by Yuri Ajin
“What for?” Yoh frowned.
“I’m going to open an alchemy shop,” Kai admitted.
“I see... Well, you can count on me to get you what you need. Are you still staying at Elea’s house?” After Kai nodded, Yoh continued, “In that case, I’ll come over tomorrow. We could go check out a few places, and you can rent the one you like. And yes, you don’t need to pay for this. Consider it a gift of gratitude for listening to me.” Yoh smiled. “Though your gaze was cold as always, I didn’t see contempt in it... Thank you...”
Kai wasn’t going to refuse.
“Thank you as well,” he said, and then added, “But that’s not all. I’d like to offer you a job. I’ll need an assistant.”
***
As promised, Yoh took Kai to find what he needed the next day. In the end, Kai chose a small two-story house near the center, which had already been used as an alchemy shop in the past and which had its own workshop. The previous owner went bankrupt when a bunch of cheap alchemy from the Fifth Faction appeared on the Abode’s market.
It cost Kai twenty-five Coins for a three-month lease. He paid five more to renovate the building, which was damaged due to the passage of time and at the hands of its violent previous residents. The Ground floor wasn’t officially considered part of the Abode as it was built by students, so they weren’t punished for destroying it.
Kai had to pay five more Coins to obtain a one-year merchant license from the local mayor’s office. No matter how ridiculous that sounded, there was a proper functioning government on the Ground floor, created by the students a long time ago.
After getting everything done on the Ground floor, Kai took Yoh with him to the first floor. He needed the redhead to show him the locations of all the pavilions, including the Trade Pavilion, which he wanted to visit that day.
Having studied Rune’Tan’s scrolls, Kai drew up a rough plan for further action. First of all, he needed to become stronger to have at least something to oppose the factions with and to join the Independence. For that, he needed a lot of money to keep visiting the pavilions on the Ground floor. And he could earn them with the help of alchemy.
So, he decided to open his shop, which would simultaneously allow him to practice the craft and make money. Before starting a business, he had to find the necessary ingredients and decide what kind of alchemy he’d work with.
He could’ve just taken orders from customers, but that was a bad strategy. He didn’t have any reputation here at all, let alone as an alchemist, so it was unlikely that crowds of customers would immediately run to him.
So he decided not to rush, but to allocate a week for practice in order to see which recipes were easier and more profitable to make. The alchemy he learned from Rune’Tan was very different from the local one.
Yoh, who agreed to work for him, kept tabs on the needs of the Abode’s students, particularly focusing on the residents of the Ground floor.
For starters, Kai bought ingredients for the most basic of products to practice with them. He spent another thirty-two Coins, after which he only had twenty-eight left.
***
A week passed by quickly. Day after day, Kai made various alchemical items, honing his skills. And since he had been extremely productive and devoted all of his time to alchemy, he became good in no time. The main factors contributing to it were, as predicted, his photographic memory, energy vision, and perfect energy control.
Ultimately, all this allowed him to create a pill with a High-quality cleansing process on his first attempt, which even experienced alchemists rarely achieved. Everything he made, he sold at the Trade Pavilion on the first floor. He didn’t see any point in offering such a High-quality product to residents of the Ground floor. However, the Trade Pavilion was willing to buy only drugs with High or Perfect purification. The pavilions weren’t controlled by factions, but by the Abode itself. The great artifact had its own criteria. It didn’t care about the fact that Kai was a newcomer and a zero from the Ground floor; therefore, he turned a good profit.
He earned about four hundred Coins and spent all of them on new resources. By then, he already knew what goods he could sell to Ground floor residents.
He could still sell rare drugs to the Trade Pavilion, as he had originally planned, but he realized that the Abode was rapidly decreasing the prices as the number of goods increased without the demand growing. It was one thing to sell one rare and unusual pill, and another to sell a lot of them.
In the end, he found what everyone always needed — supplements that destroyed impurities.
