Seven days passed in a blink of an eye.

The bloodletting process finally finished. Sprawled out across the clearing were twenty-eight and a half barrels worth of freshly squeezed Troll blood.

“With this much, I should be able to make at least one hundred potions,” Grisella spoke with excitement in her voice.

By her standards, this was a considerably large haul. In addition, a significant portion of this year’s batch would consist of slightly better-quality potions. She was more than satisfied.

Ellis watched as she collected the barrels into her spatial artifact. After a few seconds, he shifted his gaze toward the stack of nine corpses that stood near the vegetable garden. The Corpses looked almost mummified. They were skinny, with paper thin skin and cracked joints.

He was suddenly reminded of Ena’s birth. The dragon corpse from back then looked somewhat similar.

“Ah, that’s right.” Grisella suddenly exclaimed. “Before I forget, I should take out the organs.”

“The organs? I thought you only needed the blood.”

“I only need the blood for the potions. The organs can be used for something else.” She explained. “I mentioned before how Troll blood was poisonous unless properly treated, right? Well, the same applies to their organs. More specifically, the liver and pancreas.”

“I see… “

Ellis did not show much of a reaction, but someone else certainly did. Upon hearing Grisella’s words, Ena’s eyes suddenly lit up. The little fox dashed towards one of the corpses and quickly fished out its inner organs. The liver and the pancreas. They looked somewhat dehydrated, but otherwise, they were in surprisingly good condition.

“H-hey, what are you doing?!” Grisella shouted as she unconsciously took a step forward. The little fox normally acted aloof and distant. Ena’s sudden burst of excitement caught her off guard.

Ena naturally ignored her. Grisella furrowed her brow. After a short pause, she shifted her attention over to Ellis. She glared at him. Her silence demanded answers.

For the most part, Ellis let out an awkward laugh.

“Well, just leave her alone.” He said.

Ena then gestured for Umbra to come over. Albeit unwillingly, the troubled wolf begrudgingly walked over. Without missing a beat, Ena quickly tossed the liver directly into his gullet.

Umbra made an expression as if he had just deepthroated a whole lemon. After he swallowed the liver, Ena then threw over the pancreas. In a blink of an eye, two purportedly poisonous ingredients disappeared into Umbra’s stomach.

“W-what just…” Grisella had watched the whole process with wide eyes. She still couldn’t quite comprehend what had just happened.

A fourth of a cup of an ordinary Troll’s blood was enough to send a normal man to the afterlife. A Troll’s organs were hundreds of times more concentrated than its blood. What’s more, a Grandelier Troll was thousands of times more poisonous than your average everyday Troll. The organs that the wolf had just swallowed were potent enough to kill high-class dragons!

“You should quickly go and harvest them.” Ellis’s voice snapped her out of her reverie. “If you wait any longer, Ena will take even more.”

Grisella turned towards the Ena and just as he had said, the little fox was already trotting towards the next corpse.

The witch gritted her teeth. Although she was still slightly confused, now wasn’t the time for that. She threw herself into the art of organ collection.

Some time passed. Small chunks of organ and pieces of severed entrails stained Grisella’s blouse. She had a ragged expression on her face.

Out of nine corpses, Ena had ‘stolen’ three.

Right now, she felt a bit disgruntled, but as the magnanimous person that she was, Grisella decided to drop the issue and move on to the next step.

Now that she had collected the blood, it was finally time to actually begin the process of potioneering.

Grisella dusted herself off and walked over to the vegetable garden. She then knelt down and harvested one of the vegetables growing in the soil. It was a greenish-blue colored root vegetable that somewhat resembled a carrot.

“What are you doing?” Ellis curiously asked.

“Harvesting the necessary ingredients.” She succinctly explained. She plucked out four more carrot-like vegetables. “If it’s for a hundred potions, then I’ll only need five.”

Potioneering was one of the most popular branches of alchemy. It had the lowest barrier for entry and the highest skill ceiling. A bumbling idiot could make a potion as long as he had the necessary ingredients, but only an expert Alchemist was able to craft panacea from a common tea leaf.

The potion that Grisella was aiming for was rather simple. It only needed two ingredients: Troll blood and Evancrest Root.

The blood was somewhat difficult to obtain (at least, for most people), but Evancrest Root was a very common herb. Sometimes, it could even be found growing on the side of the road. Still, there was a reason for its obscurity. Its only function was to detoxify Troll blood.

Even after collecting all the necessary ingredients, there was still a long road ahead of her. The difficult part of this recipe came in its process.

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While the others continued to play outside, Grisella and Ellis returned to the cottage. Once inside, they headed straight for the kitchen.

Grisella pulled out a scroll from her spatial artifact and unfurled it onto the kitchen table. The scroll was made from tanned animal skin and fully expanded, it covered the entire table.

Scribbled onto the surface in pitch black ink was a diagram. No, not a diagram, but rather, a magic rune.

To Ellis, it resembled a cliché magic circle with a hexagram drawn in the middle. This one was just slightly different. Foreign glyphs decorated the inner and outer lining of the circle.

“This thing is…?”

“A stove.” She answered.

Grisella then tapped the magic circle. At the same time, she mumbled out something unintelligible.

Almost immediately, a ball of purple fire sprouted out from the ink. It danced in the air before coalescing into one big giant ball of flame.

“Kyu!” Peeking in from the window, Ena let out a disdainful snort. It was as if she was saying, “I can do that too.”

Ellis ignored her and kept his full attention focused onto the strange alchemical process taking place before him.

Grisella did not stop there. After the purple fire stabilized, she then hauled over a giant black cauldron from the kitchen and placed it directly over the magic circle.

“Isn’t that the thing you used to cook dinner?” Ellis widened his eyes in surprise. Was he imagining things or was this girl really about to do alchemy with a kitchen pot?

