Chapter 89: Closed-Dish Cultivation (Patreon)

How did you prove germ theory to someone who didn’t believe it? It was actually a surprisingly difficult question, given that technically speaking, even back on Earth it was, still just a theory. A germ- ahem.

Granted, it was a highly tested and unanimously accepted theory, but because it was a matter of biology, it couldn’t be a proper law. It just couldn’t have the sorts of rigorous mathematical backing required.

All that was to say Edwin couldn’t prove that germs caused disease directly. He could prove the existence of bacteria, yes, but without access to massive amounts of people who were sick with the same thing, he couldn’t even show that the presence of a given bacterium was strongly associated with being sick

Edwin’s solution? Ignore the outright proof of germ theory for disease, just go to try and show that bacteria were real. There were two routes to get there. The first was to build a microscope and outright show Galen that bacteria were real- tricky, but doable, potentially even with apparatite lenses instead of glass. The second was to grow a culture of bacteria in a petri dish.

Fortunately, he didn’t need to choose one route or the other. Both would work just fine for his purposes, and mean there was less chance of being messed up in some way.

“Well?” Alchemist Galen prodded. Fair enough, Edwin had been silent for a minute while planning out his avenues of attack, “What shall I see?”

“I don’t suppose you have any microscopes?” he checked. No point in reinventing the wheel if he didn’t need to, after all.

“A… small-glass? What’s that?”

“That’s a no, then. It’s a contraption that lets you see really small stuff. I didn’t think you’d have it, but I wanted to check. I’ll… make one, I guess. Just give me a few days and I’ll have proof for bacteria’s existence.” Edwin nodded to himself. He’d head back to his carriage and try to get some kind of bacteria culture going, then build his microscope while it was developing.

“Hm. Well, when you’re willing to admit defeat, find me. Now run along. You’ve wasted enough of my morning already.”

Edwin glared at the alchemist, but held his biting comments back. What he made would be far more convincing than anything he could say…

“I agree. Quite the wasted morning.”

Dang it.

------

Petri dishes were actually quite easy to make. Well, it was that easy when you had an instant ‘summon object’ power, and could simply create a glass dish by imagining the tool exactly as he wanted it to appear. It would have been way harder if he had to try and use actual glass in his experiments. Regardless, that was unfortunately where the easy part ended.

Awkwardly, this was the first time Edwin had actually tried cultivating bacteria. He’d been a physicist, not a biologist, and the closest he’d gotten to the squishy sciences since before college was when he took organic chemistry, which… well, it didn’t cover bacteria cultures. Even back in high school, he didn’t think he’d actually done anything like this. So, he had to figure it out from scratch

Memory told him that the substance used in a petri dish was called agar, but that came with precisely zero accompanying knowledge for what that was, why it was used, or even how to use it. Making an educated guess, he presumed it was food for the bacteria, which he hoped he could substitute with more readily available magical ingredients.

Talsanenris was the obvious option for magical food, given its utterly absurd caloric equivalent, though it might have been short in nutrients. He did have a fair amount of talsanenris leaf, though, which he’d seen had tremendous nutrient density, so that should compensate well enough. All he’d need to do would be to crush some talsanenris leaves and berries together, then add water until it was a nutrient slurry, and he could use that as his base for his colonies.

…Probably, anyway. If this worked properly on his first try, it would be amazing. He’d had better luck with all of his trials on Joriah than back in a lab for whatever reason (he suspected his Alchemy skill helped), but he wasn’t sure if that luck would hold over to biology. Well, fingers crossed.

He used a stagnant puddle near the stream for his bacteria source, scooping up a tiny measure of water and pouring it into his experimental dishes. Once they were prepped, Edwin found a warm, but not hot, corner of his lab and let them sit.

While waiting for his cultures to grow, Edwin started tracking down the materials he would need for his microscope. While he could make most of it out of pure apparatite, it wouldn’t be suitable for the tube. The whole point, after all, was that only light from the sample could make it inside, and his transparent crystal wouldn’t do a very good job at blocking out extra light.

