Several hours rolled by when Arthur heard a knock at his door. When he opened it he found Gaelin standing there with the wooden box full of an assortment of useful magical ingredients. Not quite the same amount Arthur would collect in a morning, but still a decent haul that would cover most of what he would use today.

“Well done, put it on the table for me while I get you some money.”

Gaelin smiled and did as Arthur asked, Arthur returned from the spare room with a small pouch containing ten copper coins which he then handed to Gaelin.

“This is a pretty nice haul for your first time, if you want to earn more money you can do the same for me tomorrow.”

“O -of course, I will do that.” Gaelin said as he looked at the ten coins in his possession, his eyes glittering like he was looking at gold.

Gaelin did not stay for long after that, Arthur just gave him a few tips for when harvesting plants and told him of a few that he would like a bit more of for his alchemy. Once he did leave Arthur set to work cutting off all the useless parts of the plants and preparing them for when he would use them next. What was useful varied from plant to plant, but usually when you use the whole plant it is far less effective than when you just use the most potent parts.

Usually it was just one part of the plant that was useful, but in a few instances there were plants that had multiple useful parts. Using the whole plant or animal part would usually create problems, for example the Clumpfoot Cap is both used for deadly poisons as well as a pain salve. Include too much of the dangerous poisonous bits and now you have something that can kill if it gets in through a cut.

By the time one o’clock in the afternoon rolled around Arthur was finished with preparing the ingredients and disposed of the excess in his backyard. A small pile of the stuff had started to form and while it wasn’t a problem at the present time it likely would be in the future. ‘I will probably need to dig a hole and bury it somewhere back here. But not today, that is a problem for future me.’

Now that he had all the important chores out of the way Arthur could now actually spend some time at the guild library and study without any interruptions.

***********

The guild was about the very same as the day before with smaller than average lines and a cold feeling of worry clouding the city ever present on the faces of the people. Arthur slipped by the same way as he normally would and quickly made his way to the library. Like normal the library had a few people walking in and out, checking out and returning books. But Arthur didn’t pay them all that much attention and simply walked towards the apprentice section of the library.

He quickly found the remaining books he was reading the day before and continued where he left off. The first book he decided to read was titled “The Forgotten Alchemy of Elsand”, it contained a good twenty or so recipes for potions, oils, powders, and other unique forms of useful alchemical products that did all sorts of things. It was truly a treasure trove for someone like him who needed all he could find.

The last book was titled “All the Spells an Aspiring Apprentice Should Know”, it contained another thirty or so spells that would be very useful to him. Although there were several offensive and defensive spells to be found within the book most of what was contained were utility spells. A couple of the notable ones that caught Arthurs eye included feather falling, fire orb, vibrate, cool, heat, dry liquid, and magic hand. Most of the other spells that Arthur found useful were tier two spells, and at the moment Arthur didn’t know how to cast them.

He understood the general process and foundation of the spell, but of the few times he attempted to cast one the spell failed and he felt like he was missing something fundamental with the spell. Like he was trying to open a locked door just by turning the doorknob and pulling.

But despite his incapability of casting tier two spells with any training with them he still felt like he learned quite a bit from this trip to the library. He now has several recipes to try out as well as some spells he wanted to test the usefulness of.

*********

The very next morning Arthur was preparing to brew some of the recipes he learned the day before. The one in particular he wanted to try out was something called alchemist embers. It is basically fire in a bottle that really likes to spread once it gets out. The only weird thing about it is that it requires the embers of a fire caused by the alchemist embers to make, this has led to many people debating what came first, the embers or the flame. But none of that was very important to Arthur, he just needed to buy some embers, which were also stored in a bottle, along with a magically empowered glass bottle that could resist the heat. Neither were cheap and ended up setting Arthur back a whole gold coin, fifteen silver for the embers and five for the bottle. But despite spending almost two weeks of the money he makes he wasn’t all that worried as alchemist embers were very valuable with a market price of a whole gold coin.

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The trick to earning more money than he spent was to use the actual embers to create a controlled fire to then create more embers. This was how practically everyone that wanted to create them would do it unless they had a supplier that would either buy the bottled alchemist embers for more than one gold coin or sell the materials for less. The other ingredients that were used were mostly just flammable plants that were fairly common in the region.

To begin the process of creating more of the embers Arthur manipulated the earth in his backyard and created a large bowl thing that could easily fit several people inside of. Arthur made sure to keep the walls of the large bowl at least two inches thick for safety, there have been several stories of mages trying this out and creating fires that killed them because the walls of the large bowls they created were not large enough to withstand the heat without becoming brittle and crumbling even with reinforcement with magic. That was something the man who sold him the embers warned him about and made him promise to remember it.

