Maizen: Return of the Zombies

Chapter 46

A week went by. At this point, broken potion bottles covered at least half of the floor where JJ stood, and his arms were barely recognizable through all the cuts that had been inflicted since.

JJ could feel it - his eyes were bloodshot. He'd hardly gotten any sleep, and added to that, the constant stress of his work, it made sense. But he didn't care about that; all he cared about was making the cure.

In order to keep himself focused, he'd crafted some iron doors and placed them down, connecting them with an iron button to keep out the noise outside. Despite it's simple setup, JJ called it a security measure, just to give himself the familiar feeling of when he used to build things like these all the time, except bigger and better.

Maybe when all of this ended, he could go back to doing that.

Once again, JJ felt that uncomfortable feeling of someone watching him. He knew it was Mikey, but he paid him no mind. He grabbed another empty potion bottle, and started rummaging through the cabinets, starting his next attempt.

"He won't get any attention from me." JJ thought to himself. Every since their encounter a week ago, Mikey had stayed in the lab with him. He would watch him work, listen to him scream each time he failed, and would watch as he'd cut himself, dangerously deep at this point. But he never said anything. Not a word; he was completely silent. "Just what I want."

After an hour, JJ had gone through two more failed potions. As he was working on the third, he started to feel a searing pain in his upper leg. Since he'd pretty much carved his arms in every place possible, he moved on to his legs. And since he'd gone deeper than before, he ended up creating a wound so deep, that the blood loss was causing his vision to slightly detirerate.

But his head buzzed with detirmination. "No distractions." He told himself, and kept working.

So far, he'd combined the residue of multiple healing herbs, an unidentifiable liquid he'd labelled "bright yellow acid," and another one that was similar, but cyan. The ingredients had all been scribbled onto a piece of paper next to him, so that if it turned out to be the right combination, JJ would have the ingredients list to make as many as he needed.

He decided to try mixing it now. Using some sort of teaspoon-looking thing he'd found a week ago, he combined all the ingredients fully. They swirled around for a minute, before settling. The final color would be revealed soon.

He'd tried similar ingredients before, and they'd all turned the wrong color. So JJ gripped the table, bracing himself for the anger he'd feel when it turned out wrong, and when he'd unleash it on the potion bottle; using yet another piece of glass to give himself and even deeper wound than the last one; it was still stinging, but JJ had managed to ignore the pain for now. Besides, he'd be able to focus on it again when it doubled after he'd cut himself again.

"I'm already seeing my mistakes - I messed up by adding multiple liquids at once. I needed to do less herbs as well. Less ingredients is the key, and there needs to be a wider variety of them. Am I losing my intelligence? This is the worst time to!"

The color turned to a very light red.

JJ was about to crush it with his bare hands, without a care of what glass pieces stabbed into his skin, when something else happened to it. The color slowly turned more vibrant, and the shade changed over from red, to something else. JJ got onto his knees to get a closer look; a potion had never changed colors before.

Then, the real final color settled.

JJ stared at it, very intently. At first he thought his eyes were messing up due to how sleep-deprived they were, but this wasn't something not even the weakest eyes could miss.