A New Star Chapter 102 (Patreon)

Xera

I was back in my lab after meeting with my father and arranging things, and now I had both the kind of work I enjoyed, and plenty that I didn’t, piled up. I had alchemy to do, and research to conduct, the first of which was pleasant, if tedious at times, and the second of which was a bit dull but could produce interesting results. The other thing I had to do was paperwork, direction of the staff, and making certain arrangements; all the tiresome business of being in charge, even if some work could be delegated. While my father had said that he would take care of things, it was not going to be a priority on his to-do list, and I would have to follow up and make sure things were running smoothly.

The first thing I had to do was get some of these ingredients sorted and make use of some of the new plants I had gathered on my trip. Some of these I was going to use for medicinal baths or body reinforcement, but the rest I would be making into pills and potions. I didn’t actually make all that many potions these days, as they weren’t really all that necessary for me. I would use one or two potions while I was training during a given week, depending on what was happening, and I would use another one or two when I was in the Wilds. Considering I could make ten good potions in a batch, there just wasn’t all that much need for the volume, though that might be changing.

As I had increased my grade in alchemy, everything I made became more potent and efficient. Whereas most people had dismissed alchemy’s use, outside of affinity pills, which were complex to produce even for simply affinities and very expensive, a part of that had to do with the decline of the profession overall. People who were used to having multiple healers available at any time, or their own healing or regenerative affinities, didn’t really care much about some simple, A-grade healing potion. However, that sentiment would change quite a bit when considering something like a K-grade potion of endless rejuvenation, something that could practically restore someone on the brink of death and would linger in their blood for hours, continuing to heal and restore them, though at a lesser rate. Even someone with a K-grade healing affinity would be hard-pressed to match the power of that kind of potion, but I was still studying such things.

For now, it would be pills and elixirs that I would focus on, though mainly pills. Elixirs were too technical and complicated to make just at a whim, and I had in mind just a few specific ones for a few specific purposes. The pills were a challenging puzzle, but one I was more comfortable with and able to much more readily handle. They also were the only thing that had remained consistent in demand over time, especially by the wealthy elites of society. My theory on that was, since pills tended to last quite a long time, and preserving jars and boxes further extended that lifespan to a great degree, pills had never really fully disappeared, not from high society. People either had stashes of them, or found them in old ruins or abandoned bases, or they even appeared as a dungeon reward for clearing a particular type or style of dungeon. Pills had thus remained popular, to a degree, and having an alchemist pop up that could brew very powerful pills just fanned the already existing market flames.

Most of what I made was still affinity grade boosters, which were a great source of profit, even if it was a bit too time-consuming for my liking. People would need dozens, if not hundreds, of the pills to advance a single affinity a single rank, and concocting all those pills, even when done in batches and done rapidly thanks to my experience, took a lot of time. Still, they sold well, extremely well, to the point where that was about all Pietr pestered me over these days, constantly asking about new batches of affinity boosting pills in specific. He got what I made and would be happy with it, especially as I was pretty sure I could kick both his and his enforcers’ asses all at the same time.

The real trick I was working on with the pills was mass production, and that was only going to be viable in producing pills a couple grades lower than my current skill. The mass processing techniques for pills, many of which were lost, relied mainly on the alchemist having a superior skill and power, meaning it was used by a higher grade alchemist with a high grade fire or similar affinity, to make lower grade pills. I was working on a method to produce batches of a hundred and fifty pills at a time, taking about ten minutes in total to make, though that didn’t include a little of the cleanup. Overall, I could do four of those runs an hour, maybe five if I was really going fast and had no distractions, which would be a miracle in this house, but that was still six hundred or more pills an hour.

The affinity being low didn’t matter, either, as a lot of people were buying pills for children, which I understand sounds rather bad when phrased that way, but these were rich elites and nobles buying pills for their eight, nine, ten, and eleven-year-old children, those who had started to express one or more affinities but were at beginning rank. Giving the kid a boost in one of their big three, and the one they favored the most, could be a big mental boost, and also a big reward or enticement. I thought it was bit silly to get the kids using something I considered mostly a shortcut so early, but they were paying customers, well paying customers, and I was in need of money.

A lot of the ingredients I used and things I needed for my work and advancement cost money, quite a bit of money, and then there was the issue of Pietr and Robin’s cuts. On top of that, I had to make a lot of purchases soon for both alchemy and outfitting for the merry little band of adventurers I was still pulling together, and I would need a lot of specialized gear for those who were doing spy work, mainly the twins and Lester for now, but I needed a few more agents. Someone with some experience and skill wouldn’t be amiss, but older agents didn’t exactly grow on trees, nor were their loyalties so easy to turn or earn.

That was a problem for another day, and I was currently working on batch refining. If I could get this down, I could produce a few thousands, even ten thousand or more, pills in just one days, which wouldn’t be enough to make Pietr happy, but it would stop his whining for a bit. If I slipped down there after a week with eighty-thousand B-grade and C-grade pills, or even more, as the lower grades were even easier for me to batch process, even his network would take quite some time to absorb all of that. I knew what he was charging for the pills, which was obscene, but the nobles had wealth saved up from centuries, if not millennia, of adventuring and business ownership. Some of the families just in the rural areas had the kind of wealth that could beggar emperors on my old home world, so I was worried about anybody that was buying having their pocketbooks run dry any time soon.

