Emerald Alchemist, Ch 25: Renzer's Bluff (Patreon)

The Alchemists’ Guild building hummed with activity as Verse and Vesana headed through the gate. Once inside, they took the shortest route possible to Renzer’s office.

After his breakthrough, Verse had refreshed his array of soul talismans. Now the draconic runes circled around his arms and neck, floating just above his skin and beneath his clothes. They hummed with elemental energy, waiting for him to speak.

He’d discovered that combining the soul talismans with a spoken command intensified them, especially if his bloodline was active to pour more power into the rune. The draconic language resonated with the power of the world, and it made them much more dangerous.

He was looking forward to testing them out against Renzer if the man didn’t want to cooperate.

The guild building was a sprawling complex, but with Vesana leading the way through one secured door after another, it didn’t take long before they reached Renzer’s office.

The branch manager’s hallway was decorated in rich wood that had a pale golden grain and an understated elegance. It was a grade above the rest of the guild’s interior, but it showed its wealth in quality and endurance rather than in an ostentatious display.

Renzer’s door was the exact opposite.

The door was made from a darker golden wood that released a faint but constant spiritual pressure. It was inlaid with an elaborate pattern of white and black oak trees, which were made from tiny chips of high-quality elemental ore and high-grade spirit stones.

All around the door, there was a pleasant haze of fiery spiritual energy and a wisp of something smoky that calmed the mind and heart, like high-quality incense.

“Radiant fire oak,” Vesana said with a grimace as she indicated the door. “The wood gathers ambient spiritual energy to strengthen itself, even after it is cut. If there’s any excess energy, it releases it into the area. The stones inlaid on the door are a formation that intensifies the effect. It’s a good aid to meditation and a hallmark of many meditation chambers, but it’s expensive, especially for a small city like Boreas.”
It almost made Verse chuckle to hear her call the city small, but compared to the capital, it apparently was. The royal palace was supposedly as large as Boreas, and the city around it was the size of an entire province.

“He had the door changed out when he came here,” Vesana added, “claiming that a branch manager needs to impress visitors. It’s one of the more expensive ways the guild has wasted money on him. We’ve never been stingy with our people, but most of the support goes into ingredients and research. We have elaborate meeting rooms for important visitors, but those are in more public-facing areas. They don’t have any reason to come here. These offices are for private work.”

From her frown, she saw the door as an embarrassment.

“Let’s see if he’s inside,” Verse said as he double-checked his talismans and focused his mind in case he needed to fight as soon as the door opened.

The Knight’s Seal on his shoulder began to glow, surrounding him with a radiant golden aura. It came with its own sense of spiritual pressure. He planned to use it to hide his bloodline aura as much as possible.

Now that they were officially dealing with the disappearance of the alchemists, it was good to look the part.

As far as the guild and the public were concerned, from this point forward, Vesana’s uncle had empowered her to investigate the disappearances, and she had requested the assistance of a nearby Imperial Knight to help.

If Renzer didn’t want to acknowledge that, it would mean he was opposing the investigation for his own purposes.

That wouldn’t go well for him.

Verse cycled his cultivation as he brought himself to peak condition and then nodded at Vesana.

She immediately pulled out an intricate jade plate and placed a high-grade spirit stone on the surface, which disintegrated into dust. A moment later, a pulse of heavy spiritual energy flooded out around the area, making it feel like everything was underwater.

“That should block his communications for a while,” she said as she tucked the plate into a pouch on her belt. “Let’s tell him we’re here.”

Verse rapped on the door with a loud thud that was half physical and half a pulse of spiritual energy. He could just hear the echo inside the office.

What he didn’t expect to hear was a weak groan from the other side, nor for the door to immediately swing open like it was waiting for them.

The office was large, about thirty feet across, and paneled in the same light golden wood as the hallway. Here and there, expensive-looking paintings gleamed on the walls, their frames made from woods that looked just as expensive as the door.

The artwork was a mix of calligraphy that gleamed with a touch of the dao, spiritual herbs in special pots that released waves of dense energy into the office, sculptures from rare ores and stones that released their own unique signature of spiritual energy, and ornate pieces of art studded with gems that flickered with elemental auras.

It was like walking into a treasure room where everything was as rich and ostentatious as possible. Some of the pieces were very nice in their own right, but they had clearly been thrown together by someone who had no sense of taste.

Just seeing it made Verse grimace.

