I learned what I could from observing all these thieves working in Riften and practicing it myself. But no matter what I stalled at thirty for the skill as I simply didn't have the experience to come up with the deeper parts on my own. From that point on I started offering discounts on my healing in exchange for tips and hints. A great deal of them were things others had already told me but occasionally I'd get a new nugget that would give a slight improvement in my sneaking. -
While I worked on that skill I also started putting my money towards learning proper alchemy from Elgrim. He was a stern but fair teacher as he pointed out every mistake I made and made me pay for all the ingredients along with the lessons to really make the failures sting. Thanks to him though I learned something crucial, alchemy wasn't limited to plants and minerals. In his words alchemy at it's most core was the art of extracting the very essence of a thing and mixing it with the essence of another thing to work miracles on a small scale.-
In theory you could take the essence from the very world itself to create something from nothing. This reminded me of an artifact from the game, the White phial. This was created by the ancient master of the art Curalmil. This famous figure was one of the only known cases of someone supposedly able to create potions from nothing. His artifact was a phial that once per day did exactly that in the game. Anything put in the phial would be copied and even as the phial was empty would manifest from nothing within it. -
Alchemy wasn't just using ingredients like in the game though as in reality you had the ingredients, the equipment to extract the essence, the solvents to house these essences and facilitate their fusion and finally the phials and flasks to house the final mixture. Potion solvents were types of water starting from natural water and ending with the legendary Lorkhan's tears, a solvent so rare it's said only a small amount of it is left in the entire world. For poisons it starts with grease and then moves onto progressively more potent acidic things with the equally legendary Alkahest at the end, no less rare than the potion solvent at the same level.-
Naturally you could still be a master alchemist without touching these mythical things. It just meant that the potency of your potions and poisons would hit a limit based on the solvent you had used. Elgrim and most alchemists according to him in the current era only had access to Cloud mist and Tarblack at best which were two places from the peak in solvent hierarchy for both poisons and potions. I as a novice was made to use grease and natural water though. Not that I could even afford to use those high end solvents as they had prices in the tens of thousands of gold.-
The really hard part came from figuring out how to extract the essences of each ingredient because it wasn't the same all the time. I'd like to say I learned this skill at leaps and bounds level but I would be lying if I did. It was pure agony for the next year as I was constantly out of money and failed almost constantly. You'd think it couldn't be THAT hard if I was using the same ingredients but that was the problem, I wasn't.-
Elgrim didn't have an infinite stock of every ingredient there was and if anything was missing many different ones. I was forced to use what was on hand at any given moment and with wildly different price tags to boot. I simply never got to get too comfortable with any particular ingredient before I had to switch to something else. It was only during my ninth year of life in this world that I really got to succeed in alchemy as I had used most ingredients the man could get at least once before. When I couldn't afford more lessons and ingredients though I'd join up with the Riften guards at their barracks to learn how to use a sword.-
Like all children I was stuck using a dull wooden toy sword and the training was at first merely "smack the shit out of the straw dummy" than anything proper. It was only after my first month of off again on again practice with the wooden sword that the guards figured out this wasn't in fact just a childish flight of fancy but me actually trying to figure out how to use a sword. None of them were master Yokudan sword-saints or anything like that but they at least knew how to use the swords to a decent degree. -
There wasn't really such thing as sword "styles" exactly but there were methodologies behind why and how you used certain movements with a blade. For example there were variations on why you'd use a vertical slash in any given confrontation. It was still a vertical slash in all regards but the reason behind it was important. There were certain taboos with using a sword as well such as overhead swings and spins. Sure they looked cool but in reality they tended to just leave you vulnerable.-
Unlike with alchemy I did actually learn this skill fast, scarily so. It dawned on me pretty fast that I literally had a sword in my soul like a part of it so naturally the skill came almost like instinct being awoken. By the start of my ninth year I was sitting at sixty with the skill and could out match any guard in the hold in terms of pure skill with a blade. My body was the only thing holding me back from beating most of them, something they all acknowledged.-
I had also finally managed to summon my sword from within me during this time. It was about four feet in length total with a warped and rusted blade that held a single edge and thick spine. The guard was a simple cross and the handle was wrapped in breaking down leather with the pommel a jagged sphere. Altogether it was an ugly blade that anyone would discard as trash if they found it laying about. I slowly and painstakingly fed it one plain iron dagger periodically throughout the year for a grand total of fifteen. Each dagger would sink into the blade like water flowing into water with a flaw of the blade magically vanishing each time.-
It took fifteen iron daggers to turn the blade from a useless thing to an acceptable if inferior weapon. I didn't dare openly show the blade or it's unique property though and sent it back into my soul each time I finished feeding it a dagger. Once the blade was finally "repaired" to a state it was useful though I stopped feeding it all together as my lessons and food costs were quite high and I wasn't earning the sort of gold that could afford buying many weapons regularly.
{Author note: So few of you may know but there is someone on this platform plagiarizing my previous Harry potter story. When confronted the person claimed a desperate need of funds and promised to take the stolen work down in two weeks. I accepted this because I can understand desperately needing money. The story has not been taken down however. I now call upon all of you to go to the page of this stolen story and report it for planarization. Screenshot my own ringmaker story to help. The stolen story is called Ringcrafting in Harry potter by Kirekky.}