Chapter 5
The first thing I saw was a list of disciplines. Eight of them, arranged like skill trees in some RPG, except that instead of virtual abilities these were entirely real, potentially lethal areas of knowledge. They didn't simply float in empty space; they seemed engraved in light against the dark background of the interface, each one accompanied by a short but dense description.
Herbology (Power of Nature) was a discipline centered on using plants to create healing and enhancing compounds. My first instinct was skepticism. Herbology? That sounded like a course name at a wizarding school, something for overachieving girls and dedicated nerds. I pictured endless hours grinding roots with a mortar and pestle. But then it clicked. This was the Marvel universe. A world where Wakanda grew a heart-shaped herb that granted superhuman strength, and where sentient living trees wandered through deep space.
We weren't talking about chamomile and plantain here. In all likelihood I'd be hunting down "lunar chamomile" that bloomed once a century on Himalayan peaks, or "whispering moss" from Asgardian caves. Genuinely promising, without question. Creating serums that enhanced strength or accelerated regeneration was a direct road into the major leagues. But logistics were going to be, to put it mildly, an issue. I was a broke student in Hell's Kitchen. I could barely scrape together subway fare, let alone fund an expedition to Tibet. Tempting, but this was a game for the wealthy and well-connected. Setting it aside for now.
Chemistry (Transformation of Matter) was the science of combining substances to produce new, often dangerous compounds. Now that was more like it. No abstract alchemy with miracle herbs, philosopher's stones, or lead-into-gold transmutation. In theory, concrete formulas, reactions, and reagents. Chemistry was foundational to everything, from household cleaning agents all the way up to sophisticated poisons and explosives.
It covered both the sticky web formula a spider-themed hero used to pin criminals to walls and the acid capable of burning through a bank vault door. Dangerous? Absolutely. I wasn't a chemist, and one mistake, one wrong drop or one extra degree of heat, could cost me this apartment or my life. I could vividly picture one accidental spark turning my studio into a small branch of hell, complete with toxic smoke and furniture scraps embedded in the drywall. But the potential was enormous, and more importantly, it was accessible. Many reagents, even in crude form, could be sourced from ordinary household products. Risky, messy, but doable. Mentally noted.
Explosives (Controlled Chaos) was, as the name suggested, the art of creating and deploying explosive substances. Blunt and unvarnished. Not "pyrotechnics," but explicitly "explosives." I mentally drafted a Daily Bugle headline: "Mysterious Bomber from Hell's Kitchen Strikes Again!" Hard pass. Drawing the attention of S.H.I.E.L.D., the FBI, or any other alphabet-soup organization was not on my to-do list. I was a builder by nature, not a destroyer.
But then the cold, practical corner of my brain offered a counterpoint. Explosives weren't just bombs. Smoke grenades for retreat. Flashbangs to disorient opponents. Shaped charges for getting through armored doors. These were tools. Terrifying ones, but tools. Learning the recipes was worthwhile for general awareness alone, just to understand how the stuff worked and what to expect when someone else used it. Not creating anything from this category for now. Studying it, though? Mandatory.
Smithing (Art of Metal) covered metal processing to create armor and weapons. Something lit up in me at that. Not just interest, something deeper, something the craftsman in me recognized from a long way off. The smell of red-hot steel and coal. The deafening, rhythmic crash of hammer on anvil. The sharp hiss of heated metal plunged into water. I could almost feel it physically. This was mine. Real, honest work.
But reality promptly doused that feeling with cold water. A forge. In a studio apartment? Running a power drill in this building was already a neighbor complaint waiting to happen, let alone a furnace that would fry all the wiring and probably set the building on fire. This was a goal for the far, far future, when I had my own garage or workshop. A dream worth chasing, just not today.
Gunsmithing (Thunder and Steel) covered the creation and modification of firearms. In the United States, where you could walk into a corner store and walk out with a gun if you had the right paperwork, and sometimes even without it, spending my limited time and resources building a flintlock steampunk pistol that was outclassed by anything off the rack seemed pointless.