As soon as he saw the local pills and potions with his energy vision, he found out that the cheap alchemy with which the Fifth Faction flooded the Ground floor market had a huge amount of impurities that negatively affected the body and the further development of those who used them.
At first, Kai found this very strange, until he realized that any artifact used for checking the quality of pills showed only Medium to High quality and that it was his energy vision that allowed him to see the real quality of the drugs.
Thus, he concluded that faulty remedies were deliberately being sold to the Ground floor. The leader of the Fifth Faction or one of their close servants found a recipe with which they could make a drug appear to be of High quality, thereby deceiving the verification artifact. Also, the Trade Pavilions on the upper floors didn’t accept their goods, since they could determine their actual quality.
For the past three years, all the inhabitants of the Ground floor were being poisoned, which, in turn, impeded their cultivation process and, in some cases, halted it.
And that was what Kai decided to capitalize on. But selling only Purification Potions wasn’t enough as it wasn’t that profitable. So he was going to use a different method.
Over the past week, he had perfected his purification method, using Yin to eliminate impurities and Cold Void to protect the essence of the ingredients. However, he wasn’t going to stop there. He also wanted to include Yang in the process.
He had his Yang Concentration filled with the heart energy of the creature he had found deep in Starks’ mines. Studying it under the effect of the Ultimate Focus, energy vision, Body Gates, and Favorite of the Forces ability, he could learn the Yang concept with incredible speed. In just a week, he gained initial understanding of the second layer, which allowed him to start working with Yang.
He already knew that this concept, in contrast to Yin, had two properties — strengthening and transformation. But he couldn’t just use that knowledge before he strengthened and deepened his understanding.
First, he focused on the transformation. Thanks to it, he could transform one type of energy into another under certain circumstances. For example, having the essence of a Spirit Plant with the Fire attribute, he could transform his ki and Forces of Sword into the energy and Forces of Fire, the strength of which would depend on the strength of the Plant.
This ability had one drawback. The transformation was very exhausting, so he couldn’t use it non-stop.
Nevertheless, he found a purpose for it. Kai decided to transform the energy in the final scheme of creating alchemical concoctions. With its help, there would be no risk of lacking a certain kind of energy to create the desired weaving.
With the help of transformation, he learned to transform Azure Crystals into liquid, creating perfect Heavenly Water without the use of the special Fire technique.
But that wasn’t all. He realized that if he saturated the Heavenly Water with Yang particles, then it’d turn into Emerald Water, like the one that was mined in the Abyss under Starks’ city, and use it to create even better products.
Unfortunately, not everything was as rosy as it might’ve seemed. Kai realized that he could fill just one-hundredth of a part of a liquid with Yang particles, which was enough for a tiny potion. After that, his soul began to experience unbearable fatigue.
But he didn’t despair. Though he was unable to create mass amounts of Emerald Water for sale, he
was going to make at least one serving for the Heavenly Flask potion he needed for his breakthrough.
Having finished practicing the transformation property, he moved on to the second — strengthening. At first, he believed that it could only strengthen non-destructive elements (Cold Void, Earth, Water, Wind, and so on), but he eventually realized that he was wrong. The Yang concept wasn’t suitable only for elements. As it turned out, it could strengthen the very essence of ingredients. Kai took advantage of that and managed to triple the effectiveness of his drugs. Such an increase seemed incredible, which made even the System pay attention to it.
The Small Salvation Pill turned into an Enhanced Small Salvation Pill. A similar change occurred with all the other recipes that Kai had strengthened with the Yang concept.
Ultimately, both of these properties allowed him to create the perfect product.
[Enhanced Clear Body Potion]
Rank: Gold
Quality: Peak
Removes most of the alchemical impurities from the body, thereby restoring the physical strength and speed of development suppressed by the impurities. The final result depends on the number of impurities and their severity.
This potion can only be used by initial-level Elementalists and cultivators of lower levels.
Something similar to this potion existed, but it cost more than one hundred Coins and it was sold on the third floor. As for the outside world, only aristocrats and brilliant students of the strongest sects could afford such a luxury.