He simply could not believe it. She hadn’t even bothered to clean the cauldron beforehand.

Grisella gave a subtle nod to herself before she pulled out a wine barrel from her spatial artifact and poured in approximately a fourth of a barrel’s worth of blood directly into the cauldron.

A peculiar scent wafted through the kitchen. It wasn’t a very pleasant smell. In fact, it was a smell that resembled burnt rubber.

Ellis couldn’t help but furrow his brow.

Meanwhile, Grisella pulled out an Evancrest root and placed it on the table. With a chef’s knife that she procured from a cabinet in the kitchen, she began mincing the root. She did not stop until the carrot-like herb reached a paste-like consistency.

Grisella then took a small dollop of the paste and added it into the cauldron.

She breathed out a sigh of relief.

Ellis tilted his head in confusion. “That’s it?”

“No, of course not.” She shook her head. “That was the easy part.”

Grisella walked over to the kitchen and searched through the cabinets. After a few seconds, she returned with a black lid. The lid was somewhat special. It had no handle and there was a single hole located directly at the center of the lid. She covered the cauldron with the lid.

To his surprise, she did not remove her hand from the lid. Instead, she kept it on there as she glared intently at the cauldron. Her hand covered everything but the hole.

“There are glyphs carved on the inside of the cauldron,” she explained. “My job is to manipulate those glyphs with the intention of changing the overall make-up of the blood itself. The end result should be a mixture with next to no impurities or poison.”

“Is that hard to do or what?” Just from her words alone, Ellis could not really tell. After all, he had zero experience in the field of alchemy.

In response, Grisella shrugged her shoulders. “It is a somewhat difficult task to pull off. If I slip up even once, then I run the risk of losing an entire batch.”

“I… I see.” Even though she seemingly downplayed the whole process, it was definitely something not everyone could pull off.

After that, Grisella went silent. She kept her concentration focused on the cauldron. A bead of sweat trickled down the side of her forehead. After about a minute or so, Ellis suddenly heard a violent rumble. It originated from somewhere inside the cauldron. It was a sound reminiscent of popping fireworks.

At almost the exact same time, smoke began billowing out of the hole in the lid. It quickly filled the entire cottage in black smog and drowned the kitchen with the smell of burnt rubber.

It was a very violent process. So much so that Grisella actually felt the physical toll of it on her body.

Ellis remained silent. Even as he watched her hand redden and then turn black like charcoal, he did not dare to interrupt.

After a few more minutes, her expression lightened. Although smoke still billowed out from the lid, at the very least, she did not look as strained as before. Whether this was because she had lost feeling in her hand or because the magic had lightened up, Ellis did not know.

Regardless, he couldn’t help but ask, “Is all alchemy like this?”

“No, most of it is just mixing ingredients together and getting the right proportions down.” She spoke with a hoarse voice. “Stuff like this is reserved solely for high-class and difficult recipes. Not just anybody can do it.”

Grisella was indirectly praising herself, but Ellis did not try to point this out.

In the short time that he had spent with this woman, he had learned that not only was she an expert mage, but she was an even better alchemist. What’s more, she had a habit of indirectly praising herself. Her current actions came as no surprise to him.

Ellis thought for a moment, before he suddenly asked, “Do you think you can teach me?”

“Teach you?” Grisella scrunched her brow in slight confusion. “You want me to teach you alchemy?”

Ellis nodded. He was somewhat curious.

She hesitated for a moment. In truth, Grisella was extremely unwilling to teach him. Her skills were passed down onto her by her master. Although her master didn’t actually care, she still felt that it was not in her place to just teach others. At the same time, she did not want to just bluntly reject him.

After a while, she said, “… To learn alchemy, you must first possess a rudimentary understanding of magic. Can you use magic?”

“That… I can’t…” Ellis let out a sigh of defeat.

Inwardly, Grisella pumped her fists. On the outside, she kept a stoic expression on as she nodded her head ‘regrettably’.

“It’s unfortunate, but in that case, I can’t teach you.”

“…”

Just as Ellis was about to ask if she could teach him magic, a loud pop echoed through the room. It came from the cauldron.

Grisella’s expression immediately tightened. She shifted her focus back onto the cauldron. A slim smile stretched her lips.

It was time to collect.

She lifted her hand off the lid. As if attracted by some magical force, the lid flew open. It landed on the table, right next to the cauldron.

She peered into the cauldron, inside she saw what remained of the blood. It only reached a sixth of the volume in the cauldron. The solution darkened in color. Its viscosity had also increased. Right now, it was comparable to paste. Maybe, even gravy.

This was certainly not what Ellis had expected the final product to be, but Grisella looked satisfied.

She took a wooden spoon and dipped it into the liquid. Afterward, she dripped a single drop onto her burnt hand.

The potion took effect almost immediately. The lump that looked no different from burnt charcoal was no more. In its place was the slender pale hand of a beautiful woman.

“She nodded her head in satisfaction. “This batch turned out even better than I expected. A batch like this should be enough to fill three bottles.”

Ellis did a quick calculation. There were 28.5 barrels of blood. The cauldron was large enough to hold a fourth of a barrel. A batch like that produced 3 bottles. One hundred potions was a severe understatement. In truth, Grisella could make at least three hundred potions!

She did not immediately store the completed mixture into a bottle. Instead, she suddenly brought out a much larger pot that she had retrieved from underneath the floorboards of her cottage. It was slightly different, but it looked strikingly similar to a wok.

“The mixture needs to cool first,” she explained. “We’ll store the finished product in here for the time being while I make more.”

As she spoke, Grisella began prepping for the next batch of potions.

Ellis, who did not really have anything to do but watch her work, decided to step out.

He entertained the wolves while Grisella worked deep into the night.