I wasn't a gunsmith, and a homemade firearm was more likely to blow up in my hands than in anyone else's. But what if the recipes offered something more exotic? A rifle-format railgun? A plasma cutter? An electromagnetic accelerator that fired ball bearings? Or even just serious modifications: precision silencers, non-lethal ammunition, smart optics. That changed the conversation entirely. This direction depended heavily on what the system actually had to offer. Filed under "investigate further," which I acknowledged with some amusement was exactly where every other discipline had ended up so far.
Electrical (Spark of Life) covered harnessing electricity to create remarkable devices. In a world where Tony Stark existed, this was one of the most strategically important directions available. Electricity was the language of modern technology. It spanned weapons, defense systems, and power sources for future projects, from a simple taser all the way up to sophisticated microchips, arc reactor analogs, or EMP generators. The potential was essentially limitless.
But I suspected the entry threshold was brutal. This wasn't just connecting positive to negative. This was physics, mathematics, and circuit engineering at a serious level. And given where the recipes were coming from, I could easily picture schematics that included steps like "charge via Thor's lightning" or "connect to the Tesseract." Definitely worth studying in depth, but I was fairly certain that without a solid foundation in other disciplines, particularly Mechanics, I wouldn't get very far.
Mechanics (Movement and Logic) covered designing and creating complex mechanisms and automatons. Now that was mine. Not fixing stools, but building something genuinely complex. Mechanics was the skeleton of any device: gears, levers, drives, hydraulics, the foundation everything else was built on. Want to build a serious gun? You need mechanics.
Want to assemble a robot assistant? Mechanics. An exoskeleton? Mechanics again. Unlike Smithing, this was something I could start on a small scale. Disassembling old equipment, digging through junkyards, building something out of whatever was at hand. This was a clear, direct path toward useful gadgets and tools that would make my life easier across every other area. As always, it came down to resources and workspace, but you could start small here as long as the recipes allowed. This was the foundation I needed.
Therapeutics (Technology of Healing) combined chemistry and mechanics to create healing devices and powerful medicines. I gave that one a silent mental bow. This was the joker. The ace up the sleeve. In a world where something was always exploding or collapsing, where heroes and villains clashed in battles that leveled entire city blocks, the ability to heal wasn't just a useful skill. It was survival, currency, and leverage all at once.
The ability to patch your own wounds without walking into a hospital where people would start asking uncomfortable questions. The ability to create a regenerative compound or a stimulant that put you back on your feet in hours instead of weeks. This was where the real gold was buried. But it was also the biggest danger. A person capable of performing medical miracles would immediately become a target for everyone from the government to criminal syndicates. They'd either try to bring you under control or simply eliminate you before you could fall into the wrong hands. The complexity here was also staggering, demanding knowledge of chemistry, mechanics, and apparently biology as well. A critical goal for the future. Very important, but not the top priority right now.
So, after a quick pass through the disciplines and their headers, I moved on to the most important stage: choosing a recipe. Opening each discipline one by one, I read carefully through the abbreviated descriptions again and flagged the most interesting and potentially viable options. Each discipline had several dozen recipes, which was a relief, because if the count had run into the hundreds, one night wouldn't have been nearly enough to evaluate them all properly. As it stood, the full collection ran to roughly two hundred to two hundred and fifty recipes spread across all eight disciplines.
I decided to go through them in order and record everything promising in a physical notebook to avoid losing track, starting with Herbology. Seven recipes caught my eye, each useful and practical in its own way: healing balm, elixir of persuasion, fatigue pills, restorative remedy, wonder drug, potion of haste, and brew of intellect. Despite their seemingly obvious names, the descriptions for the elixir of persuasion and the fatigue pills genuinely surprised me, which is why both made the wish list. The elixir of persuasion temporarily enhanced the charisma and eloquence of whoever drank it. The fatigue pills eliminated fatigue entirely, and honestly they would have been better named anti-fatigue pills, but the effect was clear enough.
