Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 108: Angel’s Baby
Why do you think alchemists became swindlers?
Bessa once believed her life had finally curved toward something like grace. She’d clawed her way out of the guild’s shadow and bought a small, sunlit cottage at the edge of a quiet, unremarkable village.
What a staggering turn-around from the grimy, hopeless terror of her childhood, right? What kind of childhood, you asked? A kind of childhood that had begun on a slaver’s block with her only value a fluke noticed by a wandering set of eyes.
What talent?
Alchemy.
True alchemists could recognize the spark in another. The talent, a freakish, cerebral gift that only manifested in humans, and even then, was as random as lightning they couldn’t expect it in their own offspring. They could look at a grimy, cowering child and see a rare pattern of potential.
A specific keenness in the gaze, a latent intelligence. So, the guilds and independent masters made their rounds in the grim bazaars and auction pits, hunting not for laborers, but for raw, uncut cognitive gems.
It was always a difficult hunt.
The talent required a preternaturally good eye for subtle, often damn invisible patterns, like the shift in a liquid’s viscosity, the exact hue of a reacting gas... coupled with a mind capable of memorizing thousands of ingredient interactions, symbolic correspondences, and procedural steps.
And most importantly...
Math.
Yeah. That’s it. Math.
Well, mathematics and geometry.
For years, Bessa hadn’t understood how her old master had spotted her in that sea of miserable faces. Now, she knew. The more she practiced, the more the world unveiled its hidden hue to her.
She started seeing the shimmering color of ambient mana, the weaving threads of thermal energy, the faint pulse of magnetic fields, the complex dance of organic compounds.
So, one day, she could see that a person with the latent gift had a subtle, telltale aura. A faint blue glow around their hands and eyes, like static on a clear day.
Now that it’s clear, let’s circle back to the original question. Why did alchemists become swindlers?
Because the first and greatest swindle was performed on them.
It was a perfect loop.
A child was purchased from bondage, not to freedom, but to a different kind of chain. They were taught just enough, the bare fundamentals, to prove their worth. Then came the invoice. The "debt." For the food, the roof, the "privilege" of instruction, for the knowledge they’d yet to receive. The number was always impossible.
The guilds enforced this debt fiercely. Runaways were hunted, dragged back, and beaten. Professionally. Their tools were confiscated, their names blacklisted, any independent work destroyed.
Advancement within the craft? That cost extra. Recipes for profitable, sought-after potions? A fortune. They were kept in a state of desperate, indebted adolescence, their genius exploited to fill their masters’ coffers.
And when these broken, brilliant children grew into cynical, hardened adults, what did they know? They knew the system. They knew how to spot the spark in another vulnerable soul.
So, they returned to the auctions, or to the impoverished outskirts, and they repeated the cycle. They became the hunters, perpetuating the pyramid scheme of intellectual slavery.
So, was it any wonder they treated their customers the same way?
The world had taught them, from their first conscious memory, that knowledge was a commodity to be hoarded, diluted, and sold at an outrageous markup.
That trust was for fools, and that every relationship was, at its heart, a transaction waiting to be exploited. They weren’t born swindlers, though, some grew to be very good at it.
They cheated others, yes, but they’d been cheated first. So thoroughly that they forgot any other way to exist.
Thankfully, Bess’s soul had never fully bent to their mold. She didn’t dream of climbing the greasy, slippery pole of the guild hierarchy. She just wanted out.
Granted, for years, she’d played their miserable game, grinding powders, memorizing toxins, smiling through the extortion, because it seemed like the only board in town. But the moment she truly grasped the rules... she realized there was no square marked ’freedom.’
The game was rigged to keep her forever in debt, forever owned.
So, she chose a different strategy.
She began to learn other things. In secret. Under the pretense of cultivating rare botanical ingredients for more complex potions, she buried herself in agricultural treatises.
While her masters thought she was studying the capillary action of moonpetals, she was memorizing crop rotation cycles and soil pH balances. The alchemical genius that made her valuable to them was repurposed, turned inward toward a single goal.
A normal life.
