Seeing the Treehouse properly for the first time without being semi-conscious was a revelation. When Elroy had said "treehouse," Shane had pictured a child's rustic hideaway nailed haphazardly to a tree. This was something else entirely—a sprawling, multi-level structure of polished dark wood and gleaming brass, woven seamlessly between the colossal, silver-barked boughs of an ancient tree. Light glowed from within through stained-glass windows depicting alchemical symbols.
Pushing the heavy door open, the memory of being dragged here, half-conscious and bleeding, flashed in his mind. The air inside hummed with a low-grade magical energy, thick with the complex cocktail of ozone, bitter herbs, and something metallic. It was a fusion of a medieval apothecary and an advanced chemistry lab. Alembics and retorts bubbled over enchanted blue flames, their contents shifting through a spectrum of colors, while centrifuge-like devices spun with a soft magical whirr.
And at the heart of it all was Aimee Vi Stromsto.
Her crimson hair was tied back in a severe ponytail, and she was too consumed by her work to even glance up. She was calibrating a delicate apparatus that dripped a shimmering silver liquid into a beaker of swirling violet gas. Her movements were swift, precise, and utterly consumed.
Shane remained silent by the door, his eyes darting from her to the large slate board behind her. This wasn't the runic calculus he'd seen in the archive. This was different. It was filled with chemical notations, formulas balancing elemental symbols alongside magical ones.
**`Ag₂O (s) + 2MₐH₄ (aq) → 2Ag (s) + Mₐ₂O (l) + 2H₂O (l) + ΔE`**
He watched, fascinated, as she finished the titration, observed the result—a disappointing muddy brown precipitate instead of the clear, crystalline silver the equation predicted—and let out a sound of pure frustration. She snatched a cloth, wiped her hands, and stormed over to the board, muttering curses in Elvish as she erased a coefficient and scrawled a new one.
"The environmental resistance variable is all wrong," she hissed to herself, tapping the `ΔE` symbol representing the magical energy change. "The mana ratio in this solution is too unstable for this level of precision."
It was only after this third failed attempt that she finally looked up, her golden eyes sharpening as they landed on him. The frustration on her face instantly cooled into a mask of icy contempt.
"You," she stated, her voice flat. "Why are you here, Rothmaek? Did you come to gloat? Or did you simply forget the way back to your room again?"
Shane kept his expression neutral. 'Gloating? About what?' Another piece of the puzzle, another question about his past self's actions.
Instead of taking the bait, he did the one thing that felt genuine, he focused on the science. He gestured toward the complex equation on the board. "What were you trying to achieve? The reduction of the oxide from a compound is clear, but what is `MₐH₄`? A stabilizing agent? I don't think I've seen that notation before." It was true. Just like the operators in the runic equation, this was an unknown to him.
Aimee stared at him, her anger momentarily stalled by sheer, utter bewilderment.
"Are you joking?" she asked, her voice dripping with skepticism. "You expect me to believe you don't remember Methyl-mana-thiol? The most common magical binding agent in intermediate alchemy? I know you think I'm falling for this 'new personality' act, but I'm not. This isn't the first time you've claimed to wake up a new man to avoid consequences."
Shane just stood there, taking her verbal blows before saying "It seems you know more about me than anyone else," he said calmly. "Were we close? Friends, even?"
Aimee let out a sharp, humorless laugh. "Did the Nexus explosion finally shatter your mind? Because if you had it, you'd never suggest that. We were Friends? You used me. I'm stuck with the SIBLINGS because of you. I stood by you when everyone called you mad. I didn't abandon you. But at the first sign of real danger—the moment your family officially disowned you— you sold me out to buy your own position with them." Her voice trembled with a bitter mix of rage and betrayal.
She took a step closer, her eyes flashing. "And how did that turn out for you? It turns out you were using the siblings, too, just as a stepping stone to catch the attention of their higher-ups. You played everyone. So forgive me if I don't believe a single word out of your mouth."
The picture was becoming horrifyingly clear. The old Shane wasn't just a mad genius; he was a desperate, manipulative opportunist.