Immediately, however, his attention was pulled to the center of the room, where a man was slumped over a large golden desk. His face was pale and slightly ashen, and there were strange red streaks running across his cheeks and forehead.

Beads of sweat hung on his forehead and nose, looking like they were about to fall, but before they could, they boiled away into a strange type of steam that looked like screaming faces.

The man’s hands clawed at the desktop, contorting into painful arcs as he tried to pull himself up. Several of them were already broken, and his fingertips were bloody. It looked like he’d been at it for a while, but he wasn’t able to stand up.

The man was dressed in a rich golden robe that was streaked with blood and sweat. As far as Verse could tell, that had to be Renzer.

It was also the origin of the groan he’d heard from the door.

Verse took in the situation at a glance. He frowned as he studied the branch manager, trying to figure out what was going on.

His eyes narrowed as he searched for assassins, scanning over the pile of expensive art on the walls for signs of where they could have entered or left, but there was nothing. Nor was there anyone else here.

This wasn’t what he’d expected.

After a moment, he frowned and turned to look back at Renzer. He’d come here to fight, and finding the man already defeated by what looked like poison was...a little disappointing.

It would have been much more satisfying to hit him than to deal with whatever this was.

Renzer stared at the two of them, his hands still clawing at the desk. His mouth moved, but it was quickly replaced by a painful muscle spasm that made all of his veins stand out. It looked like he was trying to ask for help, but his body was barely under his control.

“What happened?!” Vesana shouted from beside him as she started to move forward.

Her initial plan to confront Renzer had been thrown out the window, and she was now looking at the branch manager with shock.

They were in a hurry to gather forces from the guild and follow the trail to the missing alchemists, but seeing Renzer like this was enough to make her hesitate.

“Wait.” Verse’s hand locked around Vesana’s wrist as he pulled her to a stop beside him before she could go more than a step. “Don’t touch him yet. He’s clearly been poisoned, and it could affect you as well.”

He frowned as he looked around the room, ignoring the pain that was on Renzer’s features.

He didn’t trust this. It felt like a trick.

His bloodline surged in his veins, ready to flare up at any moment as he waited for the hammer to fall..

“The Crimson...Sect,” Renzer groaned out. He clawed at the table and tried to sit up, only to fall forward onto his face again with a dull thud. “Help..me. Poisoned...”

“We have to help him!” Vesana said as she tried to walk forward again. Her sense of sympathy was apparently making her abandon her suspicions of the branch manager, or at least set them aside for now.

“This isn’t right,” Verse said as he considered the sect’s methods, the poisons he’d studied, and the pale man in front of him.

“But he’s been poisoned,” Vesana said hesitantly as she let him hold her in place. “Shouldn’t we help him?”

A jade bottle appeared in her hand as she looked between him and Renzer.

“I have powerful antidotes to try. They could fix this.”

“The problem is that he isn’t dead,” Verse said slowly as his frown deepened. He shook his head. “It’s too clumsy. For all their other flaws, the Crimson Shade Sect is efficient. This isn’t like them, and the timing is suspicious. This happened right as we were coming here. Given his position, he should have had plenty of antidotes to try himself that are similar to yours.”

“You think it’s a trap?” Vesana looked around the room, searching the corners for formations and spiritual marks. “I don’t sense anything, and the guild’s wards are all intact.”
“That’s part of the problem too,” Verse said, his suspicions deepening by the moment. He ignored Renzer as he studied the area.

The man didn’t look like he was going to die in the next few minutes.

“Think about it,” he said. “The sect somehow managed to poison him, but not well enough to kill him, without leaving a mark on the guild? If they did it here, they got through the wards on their own and left no trail. That’s possible, but it would make them much more capable than I imagined.

“The other option is they poisoned him somewhere else, and it only activated when he was here alone. That’s more likely, but it meant they got to him in the city. It would take a Primal Spirit-level poison to do that, and while the sect has plenty of those, delivering them in a way he wouldn’t notice would be difficult. Unless the poison was extremely slow, he should have collapsed somewhere else.”

The sect had also hesitated to attack him with a Primal Spirit-realm level of force inside the city. He didn’t think they would have changed their minds and attacked Renzer, who had a very public status here.

It would draw too much attention to them.

That only left silent methods, like poisoning his food or something he touched, but it would have required a lot of stealth to get past the senses of a Primal Spirit alchemist.

