A Background Character's Fate

Chapter 18[OLD]

I follow the boy up the stairs as he guides me to a room on the third floor. Several others are already sitting in the room as they read their notes or anxiously wait for the examination to start.
The participants here are wealthier than the ones in the army by their dress and attire.

"What? That's..."

Some of the participants recognise me. They were questioning why a fighter would want to be an alchemist. I can already feel the annoyance and frustration of candidates here.

I don't blame them. After all, a person has to be a genius to be in a hybrid career.

The room is a spacious golden room with a few marble tables and chairs fixated to the ground.

A woman wearing a red shawl, black coat and white inner shirt walks into the room. She was one of the people who carried the bags of Deathworm teeth just now.

She throws her glance at me before looking away.

"We will begin the examination without delay, please take a seat."

I sit at the last table at the back of the room. Each table is spaced out at an interval of about 1 meter behind one another. There are three rows of tables, one in the middle, the rest at the sides of the room.

The lady hands out stacks of paper to the people at the front. The person at the front takes a stack and passes the rest behind.

When I received my stack of paper, I realise it was a written examination about alchemy materials.

"You have 30 minutes, please begin." She says.

I look through the paper, I need to write down the properties of different materials that alchemists use such as various plants, blood, teeth, reagent, etc.

Since I was an adventurer in the past, I can easily breeze through the nature section. I was a frequent customer of potions and pills to make up for my talentless state so I pretty much know which materials go into which potion or pills, allowing me to roughly guess what their properties are.

The only problem I might have is reagents...

Atomic Spider diarrhea...?

Uhh... Atomic spiders are category 4 monsters that are as big as a dog. They have purplish skin that has small spikes to protect themselves. Generally, they are harmless by themselves as their skin is soft. But a swarm of Atomic spiders can easily overwhelm a small party.

Uhhh... Atomic spiders feed on mana crystals and are mostly found in caves so...

Mana diarrhea??????

When the 30 minutes almost is up, I had no choice but to scramble some guesses on the reagent section.

I sigh as I hand the paper up. As long as I can pass, it is fine. I am not looking to ace it and gain some attention from the higher alchemists anyway.

The next part of the examination is practical.
The woman leads us to another even bigger and spacious room on the next level of the tower.

There's a cauldron spaced apart in rows of 5.

We walk in and take a seat at a cauldron. Since I was last in the queue, I can only take the one remaining spot at the edge of the 2nd row.

An instruction manual that includes the steps and images of pills is laid down in front of the cauldron.

"In one and a half hours, make at least 3 different pills listed on the instruction manual."

!!

One and a half?

Most of the candidates in the room gasp. The test suddenly escalated to a near-impossible tier.