From the Memoirs of General Haarland:

As a young recruit, essence practice was a big part of daily routines as learning to fight or become as fit as possible. I always remember our old drill sergeant, Kane, once went off on a lecture while forcing us to run around the parade ground in the rain after one of my fellow cadets unwisely asked why we spent so much time ‘messing around’ with our essences.

Kane ran and yelled at the same time which was impressive. But what he said has stuck with me all these years, which is almost as impressive.

“You need to work on building your essence more than any other skill! It doesn’t matter if you can use any weapon or kill with your bare hands, if you run into a more experienced essence user, you are at a disadvantage and will probably end up dead! So all of my cadets will work on their essence use every single day until they are as proficient with their essences as any other skill!”

He continued to jog on the spot in the pouring rain as we all fell in heaps on the muddy ground. “When you use your essence, you build it up just like using a muscle to build up strength in it! For example, I am an Air essence user and I’m shit at a lot of spell casting but because I use my essence all of the time, I rarely need to breathe! Try your hardest to drown me - you’ll fail! Every essence can enhance your body, such as metal making you more resilient while electricity makes your reactions better.”

“Plus, there’s no shortcut and there’s no way you are going to graduate if you are crap at using your essence!”

Needless to say, I graduated and my essence skills were within the top 5 in my class. To this day, I still work with my essence a little each day. Or I hear Sergeant Kane yelling in my sleep…

----------------------------------------

Jake stood in the centre of the store, his handwritten notes in one hand, scratching his head. He had a list of potions that he thought could potentially help them that night but now he needed to make them and he wasn’t really sure where to start. He hadn’t really gotten too far with his inventory on his first night and now he really didn’t know where everything was.

Drak was in the workshop, setting up some of the equipment they would need. So rather than disturb him, Jake started to go through the different cupboards and shelves in the store to see what they had and what he could make with it.

Fifteen minutes later, one thing was clear. There was a ton of dust but not a lot of actual ingredients in the store. And what he had found was virtually useless because it had been sitting around too long.

Drak had mentioned that restocking the store was something that had been neglected a bit since his father had died. But what Jake was seeing were signs that the store hadn’t been fully stocked in a lot longer than that, probably a while before Drak’s dad had died.

Admitting defeat, Jake headed back to the workshop to see if there was somewhere else that he could look for what he needed. Maybe there was another area where most of the stock was kept?

He walked into the workshop to see his partner trying diligently to fit together a measuring device - the wrong way around. “That’s upside down,” Jake stated, frowning at the Dragonkin.

Drak gave a laugh. “I know, I was just messing around!”

Jake glanced around the workshop and saw none of the equipment he had requested was assembled and ready to use. Instead, Drak seemed to have become stuck on putting together something that a first-year alchemy student would be able to do with their eyes closed.

“What’s going on here?” he asked, feeling baffled. “It’s not like you have no clue what you are doing!”

Drak gave him a guilty look. “Here’s the thing Jake: I don’t. It’s been about two years since I last made a potion. Well, there was that time about eighteen months when I tried…but never mind, that’s not relevant right now.”

“What?” Jake exclaimed, shocked. “You run an alchemist store!”

Drak shrugged. “Technically, my Dad ran it, I just assisted him.”

“Assisted him with what?” Jake asked.

“Customer service?” Drak replied. “You know, dealing with the customers, getting the orders in, making sure people were happy with what they bought. Dad did the actual alchemy.”

“But I thought you trained?” Jake continued.

“I did,” Drak replied. “I just wasn’t any good at it.”

Jake sat down heavily on one of the chairs in the workshop, and realisation dawned on him. “And that’s why you needed me.”

“You’ve always been the skilled one,” Drak said with a shrug. “I know my own strengths but also know what I’m not so good at.”

“That might be one of your best understatements,” Jake snapped. “You’re an alchemist who can’t make potions. With a store selling stuff, you can’t make it. How have you kept the business since your Dad died?”

“Dad was very frugal,” Drak replied. “And so am I if I need to. I just stretched the gold out that he left me so I could manage until you were here and we could get things moving again.”

Jake ran his hand through his hair. “You should have told me before I came here.”

“Would you have still come?” Drak asked. “I couldn’t take that chance.”

“No more bullshit,” Jake said firmly. “From now on, you level with me about everything. No more edited stories, missing parts of the tale or almost lies. Agreed?”

Drak nodded solemnly. “I promise. Complete honesty. So what do you need to make these potions, because I know a few people?”

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

----------------------------------------

An hour later, Jake popped his head up from under the counter where he was sorting their few ingredients.

Drak and Silt came into the store with a crate that Drak placed on the counter in front of Jake with a triumphant smile.

“Here we go,” he said, gesturing to it.

“You got what I asked for?” Jake requested, moving to open it.

“Sort of,” Drak replied.

Jake hesitated and stared at the Dragonkin. “Sort of?”

“Well, you asked for Spurn root, Gooth lily, Allenbreath and Milhorn. That was for a regeneration potion, one for body enhancement, a sleeping draught and a low light vision potion,” Drak said.

“That’s right, you got all of those things?”

Silt gave a little cough from the front of the store.

“Well, no,” Drak replied. “But we got some other stuff that should do the same job.”

Jake glanced from Drak to Silt feeling like maybe this wasn’t a good idea to open the crate if he wanted to avoid murdering someone. But Drak’s cheerful expression drove him to open the box.

He studied the contents for a moment. “You know all of this stuff is more expensive and harder to get than the things I asked for?” he asked, just managing to keep his tone level.

“Well, I thought that if the stuff you asked for was cheap, the better quality ingredients would make even better potions!” Drak announced proudly.