Alchemists were all highly trained. If they smelled something strange in their food, there was no way they would eat it, and if they encountered a strange substance on a door, they wouldn’t have touched it.

At least, that should have been the case, unless Renzer was a complete idiot or the assassin was just that good. He frowned again as he brought his attention back to the branch manager.

“On top of that, he’s a very public member of the guild,” he added as he shook his head. “Even if they did target him, leaving him alive is the last thing they would do. It would incite the guild to destroy them immediately. If they were going to do this, they would hide it.”

He stepped forward and studied Renzer, looking for telltale marks in his condition that would suggest what the poison was. He’d studied several of the sect’s Primal Spirit-level poisons that he’d seen in the assassins’ equipment and Corpsewind’s ring, and he was roughly familiar with what they would do.

Renzer’s veins were standing out like tree roots, his skin was pale and ashy, his fingers had wavy purple lines on them that ended in purple tips on his fingernails, and his lips and the whites of his eyes were tinted with the same dusky purple.

Combined with the muscle spasms, the blood he’d coughed out onto the desk, and the pain he was showing, it was a potent one, but it was rather slow.

Something to cause pain rather than to kill?

That didn’t really fit the sect’s style or their need to finish Renzer off quickly.

Or had Renzer already tried to take an antidote and that slowed it down, keeping it from killing him?

Ideas flowed through his mind as he pulled out several antidotes he’d taken from Corpsewind and held them up to Renzer’s skin, comparing what he knew about them to the symptoms. He wasn’t in a rush..

Sometimes, using the wrong antidote was like pouring fuel on a fire. It could kill the patient faster, either by accelerating the poison or just on its own.

He could have stuffed some Cleansing Rain Pills in Renzer’s mouth, since they didn’t have that type of side effect, only a gentle erosion of the poison by the Dao of Water, but he wanted to see if he could identify the poison first.

He wasn’t even sure if he wanted to save Renzer. Letting him die might be more effective, and a faster justice for what he’d done.

After a few moments, he put away the antidotes and began pulling out poisons instead, examining them one by one as he looked for a match.

Renzer’s eyes were fixed on him, half frantic and half confused, as his hands continued to grip the desk in a spasm of locked muscles.

“You’re a cultivator,” Verse said calmly as he looked down at him. “Endure a little pain until I find the right one. Did you know that the Crimson Shade Sect has kidnapped five heritage alchemists now, all ones you met and who just happened to disappear before they could be registered? Imagine what they’re going through right now as soul slaves.”

His voice held little sympathy. The only reason he didn’t walk away was because he wanted to know how deeply Renzer was involved and it would be easiest to hear it from him.

After another minute of searching through poisons and still not finding a match, he shook his head and settled on a different tactic as he stuffed two of the pills he’d taken from Corpsewind into Renzer’s mouth.

One was a restoration pill for stamina and energy, and the other was a meditation aid.

“Those aren’t antidotes,” he explained to Vesana as he stepped back, “but they should help him to focus and dull the pain. Hopefully, he’ll be able to tell us something useful about what happened.”

They waited a few minutes as some of Renzer’s shaking stopped and a little bit of his color returned.

“You said the Crimson Shade Sect did this to you?” Verse asked when the man looked a little more stable. His aura as a Knight was hovering over the room, giving his words the sense of an official interrogation. “Why?”

“Yes, they kidnapped them...” Renzer groaned out as he took a deep breath and then spoke all in a rush, in between muscle spasms. “I tried to stop them, but they nearly killed me and then forced me to help them.”

“Forced you to help them?” Vesana asked sharply. “Why didn’t you tell the guild? They’re only a mid-level sect for this area. No matter what poison they can create, the guild almost certainly has an antidote.”
“It isn’t a normal poison,” Renzer said miserably. “I didn’t even know what I was doing until earlier today. I was only a puppet watching myself go through the motions. The sect master is at the Inspired Aura realm and he cursed me personally with a special blood wraith technique. He controlled my every movement and tortured me!”

Renzer was pale and shaking as he tried to sit up straight, but he only managed it halfway before a coughing fit bent him over on the desk again. He pushed himself up with a shaking arm.

“It was only today that he decided he was done with me,” he said with hollow eyes. ”I was lucky to have a powerful blood-purifying antidote pill on me that he didn’t know about. I took it immediately, but it barely kept me alive until now.”

“What changed today?” Vesana asked, watching him carefully. It wasn’t clear if she believed him or not, but she was waiting to hear what he said.

