Chapter 24
Walking home through the evening streets of Queens, Peter was thinking.
And he was bitterly aware of exactly how agonizingly slow and dim the process had become.
Normal thinking after several hours of a brain running on the Intellect Potion felt like a calculated cruelty.
It was as though a blind man had been given sight for a couple of hours, shown the world in perfect resolution with all its invisible patterns and connections laid bare, and then had that sight taken away, leaving only the memory of what clarity felt like.
The world, which had just been a crystal-clear stream of structured data, was turning back into a slow, murky river.
His own mind, which he had always quietly considered his greatest asset, now felt sluggish and wasteful by comparison.
Even so, Peter adapted.
He made himself settle back into the familiar, unhurried rhythm of ordinary thought, the absence of thousands of simultaneous ideas, the return of imperfect recall.
And now, in that familiar slowness, he was thinking about John.
An ordinary-looking guy.
Enrolled in the same year as MJ, who, it turned out, could not tell Peter very much about him at all.
Plain clothes, plain appearance, a comprehensive, almost studied ordinariness.
Peter himself might have passed for the same thing if not for his obsession with science.
But Peter, unlike John, did not have recipes.
Recipes that had turned his entire scientific worldview on its head.
Recipes that, as he now understood clearly, even someone at the level of Reed Richards or Curt Connors would struggle to produce.
They worked within the established frameworks of physics and molecular biology.
John's alchemy seemed to simply ignore those frameworks, bending reality to follow its own alien internal logic.
And all of it had come from someone who, by his own admission, had no scientific training whatsoever.
So where had it come from?
Fine.
Peter wisely decided not to force that particular door.
When the time was right, John would tell him.
And if he did not, there would be reasons for that too.
All Peter could do was hold the secret.
And he was very good at holding secrets.
That thought moved naturally to another, the heaviest and most carefully guarded one he carried.
A secret he had uncovered almost accidentally, by doing nothing more complicated than applying the scientific method to a pattern that everyone else had apparently dismissed as coincidence.
The identity of Spider-Woman.
His lab colleague, Gwen Stacy.
She had no idea he knew.
And Peter himself had not been looking for it, not exactly.
He had simply noticed.
The hypothesis had formed from a straightforward comparison of facts: the moments when Gwen disappeared from work, always with a brief, slightly vague explanation, "I have a doctor's appointment," "family situation," coincided with a striking regularity with Spider-Woman's appearances on the streets of the city, as reported across every news outlet.
Out of pure scientific habit, he had created a password-protected spreadsheet on his laptop.
One column: timestamp and stated reason for Gwen's absence.
The other: timestamp and location of Spider-Woman's appearances, pulled from news reports and public police records.
After a month of passive observation, the conclusion was inescapable.
In all that time, Gwen Stacy in the lab and Spider-Woman on the streets of New York had never, not once, occupied two places simultaneously.
The correlation was one hundred percent.
After that, Peter started noticing smaller things.
A faint scratch along her cheekbone, imperfectly covered with foundation, the morning after Spider-Woman had gone through a window during a robbery intervention.
A deeper cut on her forearm, the shape and location matching precisely a photograph from a news piece showing the heroine deflecting a knife attack.
A slight but unmistakable limp following a hard landing he had spotted in an eyewitness video circulating online.
But what struck him most was her recovery rate.
Cuts and bruises that would take a normal person a week to heal were gone on Gwen overnight.
"Heals like a dog" was nowhere near adequate as a description.
It was a biological anomaly that had no ordinary explanation.
He had not told anyone about any of it, of course.
Not even Gwen herself.
Why?
To give her another secret to carry, another source of anxiety?
He respected people who genuinely used whatever power they had to help others.
As Uncle Ben had said the first night a news report about Spider-Woman had played on television: with great power comes great responsibility.
Gwen used her power responsibly.
Recklessly at times, in his honest assessment, but that was not his call to make.
At least, it had not been his call before.
And who was he now?
The events of the previous evening had changed that question completely.
He now knew how to synthesize a combat stimulant that transformed a person into a precision predator.
He knew how to produce a Muscle Stimulator whose underlying mechanism made his scientific instincts flinch with something close to vertigo.
He knew how to create Proteus, a fabric that was not just years but decades ahead of anything currently in development.
He had real power now: in his mind, in his hands.
Power that was capable of changing things.
And with it, as his uncle's voice echoed quietly in his memory, comes responsibility.
What was the point of all these stimulants and advanced materials if they simply sat in a box at John's place gathering dust?
Was it not irresponsible to possess that kind of capability and do nothing meaningful with it?
He could become a real hero.
The kind he had always kept as a carefully guarded private dream.
But those were not thoughts for today, or even tomorrow.
He needed to work through everything carefully, keep building with John, and perhaps at some point raise the question directly.
Who knew what else this strange, ordinary-looking person was sitting on?
Especially given the latest assignment.
The Ghost Orchid.
A flower Peter had never encountered in any literature, which turned out to be a key component of the Intellect Potion.
