Ajax’s initial reaction to the floor was negative but that quickly changed as he looked towards the look on the elves' faces.

“What’s going on?” he asked as he saw the princess and Elara look gleefully towards the floor.

“Nothing.” Aranor said as they all put on a neutral expression.

“So this is how you do it.” Harold said as he let out a low whistle he quickly regretted because it caused him to take a deep breath.

“Do what?” even the prince was curious what Harold had pieced together.

Aranor, Elara and Arianwyn kept their neutral look on their faces but all of them turned towards Harold.

“Every merchant House has been wondering for years how the established elven households have such prosperous access to specific high quality plants.” Harold explained. “What was specific about it however was that it was mostly quick growing plants or collectable parts of older plants. They have been trying for years to get their spies to learn those secrets.”

Ajax quickly put together why Harold was aware of this, something this big would be of great importance in a political arena so of course House Silvertongue would be aware of it, the question was what could they get for it.

“What is it?” the prince asked, he was also aware of the secrets but he wasn’t all that invested in the crafting or procurement side of the nobles.

Darkclaw had the good sense to understand that this wasn’t something that would simply be handed out so he wasn’t surprised when the prince put up a privacy screen around all of them, the elves were included just to confirm Harold's hypothesis.

“They harvest anything with the decay attribute they come across in high dungeon floors and use it to rejuvenate a small garden where they can actually grow the higher end ingredients or just nurture some high end trees.” Harold laid out his theory. “Finding decay floors isn’t reliable but they would only need one twice a decade at most just to rejuvenate their gardens, if the floor is as plentiful as this one can be they can probably stretch it out for longer.”

“Wouldn’t someone have figured this part out if that was all there was to it?” Ajax asked.

“They probably have gardeners with specific skills tenting them.” Harold explained. “Without a large amount of fertilizer it would take a long time on incremental improvement to raise a garden like this while also raising the farmers and gardeners, everyone who has tried it was going for a quick version.”

“I remember that.” the prince exclaimed as he remembered being part of a ‘boring’ briefing regarding the subject. “They had some success with the first and second harvests but the garden lost its mana concentration soon after.”

After listening to the explanation Ajax couldn’t help but be a little mad at his own oversight of this. For years now he had been pumping a lot of his own mana into his garden by topping up the plants, infusing it into the ground and even releasing it into the air around them to increase the mana concentration but he had completely overlooked adding highly mana infused fertilizer.

“We should scour this floor then and see if we can get any results with this theory.” the prince said.

“It won’t do you that much good.” Arianwyn spoke for the first time since entering the floor. “The mana level here is too high to start with, trying it with this would just be a waste.”

“The statement is truthful but she’s trying to cover something with it.” Harold advised the prince, clearly his relation to House Silvertongue was paying dividends.

Thinking about the situation Ajax could see the problem they would have, it was the same problem he encountered every time he infused more mana in one area too quickly where the mana would burn out anything living in the area. While this discovery will help along his own gardens progress it will take time before he could use anything with mana levels equivalent to the low to mid nineties as they were on this floor.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“It won’t work for us because you have to slowly work up to the point they can handle this level of mana.” Ajax offered his insight.

“You’ve been trying this in your little farming plot?” The prince’s question moved the elves' stares from Harold to him, a bit of surprise briefly showing on Arianwyn and Elara’s faces.

“No, I was trying to get the same result without anything but regular fertilizer, this is what I was missing.” Ajax silently cursed his oversight. “It’s been really slow going and the few attempts I had in trying to speed things up set me back.”

“So it's worthless to us?” the prince asked.

“No.” Ajax’s answer quickly put a damper on the elves' happy thoughts. “We can still use what we take to grow some high end ingredients for one or two harvests, it won’t help us long term but it's still useful.”

“But…” Arianwyn started to talk but Aranor cut her off.

“What do you want for it?” Aranor asked instead, quickly picking up on Ajax’s plan.

“This is high quality, we can’t make best use of it but it's not worthless.” The prince also picked up on Ajax’s thoughts. “Since it's not a restricted resource however it belongs to us, well to the crown and Ajax since the delve spots are ours. You want to sell it to them, what for?”