“The sect master has finally finished his work,” Renzer said with a groan. “He didn’t need me anymore, so he was trying to clean up all the traces. It’s lucky that I’m not dead right now.”

Verse was closely watching the fluctuations in Renzer’s spirit, which was moving erratically as he spoke. It was something he’d just begun to be able to see in others.

The Jade Scripture had several unique traits, and this one was one of them. It was the advanced version of the sensory technique it had given him way back in the Qi Gathering realm, Jade Essence Inspection, which let him analyze someone’s cultivation at a distance.

It wasn’t a perfect lie detector, but it was still useful.

Right now, it told him that the branch manager’s mind was disordered. The changes were inconclusive, but it was the same type of movement someone would have when they were lying.

“The wraith poison nearly killed me when the sect master activated it today, but he didn’t take into account my resistance to poison as an alchemist,” Renzer added as he tried to sit up. He only managed to slump backwards into his chair. “I was just able to stabilize my condition, now that he’s not controlling me any longer.”

He looked up at Verse from there. His pale features made him look exhausted and pathetic.

“So that’s why there’s no sign of a fight?“ Verse raised his eyebrow as he looked around the office. “It was just you trying to cure this poison here? How did they afflict you with it in the first place?”

“They came here over a year ago,” Renzer explained, weakly thrashing as he tried to hit his hand on the desk and only made it flop. “They stood right in front of my desk and laughed at me! Told me I was weak and insulted the guild! They thought they could take whatever they wanted.

“When I told them to get out, the sect master subdued me and forced the wraith poison on me! The guild’s ward couldn’t stop him! I haven’t been myself since then. You have to get revenge on them!”

He brought his fist down and this time managed to slam it weakly into the desk for emphasis.

“So all of these kidnappings were while you were a puppet of the sect, is it?” Verse asked as he watched Renzer’s expression. “The four who went missing right after you talked to them and before they could be registered by the guild? And then the one who was captured last week?”
“The...four? There were that many of them?” Renzer’s eyes were wide as he professed his innocence. “I didn’t know they took so many! The devils!”

He doubled over in a coughing fit as he slammed his fist onto the desk, beating it angrily against the wood.

“How dare they!” he roared, although it came out weakly. “They have no respect for the guild! They have to be punished!”

“This is ridiculous.” This time, it was Vesana who spoke up sharply as she glared at Renzer from the side.

Her voice was more arrogant than Verse had ever heard, which made him wonder what she was up to as he glanced over at her.

It also made Renzer flinch.

“I have heard of poisons like the one you’re talking about,” Vesana said imperiously, “and a cultivator at the Inspired Aura realm is potentially strong enough to create one, but how dare they insult the guild like this. They’ve forgotten where I come from and who the guild really is. There’s an easy way to see the truth of what they’ve done.”

“A way to see the truth?” Renzer was staring at her, apparently as surprised by what she was saying as Verse.

Vesana pulled out her guild badge and held it on her palm. With a flick of her hand, a faint blue aura began to rise up from an inscription on it.

The aura drifted toward Renzer, flowing around him as it settled across his body, outlining each of his limbs and then intensifying as it gathered toward his meridian and dantian..

“This is a pill sensing aura,” she said with a hard look at Renzer. “It will show the effect of any pills or poisons you’ve taken recently. The formation built into the badge will show the wraith poison you were subjected to, as well as the dao of the alchemist who made it. It will also record the aura, so that we can track them down.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Renzer said as his eyes widened. There was a trace of nervousness in them that quickly disappeared, but his spirit wavered like a candle in a storm as he stared at the badge.

“It’s a secret of the enforcement branch,” Vesana said calmly as she looked down at her badge. “My family uses it all the time. It should be done in a moment, so just hold still.”

“The core disciples of the guild are truly blessed with resources that are beyond us regular mortals,” Renzer said. His voice held a bitter note that wasn’t there before. “I’ve done so much with what I was born with, but I still cannot compete with the heavens.”

He stared into space for a moment, looking lost. Some of the energy that had been in his voice before, even with the poison, had disappeared.

Then his spirit calmed down suddenly, as if his mind was focused to a single purpose.

“Well, if there’s no way around it,” he said quietly, almost peacefully, as he looked at all of his wealth that decorated the room, “then I suppose it will just have to be like that. Let the truth come out.”

