Nyx stepped out of the closing spatial tear and stood at the doorstep of a small wooden house, one that she remembered visiting when she overcame the Mental Trial herself. The surroundings were completely different than before, however. Instead of a meadow, it was in the middle of a forest.
Shin-Woo, who was next to her, didn't waste even a second to open the door after swiftly knocking to announce their presence. The interior was the same as before; all windows were blocked off by curtains and the only light source was a fireplace near which was a rocking chair.
An elderly woman with a tall but thin frame was sitting on it, half of her body shadowed, and her hands serenely working on knitting a small deer-shaped bundle of wool threads. When she heard the door open, she curiously looked at the entrance.
"Oh?" She blinked in surprise at Shin-Woo who came in first. "The mysterious boy… for what have you come back here?" She inquired with a gentle grandmotherly tone and when the regressor she was talking to looked to the side, she naturally did so as well.
Then, her eyes widened at Nyx, before trembling when they fell on Rakna. She dropped what she had in her hands and stood up in a small panic. "Bring him in," she ordered instantly and waved all the curtains opened up with a wave of her hand. "Quickly!" She raised her voice and walked to a single bed on the other side of the wooden hut.
Nyx shuddered at the strangely intimidating voice, even to her, and urgingly went to place Rakna down on the bed. Meanwhile, Flegra opened a glass cupboard fixed to the wall and pulled out an old-looking box.
She carried it to a small table next to the bed and opened it, revealing a black velvet placeholder with three intricate glass containers resting on it. One of them was empty, and the other two were filled with a crystalline liquid that looked like melted gems.
She grabbed one of them and brought it to Rakna, with Nyx quietly stepping aside while the older woman carefully placed her hand on the therian's jaw and opened his mouth to let him drink the content of the potion.
"How long has he been in this state?" Flegra asked as she watched the beautiful liquid being drunk without resistance. It immediately showed results and the obsidian's advance halted. Rakna even trembled and his fingers twitched for a brief moment.
"I think… counting from the moment he was left 'on his own'… about three or four minutes?" Nyx answered with a reserved tone; as if she was uncomfortable talking to this woman.
"Then count yourself lucky, Olden Goddess," Flegra narrowed her eyes. "Had you come to me even a minute later… he would have died," she stated firmly and pulled the potion back once everything had been drunk.
Nyx's expression tightened and she fought against her mortification with relief. However, she also sent a dubious look at the old woman. "Then… what is that potion you fed him?"
Flegra glanced at her as she closed the box after putting back the empty container inside. "It was an Elixir of Life," she calmly stated and proceeded to diagnose Rakna more closely.
"What….?" Nyx opened her mouth wide. "You can't possibly mean--!"
"Yes, it is indeed the Elixir you are thinking about," the elderly woman answered before she had even finished. "As for how I got my hands on it… let's say that three thousand years of time is more than sufficient to gather some trinkets."
The Night Goddess blinked dumbfoundedly and Shin-Woo watched on confused. Not only was he perplexed by the faint hostility that seemed to exist between the two women, but the subject also eluded him in more ways than one.
"Is Elixir such an impressive thing…?" He asked tentatively and Nyx swung her head toward him as if she was offended that he had said such a thing. "I-I mean, I've heard plenty of Items with that kind of name…" He added with his hands raised in defense.
Nyx frowned and eyed the box. "The True Elixir of Life… is not as simple. Take it this way… in the whole of history, from the beginning of time until today, there is only one recorded case of it being created. To top it off, it was a natural occurrence, supported by thousands of powerhouses. And it took no less than… 345 million years to achieve."
Shin-Woo almost choked when he heard that. "345 million?! All that for one medicine?"
"Not any mere medicine. It grants the benefits of immortality for a limited period of time. The kind of immortality that cannot even be contested by the likes of the Original Creators," Nyx declared and looked at Flegra warily. "How did you even acquire three doses of it?"
"You ask a lot of questions about me when your friend is dying right here," Flegra countered with a small smile and Nyx pursed her lips. "Are you still angered by the Mental Trial? I merely showed your demon. And solitude… isn't an uncommon one, my dear."
"…"
Flegra stepped back from the bed to fetch a small pair of pincers from the cupboard. "Be as it may, you do not need to be wary of me. At my age, schemes are a thing of the past. These doses of Elixir are from the original conception you mentioned. Despite its one-off happenstance, the amount of this liquid that was made at once was the size of an entire planet."
Nyx raised an eyebrow at that. This was new information to her; she had only heard about how it had been made, not what happened to it. All she had ever heard from other Gods was how it was nearly impossible to make or find.
"If you intend to ask what happened to it… I do not know either," Flegra said and used the pincers to break off a shard of obsidian from Rakna's arm. "I was just lucky to be gifted some by a very old and now deceased Host who was present during the Elixir's creation and sucked in by Systema at its inception. Who knows, maybe someone drank it all and became an immortal transcendent."
