What Witch? This Alchemist is Breaking Bad!

Three weeks later, at night, in Rena’s cellar.

Rena held a candle as she opened the cellar door and slowly walked down the steps.

Behind her, Leon followed with difficulty, carrying two barrels of Mana preparations.

Rena lit several more candles, illuminating the cellar.

After Leon set the barrels down, he turned to confirm with her, “Is it enough to just pour the stuff into the distiller?”

“Mhm.” Rena replied softly, her back to Leon as she prepared the basin and lid of the distiller on the altar.

Looking at Rena’s back, Leon quietly sighed.

In the first few days after Hannah Weisland’s death, the two of them had lived in constant fear.

To be on the safe side, Leon had Rena stay at his house for a period of time while he personally managed the workshop and observed the progress of disposing of the corpse.

Just as Leon had expected, on the day after Hannah went missing, her youngest son mobilized the village’s self-defense group to search the mountains once.

Someone had also gone to question Rena, but Rena—having been repeatedly instructed by Leon—calmly denied having seen Hannah and even went into the mountains with the villagers to search for her.

No one suspected Rena.

Mrs. Weisland had always conducted business with Rena discreetly, only occasionally running into her in the village.

In the eyes of the villagers, Rena did not have much interaction with Mrs. Weisland, merely being the granddaughter of a distant cousin.

By comparison, many people in the village had far more complicated relationships with Hannah Weisland.

After two days of fruitless searching, the villagers had no choice but to give up.

By now, only the Weisland family’s youngest son was still insisting on asking around about his mother’s whereabouts.

He had even gone to the town guards, who could only tactfully inform him that his mother had been involved in illegal dealings, and that her disappearance might be related to the underworld she had come into contact with—something ordinary people were not qualified to investigate.

In the end, Hannah’s disappearance was merely registered by the security office and the Inquisition, and no in-depth investigation was carried out.

After all, not even a body had been found, so there was nothing to pursue.

By now, not even scraps of Hannah’s corpse remained.

Leon had taken the remnants of her clothing and burned them, and the stone used in the killing had been thrown into the river, leaving no evidence behind.

Thus, the murder committed by him and Rena had been completely buried in darkness.

But for the two of them, it was still impossible to pretend that nothing had happened.

Over the past half month or so, they had spoken far less than before, and they had barely even exchanged glances.

Leon could clearly feel that after Hannah’s death, Rena had obviously distanced herself from him, as if they had returned to the time when they had first begun cooperating.

But calling it a cold war did not quite fit either.

They were not lovers or family.

Apart from their business cooperation, they actually had no other relationship.

Rationally speaking, maintaining a certain distance was normal.

It was just that Leon still somewhat missed the period when Rena’s relationship with him had eased during the time they were treating Mrs. Sairi Hesh.

If they had always maintained this distant state from the beginning, it would not have mattered much.

But having once grown familiar enough to joke and laugh together, only to suddenly become cold again—this contrast was what made it most unbearable.

In fact, looking back now, even without Leon’s involvement, the business between Mrs. Weisland and Rena was bound to run into trouble sooner or later.

The foreseeable outcome was that when Hannah was caught again, she would sell Rena out, and then Rena would be captured by the Inquisition.

Strictly speaking, Leon’s intervention had ensured Rena’s safety.

But from another angle, Leon’s involvement had greatly accelerated Hannah’s betrayal of Rena.

His failure to cleanly deal with Hannah had also directly forced Rena to kill someone herself.

On this point, Leon felt he had nothing to argue in his defense.

Leon stood nearby with his arms folded, watching Rena repeatedly extract Mana and purify it.

Occasionally, he would step forward to lend a hand—helping her lift the wooden barrels filled with Mana reagents and pour them into the distiller, or pouring the distilled liquid from the apparatus into the waste barrel.

Throughout the entire process, not a single word was spoken.

This was their first large-scale harvest.

Using reagents, they refined two large barrels of Mana preparations.

The two of them worked back and forth for two full hours before finally completing the extraction from one barrel.

When Leon saw the amount of Mana Rena poured onto the scale, he knew that this harvest was greater than he had imagined.

After all the Mana had been extracted and weighed, the final result was sixty-two carats.

Added to what they had accumulated previously, it totaled seventy-one carats—just over fourteen grams—worth more than two hundred and eighty thousand.

It far exceeded Leon’s expectations.

After that, Rena used a glass rod to take a bit of Mana and stirred it into a black reagent.

The reagent quickly turned red.

Rena held it up to compare it against the flame, and suddenly let out a surprised “Eh.”

“What is it?” Leon asked instinctively.

Rena did not answer.

She carefully observed the color of the reagent, then took out an old book, flipped to a certain page, and meticulously compared it with the color chart drawn there.

“The purity has increased…” Rena murmured.

“What?”

“The purity of the Mana has increased. The Mana refined this time has a purity of about seventy-eight percent. I’ve never extracted Mana with such high purity before!” Rena said in astonishment.

Leon was equally surprised.

The last time, the purity had only been just over seventy percent.

This time it had reached seventy-eight percent, even a bit higher than the limit Rena had previously been able to refine.

“Why? Is it because they were raised in the labyrinth for a long time?” Leon asked instinctively.

“No, theoretically, raising them in the labyrinth would only affect the total amount of Mana, not the purity…” Rena muttered to herself.

Leon also realized that this guess did not hold up.

The few Magical Beasts they had slaughtered earlier had also been raised in the labyrinth for a while, but the extracted Mana had only increased in quantity, with no significant change in purity.

Suddenly, the two of them widened their eyes at the same time, both realizing the reason simultaneously.

If there was anything different about this batch of Magical Beasts… it was that they had eaten Hannah Weisland’s corpse.

They had eaten a human!

“……”

The two fell into silence.

No one brought the topic up.

Leon knew very well that discussing this now would only make their relationship even worse, and it was meaningless.

They could not possibly continue killing people just to feed Magical Beasts for the sake of increasing Mana purity.

Magical Beasts were creations of the Primordial Witch Moilai, beings that appeared out of nowhere within the labyrinth.

Like ordinary creatures, they needed to eat and sleep, and they would mate and reproduce.

The difference was that they possessed physiological structures far more suited for combat, vastly surpassing animals of the same size, and Mana flowed within their bodies, with some species possessing special powers.

Beyond that, they harbored an extraordinary hostility toward humans.

Once they detected a human, even non-carnivorous Magical Beasts would become abnormally violent.

Whether they were resting, feeding, or even hunting other creatures, the moment they discovered a human, they would lock onto humans as their target.

Among humans, they especially loathed Transcendents blessed by the Four Gods of Origin.

It was said that when Church knights entered a labyrinth, even Magical Beasts that were natural enemies would band together and swarm to attack the intruders.

Legend held that the Four Gods of Origin created humans as the lords of all living things, granting them eternal life and wisdom.

But the evil Moilai hated the gods and humanity.

She cast a curse upon living beings, corrupting eternal life, giving birth to pain and death.

To protect humanity, the gods sealed Moilai forever beneath the earth.

And now, they had discovered that Magical Beasts that had eaten humans produced Mana of higher purity, as if those beasts had received some additional kind of “blessing.” It seemed to further corroborate the Church’s doctrine that Moilai loathed humanity.

After thinking it over, Leon tentatively spoke, “I’ll take ten grams of Mana to sell. The rest, you keep for research. How does that sound?”