“People delving this high up is pretty rare.” Ajax thought aloud. “With how restricted the dungeons are for high end delves I doubt there are more than one decay floor a month even being spawned in a kingdom at this level range. Since this is still kept secret I would guess a lot of those go to waste since the people who get them don’t know what to collect.”

Ajax could also feel the satisfaction at learning of this, with his ability to determine the floor types and lower floors with any decent amount of Decay mana on them could be something he could collect from.

“Let's trade whatever they can collect on this floor.” Ajax offered. “In exchange they can give us five times the amount in less mana infused fertilizer they have stockpiled, the best we can use.”

“Deal.” “Ten times.” Both Aranor and the prince spoke at the same time. A staredown starting between the two.

“Six times.” Aranor said and at this moment Ajax deeply wished that Anna was still there with them.

“Nine.” the prince rebutted.

“Seven.”

“Eight.”

“Seven.” Aranor repeated and Ajax could see the prince concentrating, neither of them were merchants but clearly the both had at least one merchant skill they had trained at least a little, unfortunately for Ajax Aranor was almost twice the princes age and he had traded far more.

“Seven.” The prince agreed in defeat as his own skills lost out.

“You need to start with level forty stuff, any higher and it won’t work.” the princess said.

“I need something higher.” Ajax said with a smile. “My garden is already above standard, I am thinking level fifty should do.”

“That wasn’t…” Arianwyn started to say only to stop as she went over the deal one more time. The terms were they would be traded for the best that Ajax can use, since Ajax could use higher quality they would need to provide that higher quality.

“What will you be doing while they scour the floor to collect all of it?” the prince asked since it would probably take Aranor a while to do that.

“I’ll get the miniboss out of the way first but after that I will use as much as I can for alchemy. I might be able to make something that should help Harold kill something on this floor as well.” Ajax said.

Harold looked excited at the prospect, fifteen levels was a lot for him to jump considering he wasn’t quite as much of an outlier in terms of combat as Lexi, Benedict, Xavier or Anna. Not to mention he hadn’t delved the same number of floors relative to his level as them either.

Despite the large Decay presence on the floor the main element was still Plant mana. More than that Ajax found that the plants on this floor seemed to have a much sturdier base and they could take more of his Life mana before they were in danger of disintegrating.

“Fuck!” Ajax exclaimed as he dived for cover putting a large tree between himself and the cauldron he was working with, an instant later to cauldon detonated like a grenade throwing shrapnel everywhere.

“What are you doing?” the prince asked as he inspected the blast site to see that it was one of Ajax’s cauldrons specifically for explosive ingredients.

“Overfilled the explosive ingredients.” Ajax said as he came out from behind the tree. “Turns out even if the ingredient can handle that much mana without disintegrating it becomes too unstable to work with.”

“What were you making?” Harold asked curiously.

“Herbicide.” Ajax answered. “Since it’s made from this floor the dungeon should have no issues with you using it to kill a plant miniboss.”

“Did you make anything successful?” Harold regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth but he was a little disappointed in the failure.

“Oh yeah.” Ajax said without even noticing the unintended criticism in his excitement as he pulled out two flasks. “ This is a physical booster, it will grant about a 10% increase in physical stats for five minutes.”

“That’s almost twice as good as the ones I have.” Harold exclaimed and even the prince looked interested since that was the same effect as some of the best boosting potions the royal family had access to.

“Yeah but the backlash is twice as bad, lasts twice as long and it also causes diarrhea for the duration.” Ajax said. “This other one is a quick acting short term paralytic. Takes about two seconds after the poison is applied to fully paralyze something for five seconds. Subsequent applications take longer to take effect but the paralysis period should be consistent up to four applications.”

“That should be enough time for me to kill something.” Harold said with glee.

“It won’t work on plants, only on flesh sadly, and it’s for something as large as an adult human needing a larger dose for something bigger.” Ajax said. “I’ll give the herbicide another go, I know where I went wrong.” with that Ajax took out his second cheaper cauldron and got to work, Harold quickly backing off to a respectful distance just in case it exploded again.