He played with using paper and bark for his purposes, but paper was too translucent and bark was too inflexible. Ultimately, Edwin did go with a cylinder of beaten iron, purchased from the blacksmith for some twenty ager. Honestly, he should have checked there from the very beginning, but he was too accustomed to making everything himself. Magic could compensate for a lot of the supply chain, it turned out. At least it wasn’t too expensive, though the speed at which he’d gotten his part made was bound to have upped the price some.

The rest of the build was… well, not exactly easy, but not too challenging either. Other than actually getting his lenses in focus, it was just a matter of playing around with methods of holding the iron tube up and at some kind of adjustable height.

It took time, sure, but it was just tinkering, and it was kind of fun. It still took Edwin the better part of a day to get the housing up, but he accomplished it nonetheless.

The next day was where things got tricky, and he ultimately decided he didn’t want to have to deal with the math, and instead resorted to trial and error. Granted, it was educated trial and error, but it still just amounted to trying different lenses until he found one with the focal length he wanted, namely a bit shorter than the length of his microscope tube.

Once he started getting close, the rest of the work was straightforward, and within two days, he had a fully functional microscope. It still took a bit more tweaking to get it powerful enough to actually see bacteria and the like, along with more silver spent at the blacksmith’s to get better caps on both ends of the tube, but he did manage it in the end.

While not all of his petri dishes had grown any appreciable amount of bacteria culture, two had enough spots growing in the talsanenris slurry that he felt confident in showing them to Galen.

And so, dishes in one hand and microscope in the other, he found himself knocking on the Alchemist’s door just three days after he’d last stormed out.

“Come in! Ah. Maxlin. Come to admit your failings, then?”

“Not at all, Alchemist Galen. I think I have some things you’ll find particularly interesting, as it were.”

He pulled out the dishes and set the microscope down, “So the first thing I want to show you are these bacteria cultures I grew over the past few days,” he set the dish down and slid it over, “This is just from a sample of pond water, and fed with some talsanenris. Each of these spots you see here? That’s a colony of bacteria, grown from a single cell in the original sample. I started off with just a bit of water from the stream and food to grow, and here you are.”

“Hm, yes. Mold. I’m very familiar with this concept. You can create it from almost anything edible, with just a bit of water. So trivial the System doesn’t even acknowledge it as creation. Is that truly the best you have to offer?”

“What? Create… oh, you did mention that, didn’t you,” Edwin sighed. “You know, Alchemist Galen, other than magical shenanigans, life doesn’t arise from nothing.”

“Nonsense! We can see this happen all over the place! Just as rotting meat makes flies, mice from tall grass, spoiled potion waste water makes slimes… need I go on?”

“That’s not… Okay, I don’t know about that last one, but the former are definitely false. Hm. Okay. So… I’ll get back to that one, actually. For now, this is the microscope I was talking about.”

Edwin fiddled around with his stuff for a minute, getting a slide ready. He made sure to show his process to the alchemist, taking a bit of seemingly clear water and dabbing it onto the slide. Once it was in place, he adjusted the microscope until the slide was in focus and he could… not exactly clearly, but still see some larger bacteria.

“Right here. Just look down this and you’ll see what I’m talking about.”

“Bah. Kids these days, no respect for… Oh now that’s clever.”

Edwin perked up, “You see it?” he looked over to see… Galen fiddling with the adjustment knob. Great

“Quite the clever little setup you have here. So you turn this little knob-thingy and that raises or lowers the platform? Don’t suppose you’d be able to share how it works?”

“Uh, I mean, I wasn’t really planning to but I can think about it?” he replied, caught off-guard.

“I don’t see any of these invisible slimes!” Galen snapped, finally peering into the lens.

“What? Oh, you took the focus off.”

“The what now?”

“I had it set up properly, but then you fiddled with the knob and… could I adjust it back, please? I’m going to need you to move.”

“What? You’re blaming me for it? You impertinent boy! I’ve been an alchemist since before your parents were eating dirt!”

“I mean,” Edwin found himself taken aback, “You also haven’t used a microscope before today, so you wouldn’t really be able to know how it works? Though just adjust that knob until the picture comes into focus.”