Another cough/laugh from Silt who was now diligently studying an empty ingredients cabinet at the front of the store.

“It doesn’t work like that,” Jake said with a sigh. “Spending more money doesn’t mean the stuff is better. It might not even do exactly what I need. Let me take a look at my potion notes.”

“You can still make something with them though, can’t you?” Drak said, looking a little worried.

“He can,” Silt said, joining them at the counter. “He just needs to rethink what he can do based on what he has. He’s smart, he’ll figure it out.”

Jake gave her a glare but headed back to the workshop and the potion books for some research.

Half an hour later, Jake had four ingredients in front of him on the worktop and a few ideas on what to do. He had backsap, a solar eye, wyvern blood and Blake moth wings. He also had a few items from the inventory.

“So what’s the plan?” Drak asked.

Jake sighed. “Well it is a bit different to what I had in mind but here’s what I’m thinking. Backsap is used to create a binding potion that was normally used in construction projects. But we could use it to slow people down. They might be in a bit of a mess when they finally get free but let’s not worry about that for now.

“Okay, sounds workable,” Silt said, nodding.

“The solar eye, well, that one isn’t going into a potion as such. But it is used as a heat vision for cooking. It tells you how warm something is and chefs use it to see if their food is cooked,” Jake continued. “Wyvern blood is a natural beast repellent, not the strongest, but we can maybe scare some guard dogs away with it. Lastly, Blake moth wings are used to reduce the weight of an object.”

“So you can use all of the ingredients?” Drak said with a bit of relief.

“I would rather have had what I asked for,” Jake grumbled. “But I can do a few things to help us.”

----------------------------------------

As Jake put in the last bit of prep work before making the potion, he got Drak to do the only useful thing he could do when it came to making any potion. That was using his light essence to purify the ingredients.

After he finished with that Jake started working on the first potion. First, he extracted the backsap from the vial that it was in. Then with the use of a second-tier spell, he separated the backsap into two parts. The first was the adhesive property and the second was the expansive property of the sap.

Now came the hardest bit of the process of this potion. This was also what pushed this potion so close to being a third tier. Jake had to add two stabilisers at the same time before adding them into the mix.

Jake focused the control of his essence, seeing the flow of the liquids and drawing the boiling water in with the stabilisers. It slowly mixed together in the air. During the process, Jake could feel the water essence leaving him as his mouth went dry and sweat on his skin being drawn back into his body to pay the cost of using his water essence.

But after a short period of time, Jake finished the first of the potions and was also able to make five more portions of the potions with the backsap.

Jake ran a giant glass of water and took a deep drink before looking up to see Drak taking a nap while Silt appeared to be drawing something on his face. She looked up with a grin. “Did it work?” she asked.

“Yes, and why are you drawing on his face?” Jake asked, frowning.

“I was bored because watching you doing this was putting me to sleep,” she replied with a shrug.

“Alchemy is not boring!” Jake replied, shaking his head. “It is a fascinating art.”

“Your sleeve is on fire,” Silt observed with an equally bored tone of voice.

“Don’t change the subject,” Jake said, shaking a finger at her.

“No, I’m not joking. Your sleeve is on fire,” she said with a smirk.

Jake looked down to see she was right and panicked for a moment, waving his hand. Drak woke up with a start and immediately began to laugh at Jake. Dehydrated or not, Jake had enough water essence to cast a simple water mist spell and put out the flames.

By this point, the both of them were laughing at Jake but with a sigh, he started to work on the next potion.

----------------------------------------

Jake finished the last potion and realised that the other two had left the room at some point. Looking at the 15 potions he was able to make he felt quite satisfied. But he was dying for another drink of water as using that much water essence put him at the very edge of his safe essence use.

Drinking another large glass of water, he studied the potions and felt a little better. Sure, it wasn’t quite what he wanted. In fact, it was nowhere near what he’d planned. But they had some potions and other useful ingredients that could help them.

“Ready to head back to Roy’s?” Silt asked, walking into the worktop.

Jake started collecting the potions and putting some into his belt loops while others went into the backpack he was going to take with him. “As ready as I’ll ever be,” he replied.

Silt gave a little nod. “Let’s get Drak moving and we can finalise the plans with Roy and Jackson so we can get this all done tonight.”

A few minutes later, Drak joined them dressed in dark clothes in an attempt to hide his presence. Of course, his bright red frill was still easy enough to spot but Jake almost didn’t have the heart to tell him.

Silt, on the other hand, had little worries about this. “You need to camouflage your frill,” she said, gesturing to it.

Drak frowned. “It isn’t that obvious.”

She gave him a sour look. “It’s bright red, Drak. You can’t really miss it.”

Drak muttered something and went upstairs. He came back down a few minutes later and his bright red frill was now a muted dark brownish-red and much less obvious.

“Better,” Silt said with a nod. “Let’s get moving.”

The three retraced their earlier route through The Loop and out to Roy’s compound. It was much quieter when they arrived earlier in the day with very few people around and much less activity. But Jackson was still at the door, watching for their arrival.

“Hey guys,” he said when he saw them. “Ready for action?”

“Sure!” Drak replied enthusiastically.

Silt shrugged and Jake gestured to the closed door. “We will soon find out,” he admitted.

The three followed Jackson through the almost-dark compound back to the tent they had met Roy in earlier. The Goliath was sitting behind her desk, looking up as they entered.

“You have the potions you need for tonight?” Roy asked.

“We are good to go,” Silt said before Jake could answer, guessing that he would be less than enthusiastic.

“Okay, let’s finalise this plan,” Roy said, gesturing to the seats opposite her.