Mariela is a young girl who is one of the many alchemists living in the Kingdom of Endalsia. However, when the capital city was rampaged by a horde of monsters in an event known as "The Stampede", she used her magic to put herself in suspended animation in hopes of warding off the invasion. She wakes up to find that she survived, but the spell worked out too well - she slept for two centuries, and is surprised to find that Endalsia has changed a lot in that time. In addition, Mariela finds out she's the last surviving alchemist in the Kingdom.
With nothing else to do, Mariela seeks to rebuild her previous lifestyle back in the vastly-changed kingdom, and along the way, she meets a couple of new friends on her journey. A new chapter in her life as an alchemist begins.
The Alchemist Who Survived Now Dreams of a Quiet City Life (Ikinokori Renkinjutsushi wa Machi de Shizuka ni Kurashitai) is a fantasy light novel series written by Usata Nonohara and illustrated by Ox, which was published from July 30, 2017 to August 1, 2019 for six volumes. A manga adaptation illustrated by Guru Mizoguchi began serialization in the shoujo magazine B's-LOG Comic in November 2017. Both the novels and the manga are licensed in English by Yen Press.
This work provides examples of:
- Because You Were Nice to Me: Mariela buys a crippled slave and uses her alchemy to restore him to health. Siegmund is absolutely devoted to her in return.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: The 55th floor of the dungeon is infested with three foot long cockroaches.
- Big Eater: Pre-suspended animation, Mariela was poor and only bought the cheapest foods. Post-suspended animation, the money from her potions monopoly means she can afford much better, and she is clearly making up for lost time. To the point where a minor part of book 3 is "Chubbyela" being put on a diet.
- Break the Haughty: Sieg, in his backstory. He once had a "Spirit Eye" that gave him several useful gifts like Super-Reflexes and Combat Clairvoyance, allowing him to become a B-rank adventurer despite not actually being that good with a bow. Unfortunately, the success got to his head, turning him into an arrogant adventurer dependent entirely on his eye. So when he lost the eye in a wyvern attack, his party was all too happy to ditch him, and trying to get it back drove him so far into debt that he had to sell himself into slavery, where he had whatever remnants of his entitlement remained beaten out of him.
- Brilliant, but Lazy: Mariela's master knew powerful magic and a lot about alchemy, but it would appear that Mariela was the one who did the cooking. And while she genuinely Imprinted the magic circle for suspended animation on Mariela to help keep her safe, she tricked her pupil into drawing one for her as a "graduation lesson" because she was too lazy to draw one herself. Heck, she's not even that good at alchemy; Mariela's best are High-grade potions, while the best Freyja can manage is Mid-grade. That she's able to teach Mariela in spite of this is nothing short of astounding.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Mariela's master, Freyja. Mariela recounted how she often pranked her, particularly by ambushing her with painful Imprint spells over and over to literally burn knowledge into her brain. That being said, she is a powerful adventurer with a vast amount of knowledge and experience, and Mariela wouldn't have been where she is without her. This is only reinforced once she wakes up from her own slumber, which was extended for the same duration as Mariela's because she also left a lamp on. She's actually much worse at alchemy than Mariela is, and is liable to con other people into either bringing her drinks or joining her for them, but she knows exactly which of Mariela's buttons to push in order for her student to max out her potential, is much more aware of everything around her than her carefree demeanor might suggest, and she wields insanely powerful fire magic that allows her to torch powerful monsters by the dozen.
- Catch-22 Dilemma: In order to clear the dungeon near the Labyrinth City, the military needs potions. However, potions have a very short shelf life if taken outside the region in which they are made, and in order to make potions in a given region, the alchemist in question must have made a pact with the local ley line nexus. But, since the nexus communicates in the language of the area's dominant race, and the dominant race of the area are the monsters of the local dungeon, it isn't possible to form pacts until the dungeon is cleared and the nexus gains the ability to speak a human language. Mareila is the sole exception to this rule, because she made a pact with the local ley lines before the dungeon formed, and the change to the nexus didn't impact pre-existing pacts.
- The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes: A side-plot in the second book centers around a healer responsible for treating adventurers wounded in the labyrinth, who spends the back half of the book lamenting the fact that despite the fortune in potions and medicines he uses daily, he can't do anything to treat his twelve year old daughter who was maimed in a monster attack, because all those medicines are the government's property and not his. After helping expose a criminal at the end of the book, he is granted permission to use a potion for personal reasons as a reward.
- Conspicuous Consumption: Due to the fact that it's been generations since the last time anyone's been able to make more, potions are considered to be a rarity to only be used in dire need - some people even go their entire lives without using any potions they own and pass them on to their children. As a result, the Black Iron Trading Company sees Mariela casually using potions without a thought as this, until they realize that she can make more.
- Dead All Along: Estalia, an alchemist kept in suspended animation by the Aguinas family for two hundred years in the hopes of restarting the Endalsian alchemist tradition once the Labyrinth was vanquished. Unfortunately, she was stored in a flawed magic circle and didn't make it.
- Doorstep Baby: Mariela was one, left outside an orphanage with nothing but a note giving her True Name.
- Drama-Preserving Handicap: Mariela's master, Freyja, is extremely knowledgeable about alchemy, and demonstrates extraordinarily powerful fire magic the moment she wakes up. Everybody expects her to be able to solve some or even all of their problems when she and her pupil have their big reunion... except she's got some extreme caveats. The first is that her fire magic comes from the power of spirits, which are weakened in the Labyrinth, so while she's still capable of kicking plenty of ass down there she won't be able to be the walking disaster she is aboveground. The other is that while she knows many secrets about alchemy, she can't actually put much of it to practice because she finds actually making potions to be such a pain in the ass that she hasn't raised her level beyond medium potions. So while she brings with her the information and methodology needed to end the current crisis, much of the heavy lifting is still left in the hands of Mariela and the Dungeon Suppression forces.
