A few days had passed since their return to the base. Those days had mostly been spent recovering from the journey, Fire's spent the remaining time monitoring the recovery of freeZe and TehLulz. It seemed that both of them would need a fair bit more time until they were back in fighting shape so he was in no rush with the preparations.

On the sixth day after their return Fire sat at the wooden table in the living quarters, thinking about the details of the assault on the End. His contemplation was interrupted when Unchosen came down the stairs, evidently having woken up not long before.

Unchosen said: "Morning."

Fire returned the greeting, then said: "You seem to have something on your mind."

Unchosen sat down next to Fire. "I know I should be recovering but to be honest, this is as recovered as I'll get. I want to do something that'll help us in what's ahead."

Fire had expected something like this sooner or later, Unchosen and Ambigious had come out of the situation in Rockhaven largely unharmed and it was only natural for restlessness to crop up.

Fire suggested: "How about we go brew some potions? We'll need quite specific ones for what's ahead."

He then got up and started walking towards the exit, Unchosen followed him.

While walking, Unchosen asked: "Specific in what sense?"

Fire said: "We only know very few things about the End, the only source of information are players who have gone to the End before, NPCs wouldn't be able to tell the tale because they usually don't respawn."

At the hub they turned to the corridor of the potion lab. Fire meanwhile continued: "To answer your question, there is one thing that everyone who has been to the End agrees on. The fact that there it doesn't have any air you can breathe."

Unchosen said: "So, it's in space?"

Fire replied: "Probably something like that. We know that the Nether is physically below the Overworld with a layer of void separating the two. It would be logical that the End has a similar position, existing above the Overworld. We don't know if there is another layer of void above the world but we assume that that is not the case since there is no protective layer of bedrock in the sky."

"So if you knew where it was you could just fly there with magic, right?"

Fire nodded. "That would only make sense, however the most reliable way to get there is still the portal."

They arrived in the lab, both of them routinely put on their protective gear.

While putting on his gloves Unchosen said: "So I imagine we'll need a potion that removes the need for air, ideally something that doesn't conflict with bolstering potions."

Fire said: "Exactly. That is also the most difficult part, water breathing potions rely on the oxygen in water, so we can't use them because there obviously isn't any kind of oxygen in a vacuum."

Unchosen said: "I see. So we need to design a potion that contains enough energy for our entire stay."

Fire replied: "Not quite, there is one very important bit of information that Shadow got from a mage that has been to the End before, in fact the only one she could find. That mage said that the magical background field was exceptionally strong in the End, ideally our potion should make use of that to power our bodies. If we can't get that to work we'll go with your idea."

Unchosen said: "Makes sense. One last thing, how would both of those options look conflict wise?"

Fire said: "Draining energy from the environment generally causes less complications, drinking condensed energy on the other hand would probably cause more conflicts since other potions usually don't play nice with charged particles."

"Alright." Unchosen said. "How do we begin?"

Fire replied: "The usual way, by scouring the books for something that does what we want so we don't have to reinvent the wheel."

They spent hours looking through the potion journals of various alchemists and they did eventually make a find. Naturally it was no perfect fit, so far very little thought had been given to creating a potion suited to surviving a magic-rich vacuum. This particular potion had originally been designed for miners mining very close to bedrock and was intended to offset the life force draining effects of being so close to the void. They would have to modify the potion quite a bit but the overall structure of the effect was promising. Of course they would first have to test the potion in its original form.

A first small batch of potion was brewed quickly, all relevant ingredients were readily available and it required no extraordinary processing steps.

Fire said: "Now it's time to test it."

He walked over to a structure that looked like a large fume hood. With a few gestures he conjured up a translucent blue humanoid projection below the hood. The projection was like the ones he had used to train his apprentices.

He explained: "This setup is similar to the adaptable training room, only that it isn't quite as versatile. It's limited to simulating various environmental conditions, it also serves as a containment field."

Unchosen asked: "That projection acts as our test subject, right?"

Fire said: "Correct. Usually such a setup isn't needed, if you have the ability to respawn you generally have no reason to not resort to self-experimentation, however this allows for quicker iterations. I have also learned the hard way that there are some very specific edge cases that put you in situations that can't be fixed by dying and respawning."

