Chemtech

Chemtech is Zaun's answer to Piltover's Hextech, a cruder but no less potent form of chemical augmentation that fuses machinery with volatile compounds to push the limits of biology. It arose in the undercity because ordinary Zaunites had little access to Hextech crystals, forcing inventors to draw power from chemistry instead. The city's chem-barons funded ever more dangerous experiments on a desperate population, and the toxic runoff thickened into the Gray, the chemical haze that hangs over the undercity. The technology excels at reshaping living things, granting superhuman strength, resilience, and regeneration, though its effects are unstable and often irreversible, carrying side effects of mutation, madness, addiction, and death. Singed pushed chemical augmentation past every ethical limit, and Warwick's transformation shows how completely it can remake a person. Twitch and Dr. Mundo were warped by constant exposure to Zaun's toxins, while Zac was born from a toxic spill and grew from primordial ooze into a thinking being. Chemtech is inseparable from the chem-barons who profit by it. Saito Takeda funded alchymists seeking a fighter who could shrug off mortal wounds, the experiments that produced Zac. Renata Glasc inherited her parents' refined chemtech formula, meant to extend the lives of the dying but plagued by side effects, and built the empire of Glasc Industries on it. In the chemtech mines beneath the city, barons like Voss worked prisoners such as Urgot until a ruptured chemtech vein tore the Dredge open. Beyond Zaun, chemtech is feared: Piltover bans it from its university to keep its science unsullied. Renata has spent years persuading wealthy Piltovans that chemtech can be beautiful rather than ugly, even as she seeds her products with her parents' formula, side effects and all. Yet as Ekko's story insists, the undercity's greatest resource is not chemtech or hextech, but the determined people who refuse to let their circumstances define them.