The life she’d glimpsed in a half-forgored memory from her slave caravan days. A blur of people, backs bent in a sun-drenched field, sweat-soaked and exhausted, but free.
She didn’t want power or gold. She wanted dirt under her fingernails and no one to answer to.
But in a world of the alchemists, secrets have a short life.
When they found out, they didn’t kill her to punish her. They made her a lesson. They severed her right leg at the knee, then, they fitted her with a masterfully crafted prosthetic of articulated brass and leather.
A ’gift.’ One that required bi-weekly adjustments with a ’specialized lubricating potion’ to prevent the joints from seizing and the flesh from ulcerating.
For two years, she lived in that dread, hobbling to the guild’s back door every fortnight, swallowing her pride to beg for the vital vial, paying for it through more indentured labor.
Then she discovered the truth. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺
Through a combination of stolen time, experimentation, and her own damned alchemical eye, trained over and over and over again, she analyzed the ’specialized lubricating potion.’
It was a mix of common linseed oil, sunflower extract, and a dash of chamomile for scent. Oils and fucking flower extracts. Oils. And fucking. Flower extracts.
The gaslighting... the ’you just don’t understand this high level of alchemy yet’... the ’pay up if you want to know’... the revelation was a sucker-punch to the gut, followed by a wave of soul-scorching humiliation.
She could almost hear them, the masters in their velvet-lined studies, chuckling into their wine as she limped away, clutching her precious bottle of salad dressing, begging for oils and fucking flower extracts. Only to answer with, "This is a good lesson for you, child," when she asked why?
Ha.
It was at the absolute nadir of this bleak and humiliating rage. When the taste of her own foolishness was coppery on her tongue and the phantom ache in her missing leg throbbed in time with her shame, that something impossible happened.
An angel contacted her.
"Do you want a way out?"
"I will pay you."
"The money will be enough."
"I will also give you a new identity. A new place to live. A plot of land to cultivate."
This person knew... everything. Her deepest desire...
"But in exchange, you will owe me. One favor. A single ask. When I find you, and I will find you, you must comply. No questions. No refusal."
Who was it? A rival guild master? A noble with a grudge? A demon in a particularly clever guise?
Can I trust them?
The guild-instilled paranoia screamed no. But the alternative was a life of bi-weekly begging for cooking oil, of being a living punchline until she died in debt.
She didn’t have a chance to contemplate, though. The decision was made the next day.
Men clad in shadows darker than midnight swept into her tiny, watched room and kidnapped her. She awoke much later, groggy and disoriented, in the rocking hold of a fast-moving carriage.
Before she lost consciousness, she’d glimpsed for a second, a still form on her own cot. A body with her build, her hair, dressed in her clothes.
By now, her room would be ash. Alchemists, for all their prowess, couldn’t identify a body burned to carbon and bone fragments. It was the perfect exit.
She was transported far, far from the guild’s reach, across borders she’d only seen on stolen maps. And then, she was brought before the angel.
The woman from the society pages and the scandal sheets, rendered in three-dimensional flesh.
Angela May Iondora.
The angel looked her over with those famous, penetrating eyes, then gestured to a heavy satchel on a marble table. "Here’s the money. Pick your house from these deeds."
That was how Bess ended up in this sun-drenched cottage at the edge of a quiet village, with a new name, a clean past, and a deed to three acres of good, arable land.
She built her life. She planted her crops. She felt the sun on her back and the honest ache of labor in her muscles, and she waited.
Six years. The seasons turned. The favor never came. Sometimes, in the deep quiet of a successful harvest, she wondered if she had been a forgotten line item in some grand ledger. A forgotten investment, perhaps.
Sometimes she wished she could be forgotten forever.
Until the day her peace was shattered by an unexpected knock on her sturdy oak door.
She opened it to a sight that belonged in a stained-glass window, not on her humble doorstep.
A man with majestic, curling black horns, and beside him, a woman of such ethereal beauty she seemed to make the afternoon light bend.
"Angel’s baby?"
Angel’s baby.
So that’s what the angel called her investments?