Scanning the list again, I crossed out healing balm and restorative remedy. They were just weaker analogs of the wonder drug, healing options with lower ceilings. I put a star next to Brew of Intellect, which according to the description temporarily sharpened cognition, improving the ability to solve complex problems and notice things that would otherwise slip by undetected. Essentially NZT-48 on minimum settings. That left five candidates on the Herbology list, with the lingering question of whether any of them required magical herbs I'd have no realistic way of obtaining. Something to think about. Moving on to Chemistry.
Discarding a long list of poisons of varying degrees of lethality and a collection of formulas aimed at neutralizing or enhancing magical effects, I landed on three recipes: Acid Mixture, a caustic compound capable of corroding armor, weapons, and living tissue; Elixir of Fire Resistance; and Paralysis of Will Poison, a powerful neurotoxin that completely immobilized a target for a period of time without killing them. Based on the brief descriptions of both the discipline and the individual recipes, I was cautiously hoping that magic wasn't deeply embedded in the Chemistry tree, though doubts lingered.
My gaze drifted back to "Elixir of Fire Resistance." This was a perfect example of what made the Arcanum so confusing to me. Where exactly was the line between science and magic? The description read: "a compound that renders skin temporarily impervious to high temperatures through the formation of an unstable energy field." That sounded scientific enough on its face. But what was an "unstable energy field"? Was that Tony Stark's language or Doctor Strange's? If it required something like powdered scales from a mythical salamander, it was magic.
If it was achievable by combining rare earth metals and irradiating them at a specific frequency, it was science, albeit incredibly complex science. The system blended these concepts without apology, calling everything a "technology." Maybe for the system there truly was no difference. As Arthur Clarke once wrote, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I was apparently going to have to make peace with that blurred boundary. The main thing was that the ingredient list didn't include entries like "add a pinch of faith and a drop of luck." That was where I might actually hit a wall. Alright, on to Explosives.
Molotov cocktail, dynamite, flamethrower, land mine, chlorine gas grenade. All of it went straight into the discard pile. I didn't need lethality at this stage. In the end only two recipes held any interest, and one of those was borderline. The firm keeper was the Stun Grenade, a non-lethal device that on detonation disoriented and incapacitated anyone within its radius using a bright flash and a concussive sound blast. Genuinely useful, according to the description. The second was Plastic Explosive, a powerful and controllable explosive that could be affixed to any surface. The "controllable" element was what earned it a question mark rather than an immediate discard, but my instinct still leaned toward no. On to Smithing.
Axes, swords, shields, armor, plate gauntlets, helmets, and even boomerangs. All of them featured properties indistinguishable from magic, or most likely were magic outright, and the recipe list was enormous. I noted nothing from this category for the simple reason that building anything from it in my current situation was realistically out of reach. Molten Glass Armor, for example, was described as unique armor crafted from volcanic glass that provided exceptional protection against fire.
I couldn't begin to picture how you made armor from glass, or what volcanic glass even was in a practical crafting context. Shield Boomerang, an aerodynamically refined shield that returned to the thrower after being launched, raised its own question: did you need to train to use it the way Captain America had, or was the return trajectory a property built into the shield during its creation, working regardless of the owner's skill level? Questions. Lots of questions I wasn't able to answer adequately yet. Moving on to Gunsmithing.
Things here were roughly the same story as with Smithing. I couldn't realistically picture where or how I would currently assemble a Harpoon Gun, which fired a steel harpoon on a cable and allowed pulling enemies or objects toward you, or an Elephant Gun, a large-caliber rifle with monstrous stopping power. Running through an impressive list of rifle, shotgun, revolver, and exotic weapon recipes, I ultimately circled just one: the Tesla Rifle, which fired concentrated lightning charges that dealt massive area damage and were especially effective against mechanisms and electronics. I wouldn't be choosing it as my unlock, but nothing stopped me from noting down a Gauss cannon cranked to maximum settings. Besides, the next discipline was Electrical, and I was expecting more interesting options there than just Big-Gun-Makes-Things-Explode.
