That set the tone for the rest of the week. Kar’gandin and most everyone else focused on the laboratory’s expansion. Lucas brewed up a whole pile of mana potions as a side effect of another two batches of Blue, along with whatever random shit he could with what Adin brought him.

Lucas made a couple more smoke bombs, a potion of truth-telling, a handful of different boosts, including a particularly rough-looking potion of speed he’d made out of the stolen oak service sap, which he had no plans on selling and a few other healing potions that were probably destined to win more hearts and minds for their recruiting in the surrounding villages.

Noxious Potion of Camouflage: Create 30 cubic feet of choking smoke for 10 seconds. 10% chance of nausea.

Tainted potion of Speed: Agility 6, poison 1, intelligence -2, unable to sleep for the duration of the effect, 10% chance to hear voices

When the time came to send the Blue and the mana into the city, though, he delegated that shit. It was kind of unfortunate, honestly, because he actually wanted to go back to the small courtyard and practice some sword fighting as well as get a lay of the land regarding the fallout from their attack on the Blind cash cow. Sadly, he had to focus on his dancing and his table manners, though, which meant that he had to get the play-by-play from Hura’gh every night after dinner.

While Kar’gandin and the men from Meadowin were digging, he’d been prowling the city streets and asking around about what local talent might be available and what quests might be in the offing. While Lucas wasn’t sure that the dumbest member of their group was the right one to play spy, he and the dwarf were too busy, and right now, no one trusted Adin with more than berry picking, so there simply wasn’t another choice in the matter.

“Things are heating up. I heard there was another scuffle, just off Dyers lane this time,” the half-orc told him when Lucas returned to the cider house after dinner. “An ambush by the Butchers this time. Heard they sliced and diced a Blind underboss this time.”

That was a pretty definitive escalation from the story the half-orc had told them the day before last. That had been the ransacking of a warehouse that had led to a fire and some injuries as the Blind looked for leads on where the Butchers were hiding their drugs, but a fight like this, in the commerce district and in broad daylight?

Something like that was going to catch the attention of the city watch sooner rather than later. That wasn’t his problem.

“Sounds intense,” Lucas said with a shrug wondering how high the body count from his direction was now. It didn’t matter of course, good people didn’t join the Butchers or the Blind so it didn’t matter what happened to them.

“It would be more intense if you’d let us get involved and smash a few heads!” Hura’gh growled. “They’re both putting out feelers and looking for mercenaries. We could get some coin and make the blood bath that much—”

“Theres no money in killing, not compared to this work right here,” the dwarf said readjusting a stack of gold coins so that they jingled musically. There were over a hundred golden discs. That was half a lifetime of wealth to the average farmer, and nearly a decade of work for an honest tradesman, and they’d made it in a week by selling drugs.

The fact that they’d done it without entangling themselves in any feuds yet made that all the better. Lucas was still worried when the Whisperers would make their displeasure known, but for now, they’d been quiet, which made sense. They tended to avoid direct conflict, so as long as the Butchers were hacking people up in the streets, they’d maintain a pretty low profile.

“There’s plenty of money to be made in killing,” Hura’gh countered. “Ya kill the right people, and you get to take their shit, and—”

“And then they kill ye and take yers, and nothing was gained by anyone,” the dwarf continued.

Before Hura’gh could open his mouth and loudly disagree, Lucas butted in. “There will be plenty of time for killing, and territory and all the rest, but we aren’t even a gang yet, not really. We’re just a couple of guys with a product worth paying for.”

“If any of those other prickless sons of bitches tried to come at us…” Hura’gh growled.

“Then we’d die on our feet, but we’d still die,” Lucas said with a shake of his head. “Think about it. The Brass Knights are so big because almost an entire quarter of the city pays them a few kings or dragons a month to keep the peace. That kind of payroll buys dozens of toughs and, in a pinch, hundreds of mercenaries. It’s going to take time to match that, but we’ll get there.”

They spent hours that night debating how long it would take to get there. Topics ranged from recruiting local talent to hiring expeditions to go kill more goblins for them. What they didn’t discuss was how they could pit more gangs above them against each other for a bigger slice of the pie. Lucas didn’t have a good answer to that yet, but if they were really going to carve something out of this city for themselves, it was something they’d have to do eventually.

Through all that, Adin alternated between skulking around like a whipped hound and trying to ingratiate himself for another hit of Blue. The man’s pride never allowed him to deliver a real apology without the threat of violence, but he did mostly behave himself, and he worked harder than usual.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

What he didn’t do was show up to any of the dancing sessions that Lucas was forced to attend. As a result, Gerwin had to take his place, Which prompted Danaria to ask if something had happened, but Lucas just played it off. “There’s just a lot going on,” he told her. “Your brother… he’s a pretty dedicated guy, and right now, there’s a lot of ingredients that need gathering, you know?”

