Chalice of Your Blood and Sorrow

Chalice of Your Blood and Sorrow is an Artifact in the set Scarlet Proof.

Description

On the first night, he stood with his hands behind his back in a birch forest swept by biting winds. Flecks of snow clinging to his glasses were slightly more of a nuisance than those landing on his face, so he took them off and slipped them into his coat pocket.
Contrary to what others might have thought, Zandik understood humans very well.
First, the typical human being has two hundred and six bones. Most use their brains to think and usually feel fear when startled or threatened.
Second, to be precise, he carefully included qualifiers such as "complete," "most," and "usually" in his description, thereby avoiding any potential objections based on individual outliers.
Ultimately, his deepest understanding of humanity lay in knowing that its possibilities were limitless.

On the second night, he sat beside a feeble campfire, sharing a meal of plants mixed with scraps of animal flesh with several villagers. A black-haired woman with a deeply lined face prodded at the firewood, trying to coax the flames higher. Zandik was certain she had no idea why doing so made the flames suddenly leap higher. She did it only because those before her had done the same and got the result they wanted, and so this unwritten method had been passed down from generation to generation.
Zandik further concluded that she must be younger than her appearance suggested, and that the same was true of the others. Harsh living conditions invariably caused premature aging and bred resentment. This time, their resentment was directed at the cold, hunger, the fae, the higher-ranking fae, and the debased humans who submitted to them. Zandik had already been warned that this place held an exceedingly antiquated view of the world, which spared him the step of being surprised.
Curiously, neither illness nor death figured among the villagers' grievances. Perhaps people instinctively struggled for as long as they lived, whereas in death, they spared everyone the trouble. Under such circumstances, a stranger appearing out of nowhere would naturally be perceived as a threat and frighten the locals. Fortunately, well-versed in human nature, Zandik came prepared: the animal scraps were his contribution.
What a perfect place. Ice and snow sealed away all outside interference, forming a world within a world, each enclosed in its own shell. Human behavior remained primitive, while history itself had ground to a halt.
This place should have given rise to even more possibilities. And when Zandik spoke of humanity's possibilities, he by no means intended the word as praise.

Setting aside its connections to the outside world, a human brain placed in a water tank is no different from one housed within a skull. So long as the appropriate signals can be simulated, it will produce the predetermined response.
As Dottore poured the experimental materials into the tank, a child's voice came up nearby. He asked, "Is that a butterfly on your bottle?"
This child must be very curious to venture out on a night cold enough to freeze a person to death just to watch him conduct his experiment. If he had been a little more curious and ventured a little farther, beyond the birch forest, perhaps he could have gone on to live a much better life.
To reward the child's curiosity, Dottore tossed him the empty bottle and said, "That isn't a butterfly. It's a four-eyed monster!" The child took a frightened step back, and the bright red bottle fell into the snow. The boy's fear was entirely as expected, so Dottore quickly lost interest and went back to what he had been doing.

On the tenth night, the food and water in his pack had noticeably dwindled, replaced by detailed records of his psychotropic drug trials. The results were exactly as he anticipated, drug-induced mental control could work in either direction. Stimulation and sedation each had their uses, and whether applied to interrogation or therapy, both appeared to offer considerable profit potential.
The experiments yielded fantastic results, but that also meant Zandik's time as himself was drawing to a close. Soon, he would return to the castle of Fatuus, become Dottore once more, and attend to matters of a somewhat more humane nature.
"So far away," he thought with regret as he gazed in the direction of Snezhnograd.
If only he could perform surgery on his own brain, then he could sit back and travel in comfort like everyone else.

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Scarlet Proof Artifacts Flower of Life Honor to Your Devotion Plume of Death Glory to Your Legacy Sands of Eon Time Gifted Unto You Goblet of Eonothem Chalice of Your Blood and Sorrow Circlet of Logos Testament to Your Faith