Alchemy:

They say alchemy is a science, but only the sane say that. In truth, it’s a gamble dressed in glassware, a theology of fire and ambition practiced by those too proud to die with the rest of The Lost Ages. Every flask in an Alchemist’s den is a prayer, every explosion an answered one. It begins as curiosity, a fascination with how the world breathes, and ends with the world coughing blood back into your hands. In Everwealth, alchemy is not about progress. It’s about hunger. Hunger for control, for transformation, for the forbidden certainty that you can make the world kneel if you only mix the right things in the right way. The craft was once civilization’s crown, before The Great Schism drowned the great laboratories in molten glass and the screams of things that should not have lived. Now, what remains is half-remembered ritual, scraps of equations copied from crumbling vellum, and the desperate improvisations of madmen working by candlelight. Every “modern” alchemist is a scavenger of ghosts, boiling relics of a lost age and hoping the vapors don’t turn sentient. Their craft yields miracles, yes, elixirs that stitch flesh, metals that bleed light, golems that move without soul, but every success demands a sacrifice, a finger, a mind, a town. Yet the lure never fades. To the desperate, alchemy offers hope where faith fails and where gold cannot buy relief. It whispers you can fix this. The plague, the famine, the deformity. You can fix anything, if you dare to break something else first. In basements and ruins, would-be philosophers whisper over bubbling retorts, drinking light and spitting death. Their potions promise beauty, strength, transcendence, but more often rot, madness, or forms too changed to be called living. The lucky burn quickly. The unlucky endure. Still, there are always new fools willing to learn. Alchemy preys on those who dream too loud and fear too little. It rewards the brave, ruins the clever, and immortalizes the damned. Somewhere, buried under the ash of centuries, a truth remains, alchemy works. It works too well. And that is why no one has stopped trying.