No one walked away from that little conference happy. Lord Torvin was not used to his plans being objected to, but he did agree that Lucas had a point and that he would find some way to address his concerns while still affecting a forced takeover of the docks.

Lucas shrugged it off. He wasn’t about to let this little argument cast a pall over the festivities, and by the time he returned to the house, he was his cheerful, smiling self again.

Over the next few days, he made himself scarce. That wasn’t just because a shipment of exotic herbs and expensive reagents for him to play with came in, either. It was because he was doing his very best not to be alone with Danaria again. After all, he wasn’t sure what would happen when that happened, and just now, life was complicated enough.

Oh, he was still polite and friendly with her in the parlor and over meals. Sometimes, if the servants were out of the room, he’d even flirt with her a little to make her smile, but she was so sheltered he doubted very much that she was ready for more than that. By the time he was out of high school, he was dating women who would probably make the Red Lantern girls blush, so he was a poor judge of such things.

His ring of invisibility proved remarkably useful for that. He was still practicing it almost as much as his sword work and had felt his mana, or whatever it was, slowly increase through regular effort to the point where he wanted to try more magic, but he wasn’t really sure how to go about it.

In the meantime, whenever Danaria knocked on the door to his room, he would simply vanish. He felt a little bad about doing it, but he always found a way to make it up to her later that day. He knew he couldn’t avoid the conversation that was coming forever, of course, he just needed time to let things cool down and think rationally.

Which, of course, meant it was time to make some potions. Honestly, as much as he’d enjoyed Winter Feast and the chill days that followed, it was only when his men brought that shipment in and started unloading it that he truly felt like a kid on Christmas morning.

Up until now, most of their crates that had been brought here were bulk ingredients to be used in their most important recipes, bought from just enough different sources to make them hard to track. He doubted that anyone would try to turn the poisonous byproduct of mana potions into drugs, of course, but then he doubted he would have been able to single-handedly tank the price of mana potions so hard that they were now sending those abroad for sale.

This, though, was a long list of dozens of plants that he’d heard about that seemed like they might have some utility. Some of them, like locust seeds and powdered demon horn, were controlled substances, so they’d been purchased through a cut-out they’d created by bribing a junkie in the alchemist guild. However, even as he used the crowbar to pry open the first crate, he knew this was what he’d been waiting for.

For too long, Lucas had been limited by what grew locally and could be picked off the ground, but now he had cash. Now, he could get almost anything that was worth getting, and if he could figure out a way to turn a profit on it, so much the better.

Lesser Demon Horn(powdered): Strength 6, euphoria 3, rage 2, poison 2, intelligence -3

Locust Seeds (dried): Endurance 4, endless hunger for 48 hours.

Ogre Blood (distilled, purified): Strength 5, stamina 4, poison 4, rage 1, intelligence -1, beauty -4

Iron Wood Ash: Endurance 5, poison -5

Earth Crystals (whole): Earth 9, endurance 4, poison -1, counteracts significant amounts of air in mixtures containing that element.

Troll Blood (living): Healing 9, poison 9, endurance 3. If not inoculated prior to use, troll blood almost inevitably proves fatal.

It was an impressive haul, really, and it was just the tip of the iceberg. The last one was vaguely terrifying, as the blood bubbled and swirled in a spectrum of emeralds and blacks like a living thing, which it was.

These were just the endurance-focused ingredients. He’d made whole lists focusing on each of the stats he had experience with, but there was always more to research and elemental things - that was pretty much going to be completely new for him, so he was going to have to investigate it carefully.

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For now, he wasn’t about to stress it, though. Instead, he just calmly opened each crate and started sorting their contents into appropriate sections with a little help from Hura’gh, where heavy lifting was concerned.

“What are these ones for,” the half-orc asked, picking up a dragon pepper. “Look’s tasty.”

“And you’ll probably get a chance to taste it,” Lucas said with a broad smile. “That one is for a special culinary potion I want to try making called hot sauce. It makes pretty much anything you put it on taste better.”

Hura’gh looked like he might just try devouring the whole thing, and Lucas had enough of him that he was inclined to let the half-orc try it, just to see the reaction, but after a few seconds, he put the large red pepper down, and said, “We shall see if you are successful. That might even be better than a strength potion.”