He took that as an invitation to really start spinning the knob, far too fast to properly focus on any sample, “Um, that’s not how you adjust it. You need to-”

“Shaddup, boy! I know what I’m doing!”

“Your… your, ah, actions speak otherwise, Alchemist Galen. Look, if you’d just let me, I can focus it and then we’ll be on our way.”

“No! I won’t have you deluding me with whatever tricks of the light you’re aiming to try and fool me, but I’m onto your tricks, you adventurer,” the man waved a warning finger at Edwin. “You need to have quite the updraft if you want to get one over on me.”

“Okay, then just… go a bit slower, I guess? You’ll never be able to find the right focus when you’re twisting on it so much, and I’m kind of worried you’ll…” Edwin found his warning cut off by a crack and glittering blue lights, “…break it.” He lamely finished.

“Your damned doohickey broke,” the man accused.

“Yeah. I see that,” Edwin replied, unamused. “Can I see it now, Alchemist Galen? I think I can fix it.”

“Bah. Fine, if you must.”

He gingerly accepted his creation and looked over, trying to figure out what had broken. There was no obvious external damage, but the adjusting knob spun freely and allowed the viewing apparatus to sink to the lowest point it could reach- almost touching the slide.

It didn’t take too long for Edwin to figure out the problem. One of the internal gears had shattered, disconnecting the knob from the slider in charge of actually moving the contraption up and down. He could even see exactly where it should have gone, the transparent nature of apparatite  a double-edged sword in this situation. After all, he could see through the outside just fine… but he could also see through the inside as well, and so had to try and figure out what tiny piece was missing by seeing which section of the interior was slightly less distorted.

Not fun and not easy to find, but certainly easy to fix. All it took was Apparatusing in a replacement part in the same position it should have been in, and he was good to go.

“Okay, there you go. Please try to not break it this time? Or, better yet, let me adjust it?” he tried.

“Bah. Fine. I shall allow you to present your best case, that your failings cannot be blamed on me,” the alchemist reluctantly conceded. “Just make it quick.”

Edwin successfully held back his grumblings as he set up the slide. Other than a brief hitch where he needed to replace his replacement part from the microscope- his initial fix hadn’t interlocked with the further gears properly- it was accomplished without incident and he stepped back, motioning for the medic to take a look.

“So what am I supposed to be seeing? I don’t see any of those tiny slimes you’re talking about.”

“What? There’s lots of stuff. The cells, the green algae, the longer tubes…”

“Dirt? That’s what you’re going on about? Ha!” he barked, “No wonder you sounded so sure about yourself. Of course we well know that getting dirt in you’s bad. You’re not supposed to have earth in the body, just wind, water, and fire. That’s basic!

“I will say though, the idea that you could make more dirt in your body is a new one! Ha! Can’t wait to tell the others about this.”

“What?” Edwin finally composed himself, “How do you look at that and see dirt?”

He breathed in deeply, “Okay. You know what? I can prove that there’s something alive that’s that small, and that you can’t just ‘create’ life by mixing sugars and water together. Though I have to ask, do you have any Skills that just encourage life to grow in any form? It’ll speed things up.”

Galen looked at him skeptically, “When this fails, you’re going to leave me alone and quit wasting my time. But I do have Encourage Life, yes. What would you have me use it upon?”

Edwin clasped his hands together, “Okay, great. I’ll be back in five minutes, I just need to grab a couple of things.”

-----

Edwin returned quickly, armed with his talsanenris agar-replacement and a vial of puddle water.

“So,” he explained, “Bacteria are like most living things. If you boil them, they’ll die. Once they’re dead, it doesn’t matter how much food they have around them, they won’t come back to life.

“Now,” he admitted, “There are bacteria which can survive water-boiling temperatures and can even thrive in those environments, but they wouldn’t live in the stream where I got this.” He lifted the vials of water he’d grabbed, “But that being said, there may be tiny spots of bacteria growth on the dish. It just won’t be anywhere near as prevalent as our control dish.”

“Control dish?”

“Ah… comparing what will happen to doing literally nothing. Which is what you should be doing more often,” he glared, “Particularly with medical treatments.”