The goddess remained silent at that and Shin-Woo decided to speak up once he realized that she was not about to say anything else. "So, was that enough to save him?" He steered the conversation back to the main topic and Flegra made a difficult expression as she inspected the shard of black crystal.
"No, sadly," she admitted. "It bought us time, at the very least. Even the Elixir has its limits. While it is a panacea with nothing it cannot heal… if what is to be healed is itself not there…" She trailed into silence and didn't finish her sentence.
She then put down the obsidian shard on a table and leaned against it. "In short, your friend is all over the place. The state of his soul is something I know and recognized on sight; it's called Stele Inversion. His Soul Stele is starting to manifest outside of him. Obviously, it's deadly. The Stele is a soul's core. Without it, it's nothing more than a bunch of soul power haphazardly glued together."
"Usually, you would fix it by externally pressuring it since an Inversion occurs when the Stele is pushed away by a power going berserk…" Flegra said tiredly and sat down. She sighed and rubbed her forehead.
"Ah… I'm getting too old," she whispered to herself and turned toward her guests. "The problem with the young wolf is that his Stele Inversion is not occurring alone. Which requires a question of my own; what is that black crystal and what is his body made of? I cannot recognize it."
Shin-Woo blinked and turned toward Nyx, with Flegra also focusing on her.
Nyx grimaced slightly. "I'm… not sure," she admitted helplessly. "For a while now, Rakna's body has been an enigma for not only me but everyone in our Guild. I think it was in origin a compound created by his uncle out of the Stones of Eternity and then converted into something new…"
Flegra's eyes widened as if she had recalled something. "What is the name?" She asked with a new glint in her gaze. "Did he ever tell you the name of that physique?"
"Yes… I believe it was Prima Alkahest Materia."
"The universal solvent…" The old woman murmured to herself and rose from her seat with a quiet grunt. She headed to a bookshelf in the corner of the house and at the same time, asked a second question, "What about the crystal?"
"That's… a star," Nyx said hesitantly as if she was not sure herself. "Rakna is a special case with a dual element that only appears when his soul goes through a peculiar alteration based on what emotions he experiences. They were, as of recently, the Everfrost and the Neverwinter Star. If I'm not wrong, they fused into this… Obsidian Star."
"I see; a Unique Magic…" Flegra mumbled as she flipped through the pages of a book. "But that is not enough," she instantly added with a tone full of certainty. "That black crystal is definitely not just a union of elements. Tell me where the 'crystal' aesthetic comes from."
Nyx frowned, starting to feel confused by where she was going with this. "His Kzanaria… we were told that its true identity was the Sage of the Crystal Mountain."
Flegra's hands froze for a second at the revelation. "The Sage…" She repeated subtly. "That… is a surprise," she muttered and turned around. "I understand it better now. I will now ask you a series of assumptions; tell me if they are true or not."
The Night Goddess nodded slowly.
"He has consumed some amount of divinity one way or another."
"Yes."
"His soul is marred by death causality and soul remnants."
"Yes…" Nyx felt something was wrong. That should not be something she can sense.
"He has the ability to assimilate other living beings' physical traits."
"…"
"I'll take that silence as an affirmation," Flegra continued. "His Sub-Path is most likely Nephilim."
"…"
"He is in possession of at least three different types of natural energy. Going by the fact that he is a tailed werewolf; one of them is probably Lunar Energy. Perhaps even Mystic Energy. Which of course adds up with Magical Energy; Mana."
"…"
"He has awakened at least two Sins of Infernity," she concluded with her sixth guess and Nyx was visibly stunned. "It appears I'm right, after all."
"How…?"
"Eons ago, alchemists sought to attain a dream," Flegra followed up and showed her the book she was holding. The page it was opened at depicted hooded figures circling a floating sphere of light cradled by both an angel and a devil.
She turned the page and the sphere of light could be seen disintegrating the bodies of the hooded men to assimilate them, before consuming their very souls.
"They eventually created a theory. First, they needed a container. Something majestic, something that could hold all forces of nature and life within it. Then, they needed to fuse it with a universal solvent; Prima Materia. The only substance capable of absorbing all things that exist."
"Then, they needed the ingredients. First, Mother Nature herself; as many natural energies as they could find and direct. Second, the source code of life itself; the souls of countless creatures. Third, they needed the container to be able to both filter and reign in these souls."
"As such, they required the understanding of life. They theorized that either Sins or Virtues could lead to the understanding of sentient life. For that, they would need to find the soul of a Nephilim and infuse it. Fourth, the container should be able to rule over the World's fundamentals Laws of Spiritual Energy; Death Causality or Life Causality shall be produced, and Divinity or Infernity shall be added to parallel it."
"Finally, they required the container to break down the essence of life and assimilate its properties in the physical realm so that it could eventually control matter and find a power source to devour for itself," Flegra ended her recounting and turned to the next page where a pristine carved stone was hovering above a pair of palms.
"That… is the archetype recipe of the Philosopher's Stone."