Vokey stared at the glowing notification hanging in his vision, the text mocking his brief flicker of excitement. Requirement: Unlock "Unit Conversions".
"Of course," he muttered, letting his head fall back against the cold stone with a dull thud. First, the cosmic scammer downgrades his textbook. Then, it grants him a legendary analytical power—his very own JARVIS—that is functionally useless. And now, to make it work, he has to grind for an upgrade?
"This isn't a magical system," he grumbled to the empty cell. "It's a series of infuriating hurdles designed by a mad god with a penchant for bureaucracy."
With a deep sigh of resignation, he forced his consciousness back into the drab, oatmeal-colored tome. If "Unit Conversions" was the key, he had to find it. He mentally flipped past the section on "The Mole," which he now understood all too well, searching for his next objective. His eyes scanned headings and sub-sections, but before he could find what he was looking for, a particularly strange and lengthy word caught his attention.
The next major chapter was titled: "Stoichiometry."
He tried to sound it out. "Stoy-kee-om-etry. It sounds less like a science and more like something you'd chant to make someone trip over their own robes."
Curiosity overriding his frustration for a moment, he delved in. The book explained it was the study of quantitative relationships in reactions, essentially a recipe. This, at least, Vokey could understand; it was like potion-making, but with more steps and less bubbling cauldron. He examined the example provided, an equation for the combustion of propane: C₃H₈ + 5O₂ → 3CO₂ + 4H₂O.
He followed the intricate dance of symbols and numbers, his mind tracing the paths of the reactants as they became products. One part of a flammable gas, mixed with five parts of air, yielded precisely three parts of choking smoke and four parts of steam. It was a perfect, calculated formula for... a fireball.
"This isn't just a reaction," he realized with a jolt. "It's a perfected recipe for a fire spell! They've quantified the very essence of 'FWOOSH'! It's so unartistic, yet so brutally efficient."
He sat back, the initial flicker of awe quickly dissolving into a profound and familiar disappointment. He had just deciphered a complex, multi-step formula involving at least seven different components, all to achieve an effect that any moderately talented mage could produce instantly.
Most mages can just do this with just one fire rune.
Vokey slammed the mental textbook shut. All this work, all these ridiculous numbers and nonsensical words, just to learn a more complicated way to do something simple. His Mole Vision was useless, and the path to making it useful was apparently paved with this kind of convoluted nonsense.
"Fuck this," he grumbled, slumping against the wall. "Chemistry is useless."