Lucas laughed at that, and as soon as they were done emptying and clearing the old crates, he was once again left alone to decide his next steps. So, while he started the fire and gathered the vials and other glassware that he expected he’d need, he thought about his priorities.

Theoretically, he should probably be looking for ways to make Blue stronger or make another product in the same vein, but honestly, he had zero interest in that. Less than zero interest. Despite how great everything was now, some days he wished he could go back in time and uninvent it, but that wasn’t how life worked. He couldn’t uninvent Blue, he couldn’t unkiss Danaria, and there was no way he could undo the growing entanglements that were beginning to bind his life.

But what he could do was cook, and right now, he wanted to make something fun and interesting but not necessarily profit-focused. He’d ordered all this endurance shit back when he was feeling a lot weaker than he was now, so it was less important than it had once been, but it was still interesting. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wanted to create a good ole’ comic book super soldier serum, and it would be useful for that.

While he doubted he could turn himself into a superhero on a permanent basis, even being able to create potions that could double the strength and toughness of his men for a few hours would be enough to defeat anyone short of a mage, and if he pushed Lord Torvin much harder and they had a serious falling out, or the man figured out a way to make Blue on his own, then he was certainly going to need a plan B.

So that was on the agenda, but it was still too productive for how he was feeling, so he moved on to other things.

He wanted to make some invisibility potions and some gas and firebombs of varying strengths for testing. The idea of doing the same thing over and over at slightly different concentrations was also king of boring, though.

For a moment, he almost took his peppers and went to the kitchen to start his hot sauce project. He wanted to try fermenting some of the peppers and grinding up others with vinegar and salt to see which was the better choice for their taste profile sometime soon. He just didn’t want to do it bad enough to leave the lab yet.

Which left pretty much the beauty products. Lucas looked around the room and sighed. He’d just done the alchemical equivalent of complaining about how nothing was on after flipping through a hundred channels of cable.

“Really,” he chided himself. “An hour ago, you were excited that you could do anything, but now, nothing? Get over yourself, man, and get to work.”

Lucas closed his eyes and reached out for an ingredient at random, and when he opened them again and saw that he’d picked up a vial of bestial scent glands, he shrugged and said, “Well, I guess it's time to try my hand at perfume.”

Bestial Scent Glands: Poison 5, beauty 3, endurance -1. Dangerous if consumed, these pheromone-laden musk glands have a powerful scent.

Lucas had no idea how to make perfume, of course, but he wasn’t about to let that stop him. As he understood it, the process was simple enough: find stuff that smells good, find stuff that smells strong, mix it with alcohol, and hope for the best. Humans had been making it for thousands of years, so it couldn’t possibly be too complicated.

So, he spent the day doing just that. First, he took some of the tinctures that he’d already made for this project and started mixing them together in small quantities to see how they smelled. They were made from dried flowers, fruit peels, and various sweet-smelling herbs that he’d stockpiled specifically for this project, so he had quite a range to choose from. Here all the stats he could see didn’t do a lot to help. They were all +1 or 2 beauty, so what mattered more was a pleasing scent to cover and mix with the scent glands.

After trying half a dozen combinations that he mixed together with a reed pipette, he eventually decided on cinnamon, cedar, thorn blossom, and orange peel. It created a very earthy scent that was almost strong enough to remind him of all the incense his hippy girlfriend used to burn. He added a little of the musk glands to it and was pleased to see that the stats looked decent, but he decided he’d try at least one or two more combinations to see if he could do better, then he’d let Danaria decide which one was the best.

Aromatic Perfume (20 doses): Beauty 5, poison 1. Effects last up to 6 hours.

Lucas had a lot of unanswered questions, of course, but to him, it seemed to be the feminine version of a strength potion, socially speaking. The question was, what would extra beauty do exactly, and could it stack? Could he invent half a dozen magical cosmetics and make an effect so alluring that men would have trouble resisting whoever wore them, or did only the strongest stat matter.

That was something he was going to have to test after he figured out how lipstick, rouge, and all those other powders were made.

Lucas might have been a chemist of one sort or another for most of his life now, but he’d never dipped his toe into beauty products. He’d have to, though, if he wanted to ever get out of the drug game, and recently, for better or worse, he’d had a very good reason to do just that.