The task John had given him was simultaneously simple in its statement and staggering in its scope: determine what the alkaloid Phantasmine, contained in the flower's pollen, actually was at a structural and functional level.
Analyze its properties.
Find a viable synthetic pathway to produce an analogue.
John had left him one specimen in a sealed, specially designed container, along with detailed care instructions.
Those instructions, like everything else connected to John, extended well beyond the boundaries of conventional science.
Peter was beginning to adapt to that particular quality of the situation.
But beyond the Orchid itself, John had given him something far more significant.
The complete recipe for the Intellect Potion.
Not just a list of ingredients: the full methodology.
It was an act of trust at a level Peter could not take lightly, and had no intention of betraying.
On the contrary.
He was going to go at the Orchid problem with everything he had.
He would build a proper theoretical framework, formulate as many hypotheses as the data could support, run every analysis available to him, so that when the final brainstorming session came, he would be walking in with a foundation rather than a blank slate.
A session he would conduct under the influence of his own synthesized version of the Potion.
Beyond the Phantasmine synthesis, there were other goals further down the horizon: improving the Potion's formulation, possibly changing its delivery format to something oral and stable like a capsule.
And the furthest goal of all, the one that made him stop walking for a moment when it crossed his mind: achieving a permanent effect.
A permanent, irreversible intellectual enhancement.
At the thought of it, something in Peter's chest caught in a way that was difficult to describe.
That was a goal worthy of everything he was capable of.
And every temporary window of clarity they could manufacture would have to be used to its absolute maximum potential.
Peter walked along the nighttime street with a faint, involuntary smile settling onto his face.
Intellect.
The one thing he had quietly taken pride in his entire life.
As it turned out, it could be several orders of magnitude greater.
And he was genuinely, unreservedly excited to find out how far that could go.
Creating Blade's alchemical grenades turned out to be a surprisingly meditative process.
That was largely thanks to the Master Clockmaker skill, which had proven to extend well beyond its apparent specialty in gears and springs.
It gave me a near-inhuman precision and steadiness in my movements, turning what would otherwise have been dangerous work with volatile compounds into something more like a careful, deliberate dance.
Not a single misplaced drop.
Not a single deviation.
In four hours of focused work, I produced five copies of each of the three grenade types.
The results were more than satisfying.
[Potion "Solar Flare" created. Complexity: Low. Received +100 OP!]
[Potion "Garlic Cloud" created. Complexity: Low. Received +100 OP!]
[Potion "Silver Gel" created. Complexity: Minimal. Received +50 OP!]
Subsequent batches returned progressively fewer points, as expected.
But across all fifteen items, the total came to 630 OP.
Adding the 50 I already had, my final balance sat at a solid 680.
Tomorrow that number would climb further when I started on the Beast Potion runs.
For now, though: sleep.
Before bed, I did spend a portion of the balance on a Forge the Universe pull for 400 OP.
[Information Package Received (Common): Master Gourmet (Flavor Dungeon). Unlock Cost: 200 OP.]
Description: Your refined sense of culinary and alchemical delights has reached perfection. This passive skill completely neutralizes any negative effects from food, drinks, and potions. Your body extracts the maximum benefit from each dish or elixir, enhancing their positive effects by 15%.
"Flavor Dungeon."
Was the system an anime fan?
I laughed despite myself, and then immediately issued the mental command: "Unlock."
Without the slightest hesitation.
A passive skill that grants immunity to poisons and toxins was already worth the price on its own.
But enhancing all positive effects by fifteen percent on top of that?
That was a direct upgrade applied to everything I produced.
My stimulants would hit harder.
The Intellect Potion would run deeper.
Even if the immunity were the only benefit, I would not have hesitated.
The remaining 80 OP was a small number, but it was earnable, and permanent passive enhancements were the foundation everything else would eventually stand on.
In a genuinely good mood, I showered and went to bed.
The sleep did not last.
Around three in the morning I was pulled out of it by an insistent ringtone.
Unknown number.
I already had a reasonable idea who it was.
"Yo, rookie! The city's finest bloodsucker exterminator, calling in!"
Blade's voice was unreasonably cheerful for three in the morning as it cut through the silence.
"Yeah, figured," I managed, trying to convince my eyes to open.
"You sound rough. Didn't sleep enough?"
A brief, amused sound, and then he got straight to it.
"Calling about your Muscle Stimulator. Extremely solid work. Hits even on me, and I'm already somewhere past the baseline of normal."
"Good to know."
And genuinely: it would have been a disappointing result if it had no effect on someone operating beyond standard human parameters.
Though something told me it would produce only marginal results on Steve Rogers or the Hulk.
"Good is putting it lightly. I had a productive night out in a gothic venue in the Meatpacking District. Ran into a pair of purebloods, they nearly had me. My Beast Potion works, but the aftereffects hit hard even for me. I was starting to run out of steam, and then your Stimulator kicked in. The look on their faces right before the end was worth it, heh."