After the batch processing, I was going to work on a medicinal bath. I needed to keep pushing my body affinity, and there were only two ways I could really do it right now. Working out and sparring both didn’t really get the job done any more; I had advanced too much, and had too high of a tier, for simple efforts like those to yield much, if any, result at this stage. I needed to be in real, challenging combat, the kind I had just engaged in, at least to an extent, when I had been in the mountains in the Wilds. Battle was the best, at least for myself; there were certainly people who could advance through other means, including things like meditation, but that wasn’t going to work, not for my body affinity, at any rate.

The other method was what I was gathering the ingredients for right now, which was to submerge myself in a medicinal bath and absorb all the energies from it into my body. That method was time-consuming, expensive, painful, and slow. I had to stay in the bath a while, which burnt away valuable time, I had to get expensive reagents and ingredients, which cost vast fortunes, given what I needed, and it took multiple baths to improve my physique by any noticeable amount. The pain was annoying, but I knew pain, quite intimately, and a little stinging and biting and burning didn’t really bother me at all these days.

The current bath I was working on was an effort to try to push my body up to I-grade, as I twas still sitting at H-grade, though I had put a lot of work into. I felt that I was pretty close to pushing it over the line, and that was a big deal. Every grade increase in a body affinity, any affinity, really, was a big increase. They weren’t exactly exponential, but the curve started to get steeper in the middle letters and got very steep at the higher letters. I knew, for instance, that I had still only seen a fraction of what the Count or the Silver Lady could do, considering they were at Y-rank and Z-rank, respectively. I was currently at the point where every grade increase was a very noticeable jump, and that was especially true for my body affinity. Having a tier seven body affinity, it was a nightmare to improve, but every new grade increased my power dramatically. A jump from H-grade to I-grade for me was more like the jump from R-grade to S-grade for most other people. Even a tier three body wasn’t close to the kind of strength I had, though it wasn’t like I was a whole different classification of being because of my tier. Not at seven, at any rate.

The frustrating part of this bath, and all baths I was doing at this point for myself, was that it wasn’t just a simple process of throwing herbs and beast parts in water or neutral spirit and stirring them, possibly heating them. Oh no, not for my body. Instead, it was a long and complex process of brewing potions, concocting pills, and then a very complex process of mixing everything together, making sure to pay careful attention to the timings, temperatures, and stirring the liquid, which was inconvenient to do with a tub versus a beaker. It just added all that much more time to the process, but it had to be done, and I spent an entire day just to prepare all the components.

I went down to town and dropped a couple crates full of pills that I had concocted with the batch method at Pietr’s before actually using my bath, rolling my eyes at the gleam of avarice in his eyes when he saw all the fresh product I had for him. I left him to it, as he would coordinate with Robin and get everything where it needed to know, no questions asked. I would almost say I would make honorable businesspeople of them yet, but didn’t hold out much hope for either. Pietr was a thug and Robin was a shifty thief; neither of them were really the legitimate type. Then again, with some of the corporate politics I had witnessed, and had to quash at times, in my last life, they would fit right in to a lot of boardrooms, proverbial warts and all.

I dismissed their proverbial warts from my mind after my delivery, picking up some of the coin Pietr had for me. I didn’t need it right this moment, but I was low and needed a refill for the purse before I did any more shopping, some of which would be needed for my young initiates that were soon to join me. I had delayed there long enough, and now it was time for a bath, a distinctly long and unpleasant bath, one that would, ironically enough, make me smell worse after taking it. The solutions I was using were quite caustic and rather foul of odor, making me glad that I had air venting in the lab that sucked the air into a discharge vent outside. People who walked by the easter side of the manor might get a face full of odd and bad stench for the next two hours, but they could tough it out.

The bath wasn’t any worse than any of the others, thousands of them, if my last life were included, but it was certainly never a pleasant experience. Nor was it one that I could just tune out, either, as I had to focus on the effect of the medicine and what it was doing. Since I was medicine creator in this life and not just consumer, I needed detailed notes on the efficacy, time, interaction with the body, etc. I also needed to stay focused to make sure the medicine got where it needed to go and the improvements happened as they should. It was a long and painful two hours of mostly floating underwater in a tub and trying to both focus on what I was doing and forget about what was happening at the same time.

Eventually, I was out and washed off, which was perfect timing, as a guest had arrived for me. Captain Mina, not the guest herself but playing messenger today, apparently, came to get me just after I finished drying and dressing. I cleaned up the lab and followed the minotaur through the halls to my parents office, where the guest was sitting with my father. I had thought that it might be one of my people, arrived a few days early, but that wasn’t the case at all. Instead, I found someone I had seen just recently in the capital, but who hadn’t been around all that much over the last year or so sitting and sipping tea.

“I say, you’ve got a certain air about you,” the Count said to me, waving his teacup at me.

“As do you, but I have long grown used to the scent of impending death,” I retorted, nodding to Father as I took my seat.

“Is that any way to great your favorite teacher,” the Count asked a little churlishly.

“My favorite teacher? Where?” I replied, carefully scanning the room.

“Enough,” My father cut in. “We have matters to discuss.”

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