The Sin System: My Wife is Envy

Chapter 73: The Alchemy Club 2

The club occupied a room at the end of the east corridor, past the storage access point and around the corner where the other organizations had not bothered to set up tables.

Seren unlocked it with a key she found on the third attempt and held the door open.

"Mind the step," she said.

She stepped over it herself and caught the door frame with one hand to keep her balance.

Inside was nothing like the corridor outside. Clean. Organized. The workbench ran along two walls, labeled storage below the surface, equipment arranged in the specific order of someone who had limited space and had thought carefully about what went where. A reagent shelf on the east wall. Small mana lamp over the central work area. A stool that had been repaired at one leg.

"You built all of this yourself," Tessira said.

"The shelf took two weekends," Seren said. She was at the supply cabinet, pulling out a binder to show Tessira the current project list. She set it on the edge of the bench and it slid off the other side and she made a grab for it and knocked over a small vessel of solvent, which she caught before it hit the floor.

She set the vessel carefully on a flat section of bench.

"I do that," she said.

I looked at the workbench. The current project had three stages notated on a card in her hand. The system she had developed was not the academy’s standard. She had built it herself.

The character file had been eleven pages.

Seren Aldren. The studio had planned to build an entire arc around her family. The arc never started. The author never came back to it. Nobody at this academy knew who she was.

The scholarship at the bottom of the file: third-tier merit, academic track. Commoner classification, no house affiliation. Nothing in the intake data connected her to anything.

"The project list," I said.

She handed me the binder from the floor, which she had retrieved and not mentioned.

I looked through it.

Six current projects. All of them were above second-year curriculum. Two of them were graduate-level research questions. One of them was a question I recognized from a closed academic discussion in the studio’s reference materials, a problem that the development team had flagged as unresolved in the game’s lore documentation and had planned to make into a major plot reveal in Arc 4.

She had been working on it as a side project, in her own notation system, in a club room at the end of a corridor where nobody came.

I closed the binder.

There was a knock at the door.

***

Three of them. The one in front was broad across the shoulders, the kind of build that announced itself. The two behind him stood closer to him than the situation called for.

"Aldren," the one in front said. He had spotted Seren over my shoulder. "When are you returning what you owe us."

Seren stepped slightly back and her shoulder hit the shelf, which she caught with one hand.

"I repaid the original amount in the spring," she said.

"You repaid five coins. We are asking about twenty."

"I borrowed five coins," she said. "I repaid five coins after three months. With interest."

"The interest changed," he said. "Twenty coins. You have until the end of the week."

He started to say something after that.

He did not finish it.

The two behind him went sideways. The wall received them. Neither of them moved after that.

The one in front went to his knees and then down, and Anastasia was standing where he had been, her hand lowered, expression unchanged.

Tessira’s Wind Blade was still dissipating at the doorway.

He coughed. Then he looked up.

"You think this changes anything," he said.

"Yes," Anastasia said.

He looked at her. Then at the floor. He did not say anything else.

Seren watched them go.

Then she turned to me.

"Thank you," she said.

"The amount they were asking was extortion," I said. "Not a debt."

She nodded and went to the bench and straightened something that did not need straightening.

A moment passed. I let it.

I reached into my coat on the side where I kept the spatial ring and found the coins by feel and brought out five.

He was still coughing against the wall.

I crouched and set the coins on the floor beside him.

"The debt is settled," I said. "The original amount plus what you were asking. Take it and do not come back."

He looked at the coins, then at Anastasia.

He picked them up.

It took him another minute to get his friends off the wall and leave.

Seren watched the door after they had gone.

She took the binder from the bench where she had set it and put it back down in the same place.

Then I reached into my coat again and counted fifty coins and held them out.

She turned around.

"That is fifty gold coins," she said.

"For research materials," I said. "Whatever the project list needs."

She did not take them.

"What do you want from me," she said.

"Research materials are expensive," I said. "You are working on problems that require—"

"I know what I am working on," she said. "I am asking what you want in return for fifty coins."

She studied me.

"Do you also want me," she said.

The temperature in the room dropped approximately two degrees.

"No," I said. Quickly.

The temperature stayed where it was.

"I need you to do your research," I said. "Continue what you are already doing. And occasionally, when I have a question about a compound or a synthesis problem, I would like to be able to ask you."

Her gaze dropped to the coins.

"I will also be a member of this club," I said. "So the arrangement is not unusual. You have three members now."

She glanced at Tessira and Anastasia.

"They are both joining," I said.

Tessira looked at me.

"Yes," I said.

"Yes," Tessira said.

Anastasia was already at the reagent shelf, reading the labels.

Seren turned the coins over in her palm.

"You recognized something in the project list," she said.

I waited.

"The Arc 3 synthesis problem," she said. "You looked at that page four seconds longer than the others. Few people know what they are looking at when they see it. You did."

"You noticed," I said.

"I notice most things," she said. "I just drop them afterward."

She took the coins.

She held them and then set them very carefully on the bench, away from the edge.

"I accept the arrangement," she said. "On the condition that you tell me how you knew about the filtering stone contamination on the compound outside."

"The secondary resonance layer," I said.

"Few people can read a secondary layer on a compound that faint," she said. "Not without equipment."

"I can," I said.

She considered this.

"Alright," she said, and took the binder and began the session.

Tessira found a stool.

Anastasia was still reading the reagent shelf.

I looked at the workbench and the six ongoing projects and the repaired stool leg and thought about eleven pages and an arc that had never started, and what it meant that the person at the center of it was here, in a room nobody came to, working on the right problems with no one watching.

"The fourth project," I said. "The mana stabilization threshold. You have been approaching it from the output side."

Seren looked at the board.

"Yes," she said.

"Try it from the absorption side," I said. "The threshold behaves differently under active consumption than under static measurement."

Her pen stopped above the page.

She crossed out three lines and wrote two new ones.

Then she looked at the result.

"Yes," she said, to the board. "That is correct."

She kept writing.