The connection refused to assemble itself cleanly.
Lukas turned it over with the particular, methodical quality of someone who has been given a result and is working backward toward the cause — the notification sitting in his awareness as a confirmed fact while the logic connecting it to anything he understood about potion-making remained stubbornly absent. Star monsters were terrifying for reasons that were direct and physical. Their strength, their elemental affinities, their combat classifications, the specific, graduated hierarchy of their threat levels — all of these were categories that connected to each other through chains of cause and effect that his accumulated knowledge could trace without difficulty.
Potion-making was not in that chain....