“Well, where did he get the bruises from?” Danaira asked. “Adin might claim to be quite handy with a sword, but… he’s yet to be on the winning side of a single duel.”

“Well, the forest is a rough place, but he’s been fine so far,” Lucas assured her. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much. It will toughen him up.”

She seemed unconvinced but dropped the subject. Lucas was grateful for a moment, but after that, she tangented to asking him why they were always creating mana potions instead of healing potions that people desperately needed.

“I’ve heard that you’ve been distributing some among the people, and truthfully, Meadowin seems healthier and more productive than it has in years,” she told him during their next break, “Shouldn’t that take the highest priority?”

“In time, perhaps,” Lucas lied. “It's nice to do good, but we’ve got money to make too, and mages… well, they pay top dollar.”

“Top dollar?” she asked in confusion.

“It’s fine. It’s just a saying from my homeland,” he said with a shrug. “Plus, you have to think about it. Some ingredients are rarer than others, so we need to make what we can find.”

“Couldn’t you plant more of the herbs you need then?” she asked. “Would that not be easier than finding them?”

Lucas fed her a line of bullshit on that about very specific growing conditions and the potency of wild plants, but even after they finished dancing, the thought about making a more serious attempt at a herb garden or harvestable plantation lingered long after he stopped thinking about how pretty Danaria had been in her frilled baby blue dress.

A couple days later, when he told the boys about the idea, Kar’gandin and Adin both thought it was a good idea. “If we’re recruiting so many farmers, then we might as well get some farmin’ out of them!” had been the eloquent way he’d put it, and Lucas found it hard to disagree with. After all, they had a whole decaying orchard and a few fallow fields around their little drug lab.

Surely something could be done with that, couldn’t it? He wondered.

The answer turned out to be, unsurprisingly, yes. For a few coppers each, they were able to hire dozens of young men from the village to start clearing land and burning brush, and Lucas had Adin start gleaning seeds for the different plants they would need most. They would make the whole area appear like an apple orchard, but all of the dead apple trees would be cut down for firewood and replaced with rosewood trees.

“Won’t those take years to grow, though?” Adin had asked as Lucas mapped out the property and planned out what they could do with it. “I’m all for generating more legitimate income for my house, but surely so many non-fruit bearing trees even after they grow large enough.”

“Yeah, well, that’s why we’re growing them inside the apple grove; I don’t exactly want to hang a sign on our front door that says, ‘These guys are making healing potions,’ now do I?”

“But it will still be years,” Adin insisted, cleaving to the main thrust of his argument. “Surely there are better things to do with our time than…”

“One, hiring a few boys to clear brush just strengthens our cover about your house getting back on its feet and costs us almost nothing,” Lucas said sharply, holding out a finger for each point he listed off. “Two, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t help us today because tomorrow always gets here sooner than you think, and three, magic can work on plants, too.”

After he finished his third point, he dug out his journal and flipped through the pages. Then, when he found what he was looking for, he handed it to Adin. He’d long since lost his paranoia about people stealing his secrets when he realized one key fact: the people of this world could no more read English than he could read Kar’gandin’s dwarvish ledgers. It was essentially his very own secret language.

“What is it I’m supposed to see here?” Adin asked dismissively.

“It says, serum of plant growth, and I’ve never tried it, but when I found it by accident while I was trying to turn bonemeal and red clover into a potion of endurance,” Lucas told the noble. “That didn’t work, but this might.”

“Potions for people, potions for sale, and potions for plants,” Adin said with a laugh. “Is there anything you don’t have a potion for?”

For getting you to shut the fuck up, Lucas thought, but he didn’t say it. He could see looks of resentment that the noble gave him sometimes, and unless Lucas planned on getting rid of the man, it wasn’t wise to antagonize him more than he had to.

Instead, he just said, “You know, better living though modern chemistry, right?” Adin nodded like that made any sense, which was silly, since the man was anything but modern, and had no idea what chemistry was.

So, that became one more element in their increasingly convoluted plan. At least everyone assumed he had a plan. Kar’gandin talked at length about the extra money they could make selling a few thousand more healing potions a year. Hura’gh insisted they’d need most of them for the gang wars to come and that no one would be able to stand against them, while Adin argued that Lucas should experiment with drugs like Dragon’s Blood.

The last thing that they needed was to make more poison, but honestly, he wasn’t sure what the best use for these resources would be when it reached fruition. The only reason that he didn’t include Blue ingredients in this initial plan was because he didn’t want to spell out what they were to everyone just yet.

He wasn’t sure if they’d be used for fighting or for cash flow. That didn’t matter. All that did was that he wasn’t going to put any new poison out on the streets. Blue was enough for now. He could do better than that going forward.