Seeing no other path forward, Shane dropped the act. The weight of his genuine confusion and the sheer absurdity of his situation showed on his face. "Aimee," he said, his voice quiet but earnest. "I'm not joking, and this is not an act. Truly after the explosion... I didn't remember anything. I don't remember Elroy or you, the siblings, or the deal, hell I didn't know who I was if not for Elroy."
He saw the doubt in her eyes, but it was now mixed with a flicker of uncertainty. He pressed on, answering every one of her rapid-fire, technical questions about their past project during the creation of the device that destroyed the Nexus, with a blank, frustrating honesty. He knew nothing.
Slowly, grudgingly, the rigid anger in her posture began to soften into stunned realization. He was telling the truth.
"...It's Methyl-mana-thiol," she finally said, her voice quieter now, devoid of its previous venom. "A volatile alchemical compound. It's designed to transfer pure magical energy into a reaction as a catalyst. Its structure allows it to bind to both mundane and magical elements."
"Fascinating," Shane murmured, honestly impressed. "So magic is used as a functional chemical compound. That would imply this world has a form of periodic table... a taxonomy of magical elements." He took a slow step further into the lab, his eyes tracing her equations with a critic's gaze. "So what was the ultimate goal of this reaction? It seems you hit a stag on it? "
Aimee watched him, her guard still up but her professional curiosity piqued. She decided to table her questions about his "this world" and what he meant by "hitting a stag," and who she hit a stag? Comments later.
"The Lonais siblings needed conduits, so thanks to you, I am now one of the 13 Alchemist students on this project," she explained reluctantly. " It should be anything that can temporarily enhance a body's energy core to handle a massive power transfer, I'm guessing from that cube Varkol retrieved. My theory was to create a serum that would allow a recipient to form a secondary, temporary core to absorb the shock, protecting their original one." She gestured to the failed experiment. "The reduced silver was meant to be a stable lattice to hold the enchantment. It's not working."
She stopped herself abruptly, her walls slamming back up. "Why am I explaining this to you? You already have what you wanted. You're one of them now. Our... arrangement... is concluded. You got your protection from not just the Siblings but also their master, THE CABAL, and if I get this potion right, I keep my funding and this lab. We don't need to pretend to be partners anymore." She turned her back on him, a clear dismissal. "I was glad Varkol gave you that beating. You deserved it."
The pieces of his former life formed a pathetic and manipulative picture. But within it, he saw a sliver of hope—a shared language of science.
"What if," he said slowly, choosing his words with immense care, "the performance wasn't entirely for them? What if I told you I'm starting to see things... differently? That I might have a new approach to your problem. And to mine."
He stepped forward and placed his notes on a clean corner of her workbench. On them, he had scribbled this world's runic equation from the archive and, next to it, his own annotations—his translations of most of the magical operators into terms of calculus and physics
He tapped the parchment.
"What if the fundamental principles of thaumaturgical calculus we use are... incomplete? Or perhaps, just poorly translated. What if I could show you a better way to calculate that `ΔE` variable?"
Aimee's eyes, against her will, flicked down to the notes. She saw the familiar, frustrating equation... and then she saw the annotations. Her breath hitched. She was a fourth-year alchemical prodigy, and she had never seen anything like it. It wasn't from any book she knew.
The initial shock gave way to a deep-seated skepticism, the ingrained training of a top student. She tore her gaze from the parchment, her golden eyes narrowing at Shane. "Incomplete? And poorly translated?" she repeated, her voice laced with disbelief. "Do you have any idea what you're saying? These principles aren't just random scribbles. They've been developed, tested, and refined for over four hundred years. They were forged in the fires of the Great War. You can't just wave a hand and declare them 'incomplete'."
Shane met her gaze, undeterred. "I'm not waving a hand, just think of it as a new point of view, a new way to utilize the uniqueness between magic and physics or chemistry, from what I have seen between the two, the logic is consistent, even if the notation is foreign. But... I'll admit my memory is full of holes. The war... It's a blank to me. What does a four-hundred-year-old conflict have to do with magical theory?"
Aimee stared at him, seeing the genuine confusion; it went to show that the person before her might have actually lost his memory. A bitter, weary sigh escaped her. She leaned back against her workbench, the fight draining out of her, replaced by the grim duty of recounting a history every child knew.