Kai was able to create this potion for a ridiculously low price — only five and a half Coins.
And since almost all the dwellers of the Ground level needed such a potion, it wasn’t surprising that Kai’s alchemical shop instantly took off.
Chapter 11
THE ALCHEMY SHOP 2
It was the fifth day after the start of Enhanced Clear Body Potion’s sales, and Kai’s alchemy shop was full of customers. Yoh, five of his friends whom Kai had also hired, and Shacks, who was done with his treatment but was still in recovery, worked tirelessly, without a second to take a breather. All of them had to serve the endless stream of customers coming in and out of the store.
While they worked, Kai was on the second floor of his workshop, cooking the potion for days on end.
There were twelve Cubes in his workshop that he used simultaneously. He was, perhaps, the only person who could be manufacturing twelve potions at the same time as there was little chance that there was anyone else who could control any energy. Thanks to that, he could saturate Cubes with his ki without touching them, and then remotely control the cooking process. Even Rune’Tan found it difficult to accept what was happening, although he was aware of Kai’s abilities.
But that wasn’t all Kai had to do.
He had to summon the required ingredients from his Ring, send them to a huge tank for cleansing, use Yin to destroy impurities, and Cold Void to protect the essence, collect the perfectly refined essences, divide them into twelve servings, place them in empty Cubes, take control of the artifacts, start weaving according to the recipe — twelve weavings at once — finish them, add the necessary energy he had previously transformed with Yang, secure the created scheme, saturating it with his energy, strengthen it with Yang particles, roll everything into a ball, but without creating a pill, activate the supply of Heavenly Water from containers prepared in advance, place the created weave in the liquid, switch the infusion mechanism on, send a wave of Forces of Space to teleport the sealed vials of the finished potion to his Ring, and repeat...
It took him about twenty minutes to cook twelve portions. Slowly but surely, he was getting tired, so he had to reduce the number of Cubes twice. First to ten, and then to eight.
After about four hours, he felt like a squeezed lemon and could barely support more than four artifacts. His body was fine, but mentally, he couldn’t handle it any longer. In the end, he turned off two more Cubes, deciding to finally work with only one pair.
Things were going almost too well. Five days ago, he had no idea that things would turn out like this.
The day before launching the product, Yoh, at Kai’s request, sold the Enhanced Clear Body Potion to many of his acquaintances for only six Coins, which was almost half the actual price. All to create a customer base and spread the word.
Yoh had no doubt that it’d work because he was the first to try the potion. Once he drank it, he felt the effect the very next moment. His body was instantly filled with strength and lightness, and the oppressive feeling that had haunted him for the last three years and seemed to have slowed down his development was gone. He was overtaken with joy. When he calmed down, he remembered to check the System messages. After removing all impurities from his body, his stats slightly increased.
About two dozen people came to the shop on the first day. Most of them were those who had already experienced the effects of the potion and decided to come for a second dose. The rest were newcomers who had heard about the miracle-working alchemy from other students.
On the second day, almost a hundred customers showed up. And the next day as well. On the fourth day, a long queue had formed in front of the shop from the very morning. The word-of-mouth spread quickly and the Ground floor bulletin had an article about the miracle potion. Thanks to Yoh and some money, of course.
On top of that, Kai didn’t disclose the exact number of servings needed to remove absolutely all impurities. When customers asked about it, they were told to drink the potion at least three times, but that it all depended on the number of impurities in their body.
Meanwhile, Kai continued to work with only two Cubes. During one such session, there was a knock on the door.
“Come in,” he said wearily. “Are you out of potions again?”
“Yes, they’re already running out,” Shacks replied. “But that’s not why I came. You have visitors.”
“Visitors? Someone wants to see me? Tell them I’m busy.”
“These aren’t ordinary customers. Haven’t you noticed?”
Only after he said that did Kai realize what had been worrying him for the last couple of minutes. Listening, he nodded. The chatter coming from downstairs became almost inaudible. It was strange.