- Fake Ultimate Hero: Because she's a beautiful woman from a known line of former alchemists who happened to be engaged to a leader in the labyrinth suppression effort, everyone assumes that Caroline is the alchemist who defeated the Labyrinth and that Mariela is her apprentice when it's the other way around. But since everyone in the know about the truth also knows that Mariela doesn't want the extra attention that correcting the record would bring, they let the misconception stand.
- Fetch Quest: After a while Mariela starts giving these, having adventurers working to clear the Labyrinth gather the ingredients she needs to make the potions necessary for them to delve into the deeper levels.
- For Want Of A Nail: Mariela's sleep lasted longer than expected because she left a lamp on when entering the magic circle to put her in suspended animation, which burned up all the oxygen in the room. As such, the spell couldn't release her until the air cleared, which didn't happen until the door to the basement she was hiding in decayed and fell apart two centuries later.
- Geometric Magic: Magic circles, most commonly used on storage containers so that the potions within don't degrade.
- I Hate Past Me: Sieg is pretty disgusted with how he used to be before losing his Spirit Eye, and remains afraid of relapsing for much of the story. And after getting it restored, he marvels at the things he took for granted and reaffirms that the gift was completely squandered on his past self.
- I Know Your True Name: Making a pact with the ley lines requires giving the ley line your True Name.
- Magikarp Power: Mariela's alchemy training was actually extraordinarily difficult. Her master set up her "library" so that she had to completely memorize recipes, and moving up potion grades forced her to forgo any tool-based assistance to do everything solely with alchemy skills. While this slows her ability to learn new potions, it also makes her way better at making the potions she does know. Some of the things she learns to do are thought to be flat-out impossible by her contemporaries.
- Mundane Object Amazement: Mariela missed out on two centuries of technological advancement, and so can be fascinated by tools that are fairly common now but didn't exist when she went into stasis, like hand mixers. The locals think she's from a backwater village as a result.
- Mundane Solution: Making holy water require's an innocent maiden's hair. When told of that, the people who needed the holy water think some woman made an Important Haircut as a sacrifice to make it. In truth, Mariela found a neighborhood kid with a bad haircut and offered to fix it for her.
- Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: Before the Stampede, Mariela was only a modestly above average alchemist who was barely scraping by due to the fact that the region had more alchemists than it did bakers. After leaving suspended animation, she's literally the only alchemist in town, and the massive demand for healing potions for the labyrinth clearing forces cause her to make more money in a week than she used to in a year. The "normal" part though only refers to the extent of her available knowledge; she's actually a very talented, knowledgeable, and powerful alchemist, but her master's training methods involved locking each level of her "library" until she is able to make potions from the previous level without any tools, so she was locked at high grade potions for several volumes.
- Photographic Memory: Mariela's master had a spell that allowed her to induce perfect recall of a specific thing. She used it on her repeatedly to teach her the diagrams of magical circles. This saves her life - the suspended animation circle is very complex, and any mistakes in making it can have fatal side effects. The climax of the second book reveals that other alchemists tried to survive the Stampede the same way she did, but were killed by a faulty circle.
- Rags to Riches: In Mariela's day, alchemists were more common than bakers. The high supply of potions, combined with the fact that she was a newcomer into the business with no connections, meant that if she hadn't been able to gather ingredients from the forest for free, she'd have gone broke. In the modern era, the need to purge the dungeon has caused high demand for potions, and she is literally the only supplier in the region. The girl who once considered a five copper bottle of fruit juice to be an unnecessary luxury now has an income in the hundreds of golds.
- Really 700 Years Old: Thanks to having been in suspended animation, Mariela is 216 and looks 16.
- Sole Survivor: Mariela is the last alchemist of Endalsia after an event called the Stampede destroyed a lot of the kingdom and caused a dungeon to form that tainted the ley line nexus, making it impossible to train more.
- Stealth Mentor: Freyja. She firmly believes that the only limits are those that people place upon themselves, and a good portion of her guidance consists of saying the right things or creating the right environments for people to figure out how to maximize their own potential, often under the guise of playing around to make sure her erstwhile pupils can approach their training with a healthy mindset. The rest is from her dumping difficult tasks on people on short notice so that they have to get stronger in a hurry.
- Sympathetic Slave Owner: When Mariela, awakens from her 200-year-long sleep and has to adjust to living in a world that she's unfamiliar with. She makes it to the nearest town with the help of a caravan that happened to be transporting slaves. When she sees a severely injured slave about to be subjected to a Fate Worse than Death, she decides to buy him on impulse to save him. Although the slave, Siegmund, has endured a massive Break the Cutie process before meeting Mariela, thereby obeying all her commands, she treats him with kindness and compassion, from making food for him to making special healing potions to heal his many injuries, some of which he had sustained years ago and never got treatment for them. Mariela personally hates the idea of slavery, but knows there's not much she can do about it, and is at least happy to be able to help Siegmund and allow him to be his own person. Needless to say, Siegmund blossoms under her care and by the end of the first novel, he's much better off than he used to be, promising to stick by Mariela and protect her like a bodyguard, though she wants to see him as a friend.