“Ah yes, the heartless act of experimenting upon your patients rather than treating them. Such a bastion of morality, are you not?”

Edwin took a deep breath, then figured it wasn’t worth it and snapped at the alchemist, “Better that than killing people for a thousand years because what somebody thought sounded nice. The world doesn’t work how you think it ‘ought’ to. Science and alchemy is figuring out how the world actually functions, and no matter of so-so stories will change that. So yes, I would rather experiment on a patient than blindly trust that what I’m doing is the best. Now, I’d ask them first, but people who are desperate tend to be pretty open to trying out a new system that you think might work better than the existing treatment.

“The important thing is just that you ask. Don’t force them to do something potentially dangerous just because you think it will help them.”

“Ha! As though the fools could know what is best for them. They need a firm, guiding hand to avoid hurting themselves…” he looked at Edwin, “And others, with their dangerous ideas”

Right. Edwin recalled, I’m still in the Empire, where ‘personal liberty’ is choosing in what way the government controls your life.

“Well… setting that aside,” Edwin moved on, “When doing an experiment, you need at least two groups. One is the control, where you do nothing, and the others are your experiments, where you can actually see what changes when you alter different variables.

“In this case,” he explained, “We’re comparing boiled water to non-boiled water. So when I take this vial and divide it in half,” he narrated, “we can use that to compare what happens to basically the same water when either boiled or left alone.

“So with this half,” he lifted one of the two smaller vials he made, “We put it in this dish, and you can use your Skill on it. Then we can see what happens when we use your Skill on bacteria.

“Now, with this half, I’ll take and boil the entire dish we put it in, just to try and sterilize any bacteria that might have gotten in from the food.”

“Interesting methodology. Very well, continue.”

“Okay, so here.” Ediwn mixed his control water into the dish, “Use your Skill on this while I boil this.”

The contraption he set up for boiling his petri dish was simple enough in theory, just a stand that he could set the apparatite onto, but in practice, making a platform out of his skill that could withstand the temperatures of Galen’s blazing fire- which he was using as a heat source in this instance- was a bit trickier.

Honestly, he just hoped the crystal dish would survive the fire alright. It wouldn’t be good if it broke and ruined everything, but there was only so much he could do in that regard. The stand was more vulnerable, anyway, as if he had it resting on the ground too close to the fire, it would be exposed to far more heat.

Eventually, he got a contraption hung from the top of the mantle, suspending the dish on what looked like crystal wires. Once Edwin made sure it was secure, he let it be and returned to Galen, whose Skill had already resulted in a few cultures popping up.

He nodded to himself and looked back at the dish, ensuring nothing was going wrong. A touch of Basic Thermokinesis helped it along, and it was boiling in no time. To be on the safe side, he let it go for several minutes, though he was constantly mindful of ensuring the water didn’t boil away.

By the time he was satisfied with the boiling, Galen had finished up with the first dish and was looking at the circular cultures with detached interest, “This certainly is a fascinating demonstration of trivial life creation, I shall admit. Thank you for bringing it to my attention and not making this a complete waste of my time.”

Edwin silently glared at the man, though the alchemist didn’t look up to see his gaze.

“Now can you repeat the process? Here, this one is complete, though you may want to let it sit for a few minutes before touching it.”

Edwin gently set the dish down on a pre-made stand, allowing the tongs he had been using to carry it dissipate back into magic. With a flourish, he directed the older alchemist to work his magic on the sample, and waited for vindication…

Wait, what?

“I… I don’t understand,” he blinked. “This should have worked, what’s going on?”

“As I told you, boy. You’re seeing dirt and thinking it’s alive, claiming to be able to show that life doesn’t form under the right conditions- where else would it come from? You keep spouting nonsense, and by your own words, you’re wrong.”

Edwin looked at the dish in confusion. There were fewer cultures than the wholly untreated one, yes, but the ones that were there still blanketed most of the bottom. If he didn’t know better, it would have looked like the heated mixture had just changed the type of ‘mold’ that had grown. What was…

Hm. Were bacteria magical here as well?

“Do you have anything you wish to say?”