He sounded genuinely pleased with himself.
This was exactly the right moment.
"Actually, speaking of the Beast Potion," I said, letting a deliberate pause settle before continuing, "I've adjusted the recipe. The new version has no side effects."
Complete silence on the other end of the line.
So sudden and absolute that I pulled the phone away from my ear to check if the call had dropped.
"...What?"
He finally got it out.
The cheerfulness was gone.
What replaced it was something closer to stunned disbelief.
"You're messing with me, right? That's less than one day. When the hell did you have time? An entire Vampire clan has been sitting on that recipe and refining it for centuries, and even they couldn't get rid of the side effects. Kid, are you by any chance the illegitimate son of Reed Richards and Tony Stark?"
"I won't go into the details, but I'm not joking," I said.
My voice at three in the morning was flat and even and completely serious.
"And yes, the improved Beast Potion is now available on my end as well. For trade."
I let a deliberate emphasis sit on that last word.
Blade was quiet for a moment on the other end, processing.
"Fair enough, that works," he said finally.
The casual ease was still there, but something more businesslike had settled underneath it.
"At least give me a rough idea of what you're looking for. So I know what the table looks like."
"Simple enough. Rare ingredients, unique recipes, useful connections, information. Possibly interesting artifacts or technologies outside normal circulation. Money doesn't interest me much."
I paused.
"Though I would sell both the combat and Muscle Stimulators for cash. Say, ten thousand per injector."
Blade let out a low whistle, and the tone carried both surprise and something resembling genuine respect.
"So you're playing the long game, kid. I can respect that. But why no mention of your brain-expanding Potion?"
"Because it's not in the same category. It's not for sale for money."
"Damn," he exhaled.
"Now I want a dose of it even more. Alright, I follow the logic. Mass production goods for cash, exclusive product for something more interesting."
"Exactly. On that note: if you bring me a dozen Ghost Orchid flowers, I'll give you at least one Potion in exchange."
I let that sit for a second.
"And while we're on the subject of connections: who do you go to in this city for hardware? No licensing complications, no unnecessary questions, reasonable pricing."
A question I had been sitting on for a while.
I had no interest in dealing with the low-end street market in Hell's Kitchen for something this important, but now it was time to take the matter seriously.
"I'll give you that one for free, call it a bonus for the Stimulator," he said without hesitating.
"Lucas is your man for acquisition. He can get you anything your imagination can produce, as long as you have the budget. We're talking anything. But if you want to handle it yourself, actually feel the hardware, make your own choice... then you need to talk to my little brother, Frankie. He operates on his own terms, though. Selective about his clients."
Frankie.
Frank Castle?
The Punisher?
A cold prickle moved down my spine at the thought.
I kept that particular question to myself.
"Alright, listen, Eric, I..." I yawned pointedly into the phone.
"Got it, got it. Get some sleep. I'll come by during the day to talk barter. Will you have the improved Beast Potions ready by then?"
"Yes. Send Frankie's contact in a text. And I'm going back to sleep."
I ended the call and was unconscious within seconds, dreamless and deep.
Sunday morning was unexpectedly sunny.
In good spirits, after a quick breakfast, I went down to the garage.
All the ingredients, including the compounds Peter had synthesized, were arranged in a clean row on the workbench.
The process was mapped in my head, and thanks to the Master Clockmaker skill, it was mapped there permanently.
I picked up the first flask and began.
The original Beast Potion came first, following Blade's recipe.
On a subconscious level, the process felt rough: unstable, like trying to build something precise with a tool designed for brute work.
Given what I now knew about the potion's actual mechanism, that impression made complete sense.
[Potion "Beast Potion" created. Complexity: Normal. Received +150 OP!]
Only 150, not the 200 I had anticipated.
The side effects were clearly factored into the system's assessment of product quality.
Now for Peter's improved recipe.
Working through it was a completely different experience: precise, stable, each step feeling intuitively correct to the hands running through it.
I wondered whether the system itself was exerting a guiding influence, or whether it was entirely the Master Clockmaker skill.
It did not particularly matter.
The first improved vial was done.
[Potion "Absolute Predator Serum" created. Complexity: Normal. Received +200 OP!]
The system had given it a different name entirely.
The message was clear.
Side effects were a marker of product imperfection, and the system adjusted its reward accordingly.
Over the next couple of hours, I produced four more Beast Potions for OP farming and a dozen Absolute Predator Serums, my new flagship product.
Running total: 1,070 OP.
Enough for two pulls.
I was about to open the system window, already feeling the anticipation of either a great result or a useful disappointment, when the quiet of Sunday morning was cut through by the low, distinctive rumble of a powerful engine.
A black 1969 Dodge Charger rolled up to the house and stopped.
Despite its age, the car was in flawless condition, the kind of care that came from genuine love for the machine.
The individual who stepped out of it with unhurried, predatory ease was the walking definition of bad news for the vampire community.
The pulls could wait a little longer.