53 A Year of Hell and Heaven 2

"Alchemists are the masters of medicine and whatever else that needs the expertise of being a chemical composer. An alchemist's job entails that one must grow his own stash of medicinal herbs to use for research. And once your experiments are approved and given a high valuation, you can proceed to creating the pill, concoction or decoction as freely as you can. However, an alchemist must remember one thing in this life, every medicine recipe you create cannot and should not leak to the outside world. This is my personal rule for you. If you break this, know that a consequence will follow. With that, let's start the lesson."

Clay took out a furnace for Pill concoction and a distiller for potion creation. He gave each one of the farmers the same equipment without any differences in its quality. Clay's aim to is to make sure that the farmers themselves know ho to process their own harvests so that production is up to demand if need be when the time comes. Alchemists needed not any kind of strong combat ability but the precision of following the recipe to the letter. Any research done to enhance an existing recipe will have to be done according to your own preferences and free time.

"What you are holding in your hands are the Pill Furnace. And those beside you are the distillers for Potion Making. Once you master the art of temperature manipulation, I will have you try out recipes. However, for now, keep those tools away and focus on what I will teach you." Clay pointed towards what they were holding and the distiller on the ground and proceeded in teaching them the basic process of manipulating heat. It was using magic. Fire affinity was no longer needed when doing magic, because Clay found out that the skill associated with it was used to just help in controlling the output and to produce the "fire." Clay was not going to teach them Fire magic, but natural phenomenon manipulation.

"What I'm about to teach you, you should never teach to those who do not wish to become alchemists. Only your children are illegible for learning this technique and outsiders are without any right to learn this. Not even your family members that are not part of the group you are currently in, the Alchemists."

"Once I teach you this, you will keep everything you have learned from others and only practice here. Understood?"

"Yes Lord!" The Alchemists nodded their heads right after shouting their answers. The determination they showed even rivaled that of Caltec, Jon and Mor when he made contracts with them.

Jora was the impetus, then day after day, they were able to feel and see the flow of magic particles in the air. Through their practices, they were able to master the feeling. Then proceeded into the next training menu. Clay assigned Jora to be the leader of these alchemists and appointed him as chief apprentice. In the end, even after a year, Jora had remained the chief apprentice. While the rest had followed behind him in their training. It seems that when they thought Clay wasn't looking, they were exchanging notes and teaching each other what they felt and what they learned. Leading to Jora and the rest to have almost the same ability and mastery over the skill [Magic Perception]. Although not as good as Clay, they still had the qualification now to be proper magic and alchemist apprentices of Clay.

The next few months after that until the year ended, they were taught by Clay to next take control of those particles by attaching some of their own magic energy into the particles to control them. This was a hard process and thus, their training became even more arduous, but no one gave up. And the result of such perseverance was Jora, finally attaining the skill, [Magic Control]. The rest have yet to do this, but Clay was not in a hurry.

In between training the Alchemists, his retainers and the different affinity magic users he called, Elementalists, he was also conducting his own research on how he could further trace Spiritual Energy from Isaac's connection to the Spirit realm.

He trained the Elementalists with the same magic principles that he taught the alchemists, however, as they already had affinity to either Fire, Water or Earth, they needed less time to master feeling the magic particles and attaching their magic energy onto them. Resulting in them proceeding faster than the alchemists. What they did have difficulty in doing was, mastering the imagery of their spells to cast them without chanting.

The logic to this is rather simple. Clay hated to sound so chuunibyou-ish. So, he pondered and analyzed what made the existing magic spells tick. And he found the answer. The chanting was used to give the caster a clearer image and aid them in maintaining the image as they cast the spell. Without it, there were many cases of magic apprentices burning their faces of or even cutting their limbs off with their own out of control imagery.