"It has everything to do with it," she said, her voice losing its edge, becoming flat and educational, as if reciting a dark lesson. "After the House of Holy Cross declared their crusade and the Blackreach Emperor unleashed him, the God Ṣopona didn't just vanish. He made the Holy Capital his base—defiling the most sacred land on the continent. For two hundred years, he poured his corrupted creatures out into the world. Villages, towns, entire smaller kingdoms... they were wiped off the map overnight. The remaining nations could do nothing but huddle behind their walls and try to survive. It was an age of pure defense, and we were losing."
She crossed her arms, her gaze distant. "The surviving kingdoms finally banded together for one last, desperate assault on Blackreach. They believed the Empire and the Beastmen Kingdom were collaborators, as the horrors never touched their lands. But when they got there... they realized their error. Their swords and arrows were useless. Magic had not existed back then, and mankind had nothing that could damage creatures around the border of the two kingdoms, they found that the dark creatures here were many times stronger than the ones that had been attacking them relentlessly over 200 years, They were slaughtered by what they called demons, even with the Dragons and Elves fighting beside them."
"The remnants of the Holy Cross priests, in their final desperation, did the only thing left, they prayed. They begged any benevolent god to intervene. And God's answered. The Gods instructed them to perform the 'Grace of Heaven' ritual, a ritual technique that had been last in time after the are and Seven of the strongest knights were put into a deep sleep and awoke... changed. They were the first God's Knights. They were the first to wield magic as we know it. They were the ones who told a terrified world that the three unstoppable generals they had been fighting were Angels: Shante of Rot, Conzue of Decay, and Kozan, the True Face of Plague."
"With the help of the God's Knights, for the first time in over 200 years, mankind was able to push the enemy back. In the battle against the angel, the Knights won, but at a cost. Two were dead. One was maimed. The rest were exhausted. They thought they had a moment to breathe before facing Ṣopona himself." Aimee's voice grew quieter. "But then the portals opened. One in the heart of Blackreach, another in the ruins of the Holy Capital. They were the first Dungeon Breaks. The world was suddenly flooded with monsters and creatures from another realm, and the war and the world changed again, forever."
She gestured around them, at the lab, at the institute itself. "Our entire modern understanding of magic, of alchemy, of enchanting... it was built from the ashes of that war. It was developed to fight, to survive, to understand the new horrors of the Dungeons. And at the center of it all was one man: Julius Hector."
She said the name with the reverence one reserves for a saint or a founding emperor. "He is to magical science what... what the foundation is to this building. A member of the God's Knights, who was blessed with the first Talent, he created the formulas, the runic notation, and the very framework we still use today. Even when parts have been disproven or improved upon, we stand on his shoulders. His work is the bedrock of everything."
She finally looked back at Shane's notes, her expression a mix of defiance and awe. "And you... a prince who barely passed his introductory thaumaturgy exams... and has been stuck to the first year class for 3 years, just because you scribble on a piece of parchment for five minutes and claim that bedrock is sand?"
The silence that followed was heavy with the weight of history she had just laid upon them. Shane understood now. He wasn't just proposing a new idea; he was questioning the fundamental scripture of this world's survival.
He looked at his notes, then at the fiery, brilliant alchemist who had just schooled him in the traumatic birth of her civilization. A slow smile touched his lips—not arrogant, but genuinely fascinated.
"Julius Hector was a genius," Shane said softly, his voice full of respect. "I don't doubt it. To create order from that chaos... It's staggering. But Aimee, even the greatest genius is limited by the knowledge of his time."
He picked up the parchment and held it between them, a bridge between two worlds.
"He built the foundation, but like you said most of his work had been disproved and improved upon, so how hard is it for you to believe, I might have a way to better improve on the already established formulas, a different way of calculating the variables" Shane even wondered why he was trying this much to make Aimee believe in his theory, noted that it was still untested if physics from Shane's memory could actually be properly used with this world's knowledge, he could have just went away and try some little experiment before coming back to Her, but the threat of possibility of death in 7 days was a good driving focus. .