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"I understand. Thank you very much for telling me all of this, Mr. Schneider." Ryan stood and thanked him with genuine formality.
"Ha — big as a house and still perfectly polite.
Honestly, none of this is unfamiliar to any Extraordinary who's managed to survive a while. The person who sold you the formula — they didn't say any of this?" Old Schneider seemed genuinely puzzled by that.
Ryan weighed it for a moment, then nodded and shifted the blame without a second thought:
"He only told me that after I'd adapted to and mastered the current potion, I'd need to find the corresponding Sequence 8 to continue gaining strength.
Was that also a lie, Mr. Schneider?"
Old Schneider shook his head.
"Not exactly a lie — just incomplete. The potion's influence and the whispering will decrease in frequency over time, if you can hold out. Once you're in a normal state and the sense that the potion is changing you has mostly faded, that means you've fully adapted and mastered it. At that point, you can try taking the next potion and attempt to advance."
"I see. Though I suppose I don't need to worry about that for a while." Ryan settled back into his chair.
"That's true. But even if the power is greater — whether when you first drink a potion or after successfully advancing — the influence you'll have to face only gets stronger. Whether it's worth it is hard to say." Old Schneider drained another long pull, and for a moment his expression was thoughtful.
"How long does it usually take before the potion's influence fades to something manageable, Mr. Schneider?" That was what Ryan was more curious about than the old man's implication.
"Hard to say. Some people, shorter. Some, longer. As a general rule, expect around three years — and even then, advancement is never guaranteed."
Ryan nodded, taking that in, then stood again with the same deliberateness:
"Even so, I'm very grateful for everything you've told me today, Mr. Schneider."
Before the old man could respond, he continued:
"Is there anything I could help you with? Something low-risk, with a bit of pay attached, would be even better."
He spread his hands with a resigned shrug.
"After buying the potion ingredients, I'm down to under a pound."
Old Schneider looked at his face and said:
"Making money isn't difficult for an Extraordinary."
"As long as you're willing to risk attracting the Church's attention." Ryan nodded to show he understood.
Old Schneider looked away and went back to his now-cooled meal.
"Don't worry about it too much. And I'm just a bar owner — nothing particularly complicated on my end."
"Then I won't keep you from your lunch."
When the old man nodded, Ryan left him with a farewell and pulled the door shut behind him:
"May the rest of your days be filled with peace and good fortune, Mr. Schneider."
After Ryan left, the room was quiet for a moment before Old Schneider murmured softly to himself:
"That's no easy thing."
On Ryan's end, he felt a small pang of guilt:
"I think I dampened the old man's mood. My bad."
He could tell — Old Schneider was noticeably quieter after their meeting than before.
Still, even knowing he'd stumbled down a crooked path and would face greater risks than ordinary people for the foreseeable future, it wasn't enough to bring his lingering anxiety back. The worst-case scenario with the big idiot's reckless tinkering had turned out fine — that was what mattered.
As for losing control and becoming a monster — alarming as it was, it wasn't alarming enough to put the dread back in his chest. Today's morning episode had been unpleasant, yes. But one look at Old Schneider told you everything: whatever this was, it was less than half as frightening as the moment Ryan had first pieced together the full story of the big idiot's improvised spider solution.
He came back downstairs, passed through the bar, and sat down in front of the bartender again.
"A deal's a deal. Give me the most expensive thing on the lunch menu."
With his worries lifted, Ryan was feeling generous — he went straight for the top. Of course, having been here before, he knew this was a bar, not a restaurant. "Most expensive" wasn't going to bankrupt him.
The bartender held out a hand with a skeptical look.
"Seven pence."
Ryan slapped a sou onto his palm.
"Add another portion for five pence. Otherwise it won't be enough."
Now it was the bartender's turn to look startled. The man who always ordered the cheapest thing on the menu had just put down a full sou without a moment's hesitation.
"What happened to you? Good news?" The bartender had his guesses, but skipped the usual "come into money?" jab.
Ryan just gave a small nod and added:
"No fish, please. Bones would ruin my mood."
The bartender pressed his lips together and said nothing. He leaned into the kitchen door beside the stairs and gave two quick hand signals.
Ryan glanced at the bar counter and spotted the rye ale he'd ordered before going up — still sitting there. He didn't mind. He picked it up, found a window seat, and settled in, sipping slowly while turning over Old Schneider's words.
It wasn't that he doubted the old man was lying. But thinking it over now, calmly — if everyone who became an Extraordinary had to white-knuckle it through the potion's influence at all times, with no recourse, that was simply absurd. Dying upon advancing to the next Sequence was one thing. But being tormented by the potion indefinitely, with no way to manage it other than sheer willpower?
He was only Sequence 9, and this morning's mental interference hadn't fully lifted until midday — only after he'd gotten moving and started enjoying himself. And the influence was only supposed to get worse at higher Sequences. The idea of a lone, low-ranking Sequence 9 just enduring it was one thing. But expecting the most powerful Extraordinaries to white-knuckle even stronger effects was genuinely hard to believe.