“Tell them I’ll be down in ten minutes. I’ll finish these potions and call it a day. Sell what’s left and close up. We’ll probably be open three or four hours tomorrow. How many potions have we sold by now?”
Shacks nodded.
“I don’t know for sure. I’m more of a guard than a seller.” He smiled. “But if I remember correctly, each customer bought one or two vials. And there were about eight hundred in total.”
Kai quickly did the math. Considering that one bottle cost ten Coins, the sum was huge. At least by the standards of the Ground floor.
After finishing the last two potions, he put all the tools in the Ring, cleaned himself up, and went downstairs.
The first floor of his shop was divided into two areas — a customer’s hall with six sales counters, and a small waiting room. The guests — two elves — were there now. One was dark-haired and the other blond. Both looked rather menacing.
Glancing at Kai, the two only slightly raised their eyebrows in surprise, but otherwise, their calm and haughty looks remained unchanged. They didn’t even bother to get up or even respectfully greet the shop owner.
They occupied the only two chairs in the room. And, like a cherry on top, both of his guests were smiling slightly. Silent, they were expecting to enjoy Kai’s struggle to find a seat.
But he managed to surprise them by fashioning himself a throne made of ice.
Crossing his legs and resting his head on his fist, he nodded in greeting.
“What can I do for you, gentlemen? Also, if you’d be so kind as to tell me where the rest of my customers went.”
The elves looked at each other. The power they had just felt would’ve been normal for a mid-level Exorcist, but it was unusual for mortals.
“We’re
here to discuss a possible cooperation,” one of them replied. “As for your customers, we politely asked them to come back tomorrow.”
“May I know who you are?”
“Don’t you recognize us?”
The surprised elf stroked his chin with his left hand, allowing Kai to see the mark with the number eight-eight-four-one. The second guest did the same, also revealing his ranking — eight-nine-zero-one.
No faction mark. They’re members of the Independence.
“No clue.” Kai shrugged. “I’ve arrived at the Abode only recently.”
The two exchanged glances again.
“I’m Kasox Notlin,” the dark-haired elf, who had been silent, introduced himself.
“Ephlix Tarde,” the blond added, putting his hand to his chest. “As I said, we’re here to discuss our possible cooperation.”
“And with whom exactly am I supposed to cooperate?”
“We’re the leaders of the strongest independent group of seekers on the first floors. Our brotherhood is called Cloud Anarchists. My brothers and I go into anomaly zones, where we hunt monsters, collect rare plants, and look for useful things left after the ancient war. Several alchemists and other masters already work for us, but we’d be delighted to have a talent like you join our ranks.”
“So, you’re offering me to start working for you?”
“Yes.” Ephlix nodded. Kasox, meanwhile, remained silent. “I won’t beat around the bush. If you agree to sign a contract with us, we can guarantee you not only a fairly high income, access to rare techniques and other resources, but also the opportunity to enter the List of Ten Thousand without joining a faction.”
If Yoh, or any other resident of the Ground floor who knew about the Cloud Anarchists, were in Kai’s shoes now, they’d immediately agree. Many dreamed of joining their team. But only a few were honored with this opportunity.
“Well, since that’s all you have to offer, I refuse,” Kai replied without batting an eye.
“Are you sure?” Ephlix asked gloomily, the warmth in his voice gone. “You’ll be able to get out of this shithole if you work with us. You could move to a higher floor. Get access to high-level pavilions. Make it to the List of Thousand! Isn’t that what all the students of the Abode dream about? Are you ready to pass up on such an opportunity because of pride? Or do you actually want to join one of the factions? They treat their servants like trash. They use them as nothing more than pawns. There’s no such thing in our brotherhood. All members of the Cloud Anarchists are followers of the true path and are considered to be equal, and if you don’t believe me, just keep in mind that our cooperation will be regulated by a spirit contract.” Ephlix smiled. “So, I’ll repeat my question. Are you sure?”