“I can still prove this. I just need a better setup, I think. One that I thought about for more than ten minutes.”

“Hm, yes. I suppose that with sufficient changes and perhaps a new potion of sorts, you could indeed change the conditions enough that growth would no longer happen. But you outlined your… ‘experiment’ and it failed.”

“But…”

“Get out of my office. You’re wholly unsuitable for any form of medical license, clearly, and would simply use the permit for your uncouth ‘experiments’ upon your patients.”

“I know what I’m doing, though!” Edwin protested.

“You clearly do not. Now get out or I’ll report you to the Registrar.”

-----

Over the course of his research, Edwin had come to a realization about why exactly he found alchemists so frustrating. It was just a general pre-scientific mindset, actually. Basically, instead of looking around at the world, finding something interesting, figuring out what caused that, and then using that discovery to predict other parts of the world, they skipped the first step entirely. Alchemists looked at what they thought should be the case, and then fiddled around with all manner of variables until they either found something that more or less worked how they thought it ‘ought’ to, or gave up.

He could see it even in his coworkers. Keir and Rhita both thought that porcelain was made with bone, and so they only ever worked with bone meal and other ingredients. In the unlikely event they somehow made porcelain, despite them not using any of the main components, they’d misattribute their success and focus on whatever bone they had finally tried alongside it as ‘the key.’

That was probably how their potion-making worked too, wasn’t it? Someone had thought that a certain substance- say sand- ‘should’ be able to put people to sleep, and then played around with it until they found something that worked. Of course, there were still some kind of magical shenanigans going on that kept him from making potions… unless it was just the result of their standardized Skills? Maybe because he was missing- he checked his notes- Mixing, whatever magical oddities were at play refused to blend together because he didn’t have the right equipment to make it work.

That would actually make sense, come to think of it. It could be any number of the fundamental ‘alchemist’ Skills, really. Potion-making, Mixing, Emulsify, Process… Heck, it might even be Colorimetry or Timing and his inability to tell with enough precision when he needed to perform certain steps that caused the entire procedure to fail.

Whatever the reason, though, it made it insanely difficult to explain why his approach was different from the others’. After all, from what they could tell, Edwin was just basing his ‘bacteria are real’ claim off of exactly as much evidence as most of their propositions, and was now just trying to brute-force his way into making it make sense.

He’d tried boiling- that hadn’t worked. Cooling hadn’t worked either, though that one may have been more a result of not having any particularly effective way to cool, let alone freeze, his water. Ice was a luxury he didn’t know how to make quite yet.

So Joriah had fire-immune, or at least fire-resistant bacteria that were way more common than on Earth. Perhaps it was just Panastalis, and some chemical in the water? It was a bit concerning that in the event he encountered a waterborne disease, boiling water wasn’t an assured method of preventing its spread. Perhaps he should try to make an autoclave? Maybe he could use that to figure out what temperature these pyrophiles died at.

After all, if you can’t burn something, you just haven’t used a big enough fire.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t test any other ways that might kill bacteria. After all, it wasn’t like he had any bleach or other common disinfectants to work with (not that he’d ever use it on drinking water)… he was pretty sure that filtering and distilling the water was successful at killing the bacteria, but his cultures still had growth even when he tried using only that, and he couldn’t cultivate anything that never experienced any growth short of not including any food in the experiment, which was hardly a surprise.

That said, he expected it was due to the simple fact that he couldn’t filter and distil, and thus properly sterilize, his talsanenris nutrient soup. If he had a powerful ultraviolet light, then he might be able to sterilize it that way, but he had literally no clue how to make a UV lamp.

He had probed Memory to the best of his ability to no avail save a vague tickling sense it had been covered in a book he had read at some point. Maybe once he leveled it some more, he’d have better luck, but for now… he didn’t quite have the recollection to piece together tiny fragments of what he’d learned and letting Research fill in the gaps.

The important thing was that he knew he was right. He’d seen the evidence with his own eyes, knew exactly what the problem was, but nobody would listen! He wasn’t crazy, he was right!