Once Arthur was done with that he placed many of the various flammable and fire attuned plants he had with him and pushed them all together towards the bottom. Once he was satisfied with it he took the ember in the bottle and with his aeromancy he picked up the ember that was in a thin cylinder shape and dropped it in the bowl.

The sudden wave of heat nearly knocked Arthur down as the plants ignited and burned nearly instantaneously upon contact. Arthur immediately dropped to the ground and started to reinforce the earth bowl to keep it from breaking apart. He kept himself down there until he felt the earth stop suffering from the heat. When he poked his head over the top he found that alongside the initial piece of ember there was another one that was all misshapen and jagged.

Arthur used aeromancy to lift both pieces and place them inside each of their bottles, the original went into the bottle it came with, and the one he made went into the magically empowered bottle he bought for five silver, although that took a bit of effort with the jaggedness of it.

With the hard part out of the way Arthur put the original embers away in his dimensional bag and took the ember he made with him into his spare room where he began the process of creating a proper alchemist embers. The recipe required the magic bottle, the embers, and a large amount of relatively common planets that were either highly flammable or were attuned to fire, such as the pale foot weed and the spark flower respectively.

Placing the plants inside first Arthur then slowly lowered the embers into the bottle just keeping them from touching before he started to cast the spell to bind the potion together, keep anything from burning until a command word was said, and turn the plants into a flammable liquid that would allow the fire to spread quickly.

“Umor ignis calidissimus conflandum diffunditur…” Arthur gave all of his focus as he casted the spell, he felt his mana reserves starting to get low. ‘Shit, I should have rested before I attempted this.’ Arthur inwardly berated himself but pressed on anyways, he was almost done and if he quitted now he might accidentally burn his house down along with most of the neighborhood.

How long that last stretch lasted was unknown to Arthur, but when it finally ended he collapsed to the floor feeling very lightheaded and a little sick. But the alchemist embers were finished in their alluring glow that gave Arthur a similar feeling to standing in the sun.

‘Yeah, I am definitely waiting to do this next time.’

With the bottle of alchemist embers finished Arthur took a moment to close his eyes and rest for a moment, the amount of mana exhaustion he was enduring wasn’t something that was good for staying awake. He remained like that until a series of loud knocks forced him to open his eyes and check how it was.

‘Who the hell is knocking at my door this early in the morning, it isn’t even noon yet.’ Arthur slowly managed to stand up stretching his stiff muscles as he did so and walked over to the front door.

Upon opening the door he found it was Gaelin with a box full of ingredients. Arthur stood there dazed for a moment wondering why Gaelin was so early. “Why are you here so early, it’s not even noon yet. You would have needed to be up at the crack of dawn to gather this much so quickly.” Arthur nearly pointed his finger at the young elf out of pure annoyance.

Gaelin just stood there for a moment processing what Arthur just said to him before he looked him straight in the eyes and said “But it’s 12:30. I am a bit earlier than usual, but only by about half an hour.” Now it was Arthur's turn to be confused, he stepped outside and looked up at the sun and found it to be nearly straight up yelling him it was roughly noon.

‘Shit, I must have been out for at least two hours now, probably even more than that.’ Arthur quickly hushed Gaelin inside and took the ingredients and handed him another ten copper coins for the haul.

After a brief discussion regarding what plants Gaelin should focus on looking for next he left with his box and gave Arthur time to himself to rest his eyes some more. But this time he made sure to keep himself from drifting off, but that didn’t last very long as his stomach growled in dissatisfaction at the lack of eating and forced him to get up and eat a sandwich.

Once his stomach was silent Arthur tried to return to his nap but he couldn’t keep his mind from drifting to other topics and keeping him from resting. Eventually he just gave up and left his house to go to the mages guild.

‘I'm not going to get any rest, I might as well spend some time with Calavia and even get her help in testing out all the abilities of my staff. I was intending to do that sometime soon anyways, and it won’t drain any of my mana, so why not?’

The lines at the clerks desks were probably at an all time low by the time Arthur got there, at a glance there was at most ten or so people waiting in line, and most of which were just for basic problems that just about any mage could easily do with a bit of training. As he entered the underground portion of the guild Arthur contemplated selling the bottled alchemist embers to the alchemy club right then and there, but he decided against it. He was going to spend the rest of this day with his friend Calavia.