Clearly, the world disagreed so after sweeping the other sections of bug corpses Eli washes his hands because he is a good boy and if someone gets sick eating something he made they knew where he lived to get revenge so better safe than a severely disabled, as they all say.

It's one of the numerous down points of living in a village so small you knew had no choice but to know everyone by name.

If you accidentally give someone a disease chances are you'll probably get it too because no doctors worth their knowledge would ever live in this backwaters dump and the closest thing they have is Carla the healer; who'll make you feel bad for getting sick and inconveniencing her life in the first place before giving you a potion that'll probably give you acute diarrhea before actually doing its job.

And that's not an exaggeration.

Last year Eli got a common cold but almost died after her 'healing potion' gave him dysentery.

It was so severe that after a week only water came out but his knees had already given out so he had to hobble to the bathroom on his dad's DIY crutches for support.

It was a very dark winter for young Eli.

The event also caused so much trauma that he now feels the necessity to piss on her garden every time he passes by her house as a coping mechanism for that horrible experience. Eli could be going about his day perfectly fine then accidentally catches sight of her rickety old building and his bladder just tightens with the sudden urge to pee, like an unwanted superpower.

At first, he thought he had a very specific bladder infection but after a trip to an actually qualified doctor in the city his result came out negative so he knew it was just his hatred for Carla manifesting in different ways.

Dad says bullying an old lady is inappropriate but Eli was only thirteen when she decided to make him shit his intestines so he doesn't understand why he had to be 'appropriate' to her when she clearly refused to do the same for him.

He was a staunch believer of equality dammit, and a little old lady wasn't going to make him lose his prided moral integrity.

That shit was integral, his most important defining characteristic even.

Eli brings the jarring tools from their storage in the top cabinet, an incomplete collection made up of a manual canner and some half-pint jars but really, what else do you need to can some syrup? He was a private workshop not a factory, everyone knows the p in private starts for poor and the r stands for reduced quality.

It was basically common sense.

He sets aside a tub of hot water for sterilization before placing a wide-mouthed funnel at the rim of a sterilized jar and sending a large spoon full of warm dark molasses into the bottle.

Eli watches the content slowly fill to the brim and stops his spoon before it overflows, even a single drop on the counter could call over the hibernating ants so precision was the name of the mission.

The voice in his head tells him that's a bad rhyme, it offers instead that attention was the answer to the question, so Eli ponders for a moment before shaking his head in dismissal.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

The first rhyme was better, he decides.

'Not really.', the voice denies, lying to even itself because Eli's rhyme was so obviously better you had to be deaf to not hear its superior quality, but even then you can't be excused for failing to see the popping chakras of those words alone, as his dad would say.

"I have never said that in my life." Another disembodied voice that sounds so much like dad says but Eli knows it wasn't dad.

Dad died after refusing to fulfill his son's one dream of not having bugs for roommates, a completely reasonable thing to wish for, to be honest, because he was a no-good dad who cared more for lifeless paper than family; one of the things excluding money that really mattered in life.

So sad.

"You can't ignore me forever." Disembodied voice pipes up again and the one in his head agrees.

But Eli decides that he has had enough of being bossed around by dead people and he would like to be at the market before 9 am so he hurridly cans twenty-four more bottles before the syrup bottoms out and nothing but the ones dried to the sides remains.

Eli soaks the cauldron with some soap, washing his hands before going into his room to bring out the real secret weapon of success for his small syrup business; Ridiculously false advertising in fancy writing.

He checked with the local authorities and it wasn't illegal since anyone dumb enough to believe a fourteen-year-old boy born in Benkucty had access to molasses from another county probably deserved to get scammed.

Once a month Eli takes a six-hour wagon ride to the city in order to print these labels for his humble syrup business.

The ride was bumpy and a pain in the ass so no one could say he wasn't a serious entrepreneur, Just take a look at these potholes and tell me you don't feel bad for his jumbled intestines.

The content of the label is also very simple, really.

In the middle is an unrealistic golden eclipse he saw on the arm of one of the few adventurers in the cavern and thought looked nice then below it in a gold font is a short history of the made-up foreign farm the syrup originated from before another short summary of the similarly made-up foreign farmer's family history.

No label is completed without an ingredients list so he wrote down some nonsense about morning dew extract and moon essence to really tickle the bones of people like his dad who still believed in chakras and centered their entire personalities on their monthly horoscopes.

Anyone with a brain knows it's gibberish but everyone else just sees cursive writing in a fancy-looking bottle and decides the price of five Nuros is definitely not overinflated.

And really, if you truly believed in any of those two concepts then the spiritual satisfaction you'll get from the beet syrup might actually be worth the price.

So technically, Eli was not a fraudster

He just had a very specific type of audience.