Setting aside fully lethal options and simple store-bought shock weapon analogs like the Shock Staff, a staff that delivered powerful electrical discharges on contact with enemies, I landed on three recipes from the Electrical discipline. One of them even sounded, by description alone, completely imbalanced, but there was no harm in dreaming: Mechanical Spider-Shocker, a small automaton that scurried up to an enemy and hit them with a powerful electric discharge; Protective Field Generator, a device that created a small force barrier capable of stopping bullets and arrows; and the frankly absurd-sounding Teleportation Beacon, a complex device that once installed created an anchor point you could teleport back to using a paired remote.
The Protective Field Generator was obviously the most practical pick of the three, setting aside the Beacon, which I would almost certainly never be able to build, and which frankly sounded less like science and more like, well. That word again. Magic. Moving on to Mechanics.
There were quite a few recipes here, nearly as many as in Smithing, though most of them were highly specialized automatons. I doubted I could assemble even a basic Spider Automaton, a mechanical assistant capable of combat support and carrying loads, let alone something like the Medical Spider, an advanced automaton programmed for first aid and capable of administering healing balms, which presumably required healing balms sourced from Herbology or Therapeutics on top of everything else. Trusting first aid to a robot I'd cobbled together on a shoestring was a concept I wasn't ready to commit to. Automatons went into the discard pile.
Instead I flagged the following: Mechanical Dagger, a dagger with a complex spring mechanism that shot the blade forward to extend attack range, essentially nostalgia for the Assassin's hidden blade; Binocular Goggles, an optical device for observing distant objects, though admittedly I could just buy regular binoculars, so this one had a question mark next to it even as I declined to cross it out; Gyroscope, a complex device that could be integrated into weapons or armor to improve balance and accuracy, and easily the most practically useful entry in the discipline even though I had only a vague idea how it actually functioned; and finally Exoskeleton, the crown jewel of the mechanics tree, a powered frame that not only protected the wearer but significantly amplified their physical strength.
That last one was firmly in the "drool over the steampunk Iron Man armor on minimum settings" category for now. A dream for later. On to the last discipline, and the one I was most curious about: Therapeutics.
I skipped past dozens of healing potion variants that differed in little beyond name, especially since their functional analogs already existed in Herbology, and ended up with just four relatively interesting recipes. Not many, but I couldn't complain, and the real difficulty was still ahead of me anyway.
In Therapeutics, the four I landed on were: Necromizer, a chemical compound that on contact with undead triggered a chain decay reaction; Muscle Stimulant, a powerful steroid that temporarily raised the user's strength and endurance to superhuman levels without side effects; Vivisector, an extraordinarily rare and complex device that when applied to someone recently deceased could restart their heart and bring them back; and Purity Serum, a medicine capable of curing the most severe diseases and even dissolving certain curses by targeting them at the cellular level.
The Necromizer went on the list purely as a precaution. What if a zombie apocalypse happened? This was Marvel. You couldn't rule anything out. Among the remaining three, the Vivisector was the most extraordinary option by far, but Purity Serum, which was functionally a healing potion pushed to its absolute ceiling, was genuinely compelling in its own right. In practice, I'd almost certainly be unable to build either one at this stage, which meant the star went to Muscle Stimulant.
Running through the full list one more time and marking with stars the options that seemed both interesting and actually achievable, meaning nothing in the "build a nuclear reactor in your kitchen" category, my final shortlist came out surprisingly short: Brew of Intellect, Paralysis of Will Poison, Stun Grenade, Protective Field Generator, Gyroscope, and Muscle Stimulant. Six options I could theoretically do something with, though even Protective Field Generator and Gyroscope came with serious question marks about the level of technology they required. And I only got to pick one. This was genuinely brutal. Though, if I was being honest with myself, the choice was actually pretty obvious.
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