He shuddered under the blue aura, gathering in on himself like he was shivering in the cold. The aura highlighted all the effects of the poison on his body, making it clear how unhealthy he looked.

Even sitting in his chair, he was hunched over like a pale ghoul covered in sweat, ash, and purple streaks. His voice was calm now, but suddenly his body began to shudder as his veins stood out. His eyes began to look redder and more bloodshot.

His spiritual energy wobbled around him, barely under control, but then it sharpened. He drew in on himself, shaking like he was suffering from a sudden chill.

Then a burning hot aura that felt like it weighed a thousand tons crashed outward from him and flooded the area, hurling both Verse and Vesana across the room.

It was the full weight of a Primal Spirit cultivator’s aura, something that he had apparently been holding in reserve. It flooded out of him with its full force, crackling like a blazing inferno that filled the area.

“If I can’t escape what I’ve done,” he growled as he fumbled at the desk in front of him. His movements were jerky from both the poison and rage. “Then I might as well take both of you with me.”

In the instant his aura gave him, he clawed open a drawer in the desk and yanked out a pill, which he hurriedly swallowed.

Almost instantly, the ashen marks on his face began to recede and the purple streaks all over his body turned into swirling currents that began to gather toward his stomach. The sweat on his forehead disappeared, evaporating as a hot wind blew away from him.

His skin took on a bright orange tint like a flaming ember and the spiritual energy radiating from him increased by the moment. It looked like he wasn’t able to use his cultivation at full strength until the poison was cleared, but it was returning quickly and he still had his aura.

At the rate it was going, it wouldn’t be long before he was back to his full strength.

Normally, a Primal Spirit cultivator’s aura could have easily crushed two Aligned-realm cultivators under its weight, but under the onslaught, Verse and Vesana only slid back a few paces.

For Verse, it was because his body was too strong to be thrown around by an aura of this level, and for Vesana, it was because she was shielded by all the artifacts she had.

Renzer’s aura was blazing and oppressive, but it was only an aura. Compared to Corpsewind’s, it was even easier for him to deal with. Auras were based on the dao, and while Corpsewind’s ghostly dao was the opposite of Verse’s, the branch manager’s was not.

Verse ignored the heat that tried to touch his skin, consuming it with his own flames, and then he shoved aside the remaining pressure with pure physical strength.

At his side, Vesana drew in a quick gasp of air as she pulled a medallion out of her clothes and raised it in the air. It shone with a soft blue light as the rest of the pressure around her instantly disappeared.

She straightened her shoulders as she glared at the traitor across the room.

“That has to be an antidote he just ate,” she said, biting off her words with a fierce chill. “We have to stop him before he can escape and warn the sect. Not to mention, the enforcers would love to get ahold of him and find out all the other things he’s done over the years.”

Verse looked across the room at Renzer, who was focused on the pill he’d just taken. His aura surrounded him in a defensive layer and he was clearly trying to cycle the antidote’s energy as quickly as possible.

His cultivation had been suppressed down into the Aligned realm before, but it was slowly stabilizing now that he’d taken the pill.

Unfortunately for him, even the best antidotes took a little time to work. Until then, he only had his aura and a fraction of his cultivation to defend himself.

That meant it was best to deal with him now.

Verse cracked his knuckles and a wind began to blow through the room, bringing a cool breeze that ruffled his robes and pushed away some of Renzer’s aura.

Then he reached out to the soul talismans he’d prepared. They flowed down his arms and into his hands, glowing with the intense sigils of the dragon’s language that had been combined with the Jade Scripture Sect’s technique.

“Seal.”

The word echoed out around the room as half a dozen draconic runes rose up from his hands and shot in different directions, merging into the walls, the floor, and the ceiling with a silent roar.

Lines of glowing jade flame ran across the walls between them, swiftly interlocking with one another. A moment later, the space around them warped into a sphere with six key nodes, creating a ward around the area that sealed everything inside.

Waves of jade essence flowed across the surface, creating faint draconic sigils that glimmered before fading away again into the seal. Moment by moment, the seal grew stronger as it gathered elemental energy from the world nearby.

With his Jade Formation complete, Verse’s capability with jade essence had leapt forward by a wide margin. This seal was strong enough that it would take even a Primal Spirit cultivator a little while to break out of it.

While it was intact, Renzer wasn’t running anywhere.

Verse looked across the room at the traitor and a feeling of hot wrath flooded through him, making his bloodline surge. It looked like he was going to get to fight after all.