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n“Do we have the ingredients? Is it within your skill range!” I asked excitedly, standing up.

nIf we could purify the house, then maybe I wouldn’t need to have a magic circle… no… I’d still use it just in case. However, while we were out of the house it’d be nice knowing ghosts weren’t going to enter behind us and wreck our stuff. This was very good news. I was still sweating about how to make anything we did feel permanent. The ghosts were vast, and there was only three of us. We could be waging war on them for years before we made a significant dent in their population. I had feared it might seriously require us to complete this dungeon.

nMiki nodded. “It’s within my ability to make it. The ingredients are simple too. Salt, sage, and bone powder. They possess all of it here, but the amount of bone powder is very low.”

nI blinked and then clicked my fingers. “Ah, what luck!”

nGoing into my backpack, I pull out a sack of powder the side of a small flour bag. Back in Mina’s dungeon, we had collected tons of bone powder from the skeletons. I had held on to it as an alchemic ingredient, hoping it might be useful one day. I ended up not selling it at the goods because of their lack of coin, and now it seemed to have a purpose in repelling ghosts. Perhaps that was why there were no ghosts in a necromancer’s layer, perhaps the undead and spiritually dead repelled each other in a strange sort of way.

n“Master has everything!” Miki brightened when she saw the bag full a powder. “We have a ton of ingredients, then. We can probably get more salt from the general store. As for sage, there is a garden in the backyard and it’s overgrown with sage. I noticed it because it’s not dead. The ghosts probably keep their distance from sage.”

nLike that, she pulled out the recipe. I asked her to read the entire thing to me twice, making sure I memorized it. I set my alchemy skill and then sat down right next to Miki, working alongside her to make the ingredients. When I started helping, her mouth opened in surprise.

n“Master can do alchemy too?” She spoke in disbelief.

nWell, my alchemy level was low, so it wasn’t like I could do anything. I had never actually equipped alchemy before, so as soon as it was equipped I unlocked the skill ‘basic grinding’. Well, it meant I could help her grind down ingredients, even if I didn’t understand most of the other stuff.

n“I’m not high in level,” I admitted. “Grinding is all I can do.”

n“I started out with grinding as well.” Miki nodded, her eyes showing the excitement of doing something that she knew well. “Master liked me to use spiritual fire when making ingredients. He said that the spiritual essence would enter them and make them more potent.”

nAs she worked, blue flame sparked under the bottle she was working under. In the end, the actions she took weren’t much. She merely had me grind the sage, and then burn it, and mix the burnt sage with the salt and bone powder. With that, she pulled the resulting mixture out and placed it in a small leather pouch.

n“Is that it?” I asked, suspecting some kind of magical fireworks to signify the end.

nMiki nodded. “It’s done. While it repels goes everywhere, the guide says for maximum performance, concentrate it as a line across all entrances and windows and reapply once a month.

nThat night, we made sure to sanctify the house. There were no fireworks, but for some reason, we all felt better once the ingredients were laid out. Lydia, in particular, had a much better complexion. It seemed like this stuff helped block the passive spiritual attacks on the spirit. With that, we were in a much better situation than we were before. I helped Miki make some more for tomorrow, and I even leveled in Alchemy.

n{Alchemist has increased to level 2.}

n{Combine Ingredients has been unlocked.}

nI now had the basic skills to make this stuff if I needed to on my own. It was getting very late though, so after boosting the magic circle and feeling like even if it did collapse, we could probably make it through the night without any harassment, we ended up going to bed.

nThe girls didn’t want to sleep apart this night, so we ended up on the floor in front of the fire. Even though we had fled from the city of Chalm, with the fire crackling and my two girls each sleeping on either side of me, I couldn’t help feeling like everything was going to be fine. Tomorrow brought a new day and new challenges. We were just getting started!

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