"Got it." Unchosen said. "Mind showing me how it works? I have seen the device before but I just thought it was a regular fume hood."

Fire opened a cupboard below the device, behind it was a fixture holding a large shimmering crystal that had various runes etched into it.

"This is what controls the field." He closed the cupboard and continued: "It's actually quite user friendly, the Eye-and-Claws occasionally fabricate and sell these to wealthy alchemists so it's by no means as unique as the training room."

With a gesture Fire caused an interface to appear. He said: "It's pretty self-explanatory. After we give the projection the potion time within the field is accelerated until the potion effect takes place, then we can run whatever test we want. It also contains a diagnostic system that allows us to see the cause of 'death' should our potion not work."

Fire let Unchosen look at the interface for a bit before administering the potion to the projection. Within a few seconds the potion distributed throughout the projection, visualized as a yellow glow. It seemed to distribute itself quite uniformly, which was what they needed. Fire first increased the ambient magic in the containment field, then decreased the air pressure. The projection's vital organs quickly turned from red to black.

Unchosen said: "That didn't work."

Fire quickly looked through the diagnostic interface. "Technically it did exactly what it promised, it absorbed ambient magic into the body. What it didn't do was use that magic to supply cells with energy, the projection's life force never dropped but its vital functions stopped, as you would expect."

Unchosen theorized: "The potion seems to work well as-is when it comes to absorbing the energy, now we should add another component that gets into the cells and actually does what we want it to do."

Fire nodded. "Agreed. We could probably test the effectiveness of that component on its own. While we're at it we should test it on Mencur-Besh cells as well."

It was easy to lose track of time when doing alchemy, Fire and Unchosen spent countless hours trying to improve their potion. Creating something workable took them pretty much no time at all, in fact their very first prototype did an alright job of running cells directly using life force. The problem came in when they simulated the effects of physical activity in the projection, while their potion was good enough to keep an idle body alive, it definitely couldn't do it for an active one. The next logical step consisted of making a more aggressive version of the secondary component, which proved harder than expected because it was apparently quite easy to turn it into a cell toxin on accident.

They slowly made progress increasing the efficiency of the conversion and eventually got to a point where even the most intense physical activity used up energy slower than the secondary component could use up life force. That was until the projection's life force ran out entirely and killed it that way. This of course meant that they had to increase the pull of the so-far unmodified primary component. Through the use of rare ingredients like ground-up energy crystals they were able to increase the absorption to a point where it was sufficient.

Their final test went down without a hitch, the projection stayed alive throughout the entire procedure and didn't exhibit any side-effects.

Fire looked at the mountain of notes they had produced during their research and was quite satisfied, both with their work and with his intuition. Back in the quarry he had already seen Unchosen's potential, of course not for alchemy specifically but after those thousands of years his intuition had turned into an almost supernaturally reliable compass when it came to judging people.

Fire said: "Now we'll just need to test a select few potions for conflicts, namely strength and resistance potions. However I think we should leave that for the next day."

Unchosen wearily nodded. They then cleaned up their workplace, put the ingredients and lab ware back to their respective places and stowed their notes away in a folder to be later condensed into a proper potion journal entry. Lastly they took off their protective gear and left the lab.

On the way back they ran into Shadow, however Fire knew his sister well enough to know that she had deliberately waited for them in order to talk to them.

She asked: "How did it go?"

Unchosen said: "Quite well, we came up with a potion that allows your body to run entirely on life force."

Shadow asked: "What's the efficiency quotient?"

Unchosen replied: "Around twenty-five percent. Not enough to be viable in an average environment but with the high ambient energy in the End it'll work perfectly."

Shadow laughed. "You had me worried for a second that it would be close to what my body does. Would have made people question ascension and in turn would have made me spend energy on proving them wrong."

Unchosen asked: "How are the others doing?"

Shadow said: "freeZe is starting to recover, emphasis on starting. Her silver burns still need a bit of time to heal. I ran some magical scans on TehLulz earlier too, sadly he shows no signs of recovery and I can't help him with magic either, that potion was quite something. It does make me regret not helping you out back in Rockhaven."

Fire said: "I'll go talk to him after I've had a bite to eat, maybe I can think of something to help him."

Unchosen said: "I'll come with you."

They walked the rest of the way to the living quarters in silence.