Chapter 6 Ayano Aishi: Some chemistry lessons and exploring the occult

I had started to not only read books, but to do chemical experiments. Mixing chemicals with the right amounts, cooling or heating them and shaking them is a lot like cooking. It keeps me occupied and calm.

Now mother told me that I was ready to learn how to make various chemicals.

I had already read about anatomy and leaned where the main arteries are and mother told me all about where the weak points of the human body are.

We were in my room at my table and I had all the chemicals ready. My room looks like a chemistry lab at this point. There are various utensils, beakers, Bunsen burners, a refrigerator, distilling apparatuses, simple and multistage distillation columns, a drying and a heating cabinet and many chemicals and so many more things. I also made myself some blue copper sulphate crystals already.

First I made a homemade emetic. Mixing salt and mustard does the job. There are other ways to produce emetics too, but this one is one of the easiest ways to do so. Then I made a stink bomb by filling a balloon with ammonium. Easy.

Next up was a headache poison. Tyramine and Phenylethlamine are both biogenic amines, they cause Blood vessels to constrict , which leads heightened blood pressure and migraine attacks.

Then I learned how to make a sleeping agent and painkiller. Mix Acetone, Chloroform and a strong base life NaOH. You get Chlorobutanol. However it is not easy to make. You have to be able to cool the chemicals, stir them, filtrate them , distillate them and it takes a long time, and the Chlorobutanol is volatile at room temperature and needs to be kept dry. So you have to make it a day or two in advance before you can use it. So this headache poison can only be with limitations.

Then I even leaned how to make a lethal poison. Barium carbonate and Acetic acid produce Barium acetate. A really nasty poison. But why should I even make such a lethal poison? I asked mom, despite being hesitant and she just smiled at me. why so unnervingly?.

Maybe it is for SCIENCE? Yeah or maybe to poison rats? It is also used in chemistry to prepare other acetates. Yeah maybe that is it, never mind.

The final thing I made was Rocket Candy, using sugar and potassium nitrate. Both chemical are mixed and then heated in a pan. You get a brown mass that can be burned, which produces a lot of smoke and heat.

I later even fired a real mini rocket into the sky using one of the best rocket candy mixtures I had created, I had experimented a little bit and tweaked some of the ingredients a little bit, adding some rust is useful.

Mother ignored the rocket launch and Father just shook his head a little.

When I told Father about Mother lessons, when appeared worried, but I repeated to him, what I had learned and what he had told me, and it seemed to reassure him.

Later I even started dabbling with the occult. I read various books about it, turns out that they claim that humans are not just their body but also have a soul (Reikon). Ikiryō are disembodied spirits of the living, while Shiryō are the spirits of the deceased. And if someone is murdered, their spirit will be angry and may haunt the killer. A spirit that died unnaturally or in a way that made them vengeful and angry will be named Onryō and will be hostile.

Three Great Onryō of Japan are really fascinating too, these were three people who died with great resentment and anger, they caused calamities and they had Shinto shrines built for them to placate them. If angry spirits are indeed real, there is even more reason to avoid angering or killing people than I previously thought.

One day I went with my parents for shopping and inside the convenience store there was a mysterious, roughly triangular shaped wooden thing with a big hole inside it. The thing was located on one of the lower shelfs and I wanted to know what it is. The price was not too high and my parents agreed to buy it for me. The cashier said that this planchette is rumoured to show spirits, you need to look through the hole , but it obviously doesn´t work, but let you child have fun with it, it is a nice souvenir after all.