious. Even though it’s a Rank-less draught and its toxicity won’t blast a hole through you regardless of your Rank, the sheer volume of data packed inside it is just too massive, too convoluted. If we just dumped it all into your conscious mind, it would instantly fry your cognitive layout and turn you into a drooling idiot who can’t even remember their own name.”

Amanda stated this calmly, as if presenting an objective fact. “Even as a Rank-3 Wizard with mental fortitude leagues above a standard Apprentice, you’d still be screwed. That’s why it has to be buried in your subconscious, flash-frozen and sealed away, so it doesn’t detonate like a ticking time bomb.”

“Naturally, this comes with a drawback.”

Amanda watched Pandora down over half the bottle before continuing, “You can’t actively access or search through this ‘frozen’ data. You can only passively, occasionally, experience your subconscious pulling from it without you realizing. It’s like... when you’re wracking your brain over a problem, and a random snippet from a book you read forever ago just pops into your head. Something like that.”

“But obviously,” Amanda shrugged, “this method of pulling knowledge is wildly inefficient. It’s entirely random and unreliable. Add in a taste virtually unendurable to humans... and you get a product that has barely been touched, let alone mass-produced, since its inception.”

“Until...” Amanda drew out the word, that familiar, cat-like smile creeping back onto her face. “Until it met me.”

“The Ashen Echo Draught on its own is a useless gimmick. That ‘Frozen Instant’ key on its own? Equally useless. But pair them up, and the synergy is entirely different.”

Her gaze drifted to the now-dull key, then to the nearly empty draught bottle in Pandora’s hand.

“Thanks to the Ashen Echo Draught, your subconscious now ‘knows’ every scrap of Wizardry knowledge you could ever need. And by using that key to enter Laplace’s Demon Library, you can use that black book to slowly thaw out and digest that dormant knowledge—bit by bit—until it’s truly yours. Until it becomes an active weapon in your arsenal.”

A note of undeniable pride crept into Amanda’s voice. “This is the complete package. This is what I’m actually giving you!”

Pandora finally choked down the last dregs of the draught. The empty bottle clattered to the floor. One hand clamped over her mouth, the other pressing into her stomach, her face pale as a sheet. A fine sheen of cold sweat beaded on her forehead. It took a long moment of sheer willpower to force the violent urge to puke back down her throat.

“Well? All done? How do you feel?” Amanda beamed, looking at Pandora with an almost childlike expectation.

Pandora took a moment to assess herself. Honestly, aside from the visceral nausea that was only held back by spite, and the lingering aftertaste that felt permanently etched into her tastebuds, she felt absolutely nothing. The legendary Ashen Echo Draught felt more like a weaponized emetic...

“Hold on...” Pandora suddenly frowned. “I think... I actually thought of something.”

She instinctively chased that fleeting, impossibly vague thought drifting through her mind. It was slight, slippery, like trying to grab a minnow with bare hands. She tried to snag it, to comprehend it.

Then, with zero warning, a phrase entirely disconnected from reality burst from her lips—

“Kaelen Ashbourne is the absolute best!”

The words rang out, deafeningly clear in the silence of the garden.

Pandora froze. She blinked, looking utterly baffled by what had just escaped her mouth. Then, she slowly turned her head toward Amanda.

A flash of severe, almost imperceptible embarrassment flickered across the Mentor’s face, quickly smothered by a delicate cough.

“Ha. Ha.” Amanda offered a painfully dry laugh. “There is one tiny little thing I forgot to mention.” She sounded distinctly guilty.

“When Kaelen was younger... well, she’s the one who engineered this draught, and she had this very specific, slightly unhinged quirk. Back then, she loved stamping a proprietary ‘watermark’ onto every single medium of knowledge she processed. Like a painter autographing the corner of their canvas. And as luck would have it, right before brewing this batch of Ashen Echo Draught, she had slapped that exact watermark onto every tome, scroll, and notebook she prepped for extraction.”

“Once all that data was extracted, condensed, and infused into the potion, those watermarks made up the highest density of repeated data. So, the frequency at which they get passively pulled from the subconscious is... well, proportionally high.”

Amanda’s voice shrank to a mumble. “So...”

Pandora finished the thought, a palpable grievance in her eyes. “So that’s the side effect. It makes you blurt out weird crap like that against your will. I’m guessing that is the real reason this potion never made it to market, huh?”

Amanda let out a nervous chuckle, trying to brush it off. “What can I say? That’s just how she was.”

Pandora let out a long, exasperated sigh. She shook her head, trying to dislodge the foul aftertaste. It didn’t help.

Fortunately, the potion actually seemed to have done its job, planting that Wizardry knowledge deep in her psyche. So, unless she actively chased that vague intuitive pull and triggered the catchphrase, that particular brain-fart side effect wouldn’t be a frequent occurrence. She breathed a quiet sigh of relief at that.

At the same time, she could vividly sense scattered, slippery fragments of Wizardry knowledge flashing through the undercurrents of her mind like deep-sea fish. They were blurry, transient, but undeniably real. That was enough to make her buy Amanda’s explanation.

This whole Ashen Echo system designed to pair with the ‘Frozen Instant’ key was genuinely clever.

As for Kaelen Ashbourne...

“The Grey Gaze,” Pandora chose her words carefully. “So, my Mentor knows her?”

The Grey Gaze being a Potioneer wasn’t the shocking part. After all, the Alchemy Apprentice’s Ring Pandora wore had originally been gifted to the ghost of the library’s most prized Apprentice.

The surprise was the connection itself. That woman—who had no business being on that Blood Hall prison transport, and who had conveniently dropped all charges against her beforehand—actually had this kind of history with Amanda Adam. She couldn’t help but wonder if her rescue back then had anything to do with this particular connection...