And don't forget: in a world with supernatural power, anyone holding a senior position in an organization like a church had to be a formidable Extraordinary. If they were also constantly fighting the potion's influence, what organization would put someone like that in a critical role? Fine under normal conditions — but what about in a crisis, when you need someone reliable every minute? Especially a church that held the order of an entire nation together and could face emergencies at any time.
On top of that, there were nine Sequence levels Ryan knew of. Anyone senior enough to run an organization like a church almost certainly wasn't still at Sequence 9 or even 6. If a Sequence 9 potion could drive people to alcoholism and substance abuse, then a Sequence 4 or 3 potion — five or six tiers up — had effects that tested whether human willpower could hold at all.
Which meant the stronger Extraordinaries must have ways of keeping themselves stable at critical moments — techniques for minimizing the potion's interference with day-to-day function. An organization that had existed for at least 1,352 years could not have sustained that if its leadership was in a constant state of instability. Over that span of time, something would have broken.
The lower-Sequence rank and file and unaffiliated wild Extraordinaries simply weren't privy to those methods.
So Ryan leaned toward the view that these problems Old Schneider described were really only serious concerns for small-fry Extraordinaries at Sequence 8 or 9. The world was probably not as terrifying as he'd imagined in the first moment he heard the word "losing control."
Even in web fiction, a cultivation path where you risked going mad at any point and turning into a monster would have exactly zero takers — a natural talent finishing it would be a miracle. There was no scenario where the entire world practiced it en masse.
"Your lunch, sir."
The dealer moonlighting as a server set down a plate and a bowl, interrupting his thoughts.
Ryan looked it over. Half a pound of oat bread, a small cut of meat in tomato sauce, and a bowl of vegetable soup.
"No butter for the bread — must be the cheaper portion." He made the mental note.
The server didn't leave immediately.
"Sir, Schneider says he'd only had one sip of that rye ale."
"He's that casual about it?" Ryan's eyes went wide with theatrical shock.
He hadn't bothered to lower his voice, so everyone in the bar heard it — and the bartender's expression went flat again.
"I already dumped yours, obviously." The voice from behind the bar came through clenched teeth.
"You drink the cheap stuff yourself?" Ryan continued, still with the same look of disbelief.
"I like what I like. Is that any of your business?" The bartender stared at this shameless individual who seemed completely unaware of what he'd just walked into, his frustration climbing steadily.
Ryan stifled a laugh, handed the server a pence, then shot the bartender a questioning look: we good?
The bartender ignored him, but Ryan caught the mutter under his breath:
"Easy. Easy. Can't win this one."
Utterly unbothered by the whole exchange, Ryan relaxed and enjoyed his lunch — until the server returned and set down a second portion.
Looking at the identical setup in front of him — different ingredients, same presentation — Ryan couldn't help asking:
"Does your cook only know how to pan-fry and make soup?"
The two portions differed only in that the second used white bread, a different cut of meat, and a different soup variety — plus a small smear of butter on the bread.
"Apologies, sir. We're a bar, not a restaurant."
"Fair enough." He thought about it and let it go.
If the docks didn't make the workers find their own lunch, these bars probably wouldn't bother serving food at all.
But there was no denying the price difference showed. Both the bread and the meat in the seven-pence portion were noticeably better. He couldn't tell what kind of meat it was — even after eating it — but that had never mattered to him. If it tasted good, it was good.
"Just not used to the knife and fork." After a few failed attempts, he lost patience and bit directly into the meat.
As he savored what was, in a different world, still the familiar smell of cooked meat, a question drifted back into his mind:
Why does the potion keep trying to change whoever drinks it? What is it trying to turn them into? A monster?
He thought again about his own transmigration. The big idiot's near-death memories made it clear — the man hadn't been that fortunate. If he hadn't transmigrated in at exactly that moment, the big idiot would almost certainly have become a monster. After his conversation with Old Schneider, Ryan no longer thought the scale-like things he'd seen burrowing into his arm when he first woke up were merely something that looked like scales.
They might have been exactly what they looked like. Monsters having scales wasn't unusual. What he'd taken as scales drilling into flesh was probably the process of losing control — interrupted mid-transformation, the monster's traces receding.
When he stopped to think about it, he'd occupied the body of a man who had just died, and the loss of control had halted with him. That seemed to confirm what Old Schneider had said: the state of a living person was incomparably better than someone at the point of death. More precisely — since the body was the same body — mental and emotional state was the key factor in resisting the potion's changes, staying grounded, and not becoming a monster.
"The more I look at this, the more it resembles soul-snatching." Having read a great deal of web fiction, Ryan found the whole setup eerily familiar.
Except… the influence was this obvious, yet a stable mental state was enough to hold it back — and it had even been interrupted mid-process by a transmigration.
What kind of soul-snatcher fails this embarrassingly?!
Author's Note (this chapter):"The more I look at this, the more it resembles soul-snatching."
Fujian Isn't it? The potion reshapes the body, mimicking digestion, following the path of its creator.
02-10 04:16 · Shandong It's not just soul-snatching — there's more coming later. Eldritch mind-invaders from beyond the domain.