“…That’s what crazy people say, isn’t it? ‘I’ve seen the truth, you need to listen to me!’” he asked as his ranting to Inion drew to a close.

The fey nodded, and Edwin buried his head back into his pillow with a frustrated sigh.

-----

After the... less than stellar outcome of his medical license attempt, and subsequent investigations into what went wrong, Edwin mostly just returned to his work on porcelain, though with much less enthusiasm. It had been a couple of months of just glassmaking, after all, and he was starting to get bored.

Plus, his coworkers had heard vaguely that something had happened, and would not shut up about trying to figure out what was going on. Fortunately, whatever rumors were circulating didn’t directly reach him, and those that he heard about indirectly were super contradictory.

Sometimes, people seemed to think he had made some sort of new healing potion slime, another time it was that he was secretly a healing mage pretending to be an alchemist despite what Identify said. Sometimes, he’d successfully gotten his license by revealing some brand-new treatment, other times he had been laughed out of the room by proposing that all dirt was alive and could be used to make golems.

Those were, thankfully, about as close as the rumors got. Other people said he’d shown some way to properly transmute blood into fire or fire into blood, or he’d introduced some fourth Attribute into the basic collection.

All told, Edwin’s days of anonymity were long over. Previously, he could go basically unnoticed on his daily errands or when going up and down the tree, but these days simply walking around attracted stares and the occasional whisper. It was not the sort of attention that he wanted, nor that he liked any all that much.

Finally, he couldn’t take it any more and told Fissath exactly what had happened with Galen. He categorically refused to tell Rhita and Keir because of how much they bugged him about it, not that Thoril or Wendell were too much better. Cope hadn’t said anything, but Edwin could tell that the way the man looked at Edwin had changed, and he knew there would be some kind of confrontation with him at some point.

“Tiny, invisible slimes?” the avior asked incredulously.

“Well, not exactly. But sort of. You know how insects and that sort of thing can be really, really small until you can barely see them?”

“Yes.”

“Well, life doesn’t stop there, and it just keeps getting smaller and smaller.”

“Makes sense.”

“Bacteria are, to some extent, as small as life can get. While normally living things are made up of uncountable numbers of building blocks- cells- of all different sorts, bacteria are only made of one.”

“Uh-huh. So what was the problem?”

“Well… I’m not entirely sure. My current theory is just that the native bacteria are way, way more resistant to temperatures than those I’m accustomed to. But I can’t conclusively prove that, and that’s the problem.”

“Makes sense. Pass the Arycal?”

“Right, sorry.” He handed over the white, clay-like disaster waiting to happen. Months of keeping the kiln running had taken off a bit of his fear of the substance, though he was still quite skeptical of it’s supposed complete stability.

The formula for how it was kept stable was a Guild secret, and he didn’t qualify. Then again, given the normal sorts of potions the Guild dealt with, Edwin wasn’t sure that he’d feel reassured by finding out what nonsensical blending of substances prevented the two hyper-reactive elements from doing anything.

“So… yeah.”

The avior shrugged, “It’s interesting. I don’t know enough about medicine to tell you if it seems reasonable though. The idea that tiny creatures that live inside of us and make us sick is hardly the strangest thing I’ve learned since I got to Panastalis, anyway. It’s certainly more reasonable than some of the nonsense the Pair like to cook up, anyway.”

“So then what would you say is the strangest thing you’ve heard?” he asked, their conversation naturally shifting along.

“Well, this one time Rhita tried to explain to me how…”

----

“Alchemist-Errant Maxlin,” a voice called out as Edwin slunk down the road after a relatively boring day of work. It took a moment for him to process the statement, but once he did, he perked up and looked around.

The source of the voice was readily apparent, as a tall, dark-haired woman in fine, but durable, clothing approached him. He didn’t think he’d met her before, but…

Eternal Master of Manifold Potions and Elixirs

Yeah, nope. Never met someone with that kind of class before. Sheesh, how did you even get something like that?

“I am Master Kertoa,” Her voice was firm but not harsh as she spoke to Edwin, and she looked him straight in the eye the entire time, his eyes unable to look anywhere else, “and you and I are due for a serious conversation.”