The next day,

Dan returned from school to an empty house. His parents were still at their restaurant.

He quickly passed through the empty living room and climbed the stairs. He entered his room and changed his clothes to a blue jean and a black t-shirt with a white sneaker. He then exited the house, anticipation bubbling inside him.

His money making scheme was simple and based on one thing. Herbs.

Just like humans, herbs had mutated. But in a different way than their counterparts like trees just like humans had mutated differently than the other animals.

Some herbs increased only slightly in size but their medicinal or even poisonous effects had increased sharply.

That meant that the healing or blood thickening herbs had better effects on human body and almost worked instantaneously almost like magic.

And the branch of science dealing with such herbs which used to be called Ayurveda had been renamed to Alchemy to fit the situation.

But not all herbs were medicinal. Some were poisonous and one of the most dangerous plant was something called Sissomo which would blind any human which came close enough to it. And being blind in the wild was like a dead man walking.

But what did the herbs had to do with Dan's way of earning money? Well, everything .

There was a herb called simply the strength herb. It granted a person slight increase in strength and better physique instantly after consuming it.

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The increase wasn't much but it was still a slight increase and stack it up enough times, a person would be able to notice the increase.

But all good things must come to an end. And the strength herb would also lose its effects after eating it for around ten times.

The strength was a very useful for normal humans or even some metahumans but this herb had one of the most annoying features, it looked exactly the same as another herb which was called Tej herb and also grew in almost same environment making it incredibly difficult to differentiate between the two. But Tej was just an aromatic herb. So no one would want to pick that in large amounts like the strength herb.

But the herb picker had no choice to pick all the herbs that looked like strength herb and Tej herb. And then they would come back to city and sell it like a lottery saying that there was some chance of finding couple of strength herbs which would sell for thousand Zemos a piece on a bundle of tej herbs that cost 500 Zemos.

And there really was a chance of finding one but it was just that the differences between the two herbs were so minute,it was hard to differentiate between them with naked eyes.

And then came Dan's part who had an AI inside his brain that knew every small detail about both of the herbs which Dan had stuffed into it by reading the encyclopedia that he had borrowed from school.

While others would need to scrutinize the herb very slowly and carefully, Dan could just ask Lang to scan it. Lang not only would be able to see better details then a normal person, it was also incredibly fast in recognising the differences. Just a glance would be enough for Lang to recognize the herb.

And Dan's plan was to buy couple of bundles of those herbs and go through them. A bundle would have around couple of hundred Tej herbs and if Dan went through five of those bundles which would cost Dan 2500 Zemos, it would be around a Thousand Tej herbs.

And even if the chance of finding a single strength herb was one in hundred then Dan would be able to find ten which would sell for ten thousand Zemos. His money would quadruple.

It was a neat way of money making and people who had nothing better to do usually did this. But their success wouldn't be as as much as Dan expected his to be. Dan had foolproof plan of success with it unlike others.

Dan exited his house and reached the main road where he hailed a taxi. He asked the driver to take him to a market which was just a bit far from Dan's house. The market was where herbs were bought and sold and there were even some herbal shops selling medicine made from herbs.

Dan arrived at the market and paid the driver who took a U turn and drove away.

He watched the taxi drive away and then turned to the market.

The market was just two rows of shops with a road in the middle with many different wares and people browsing through the shops.

Dan entered the market and instantly, different noise bombarded his ears. The chatter of the shopkeepers and the customers arguing with those shopkeepers filled the whole market. Some were advertising their wares while some were calling out to customers. It was a mayhem.

Dan shook his head, a bit freaked out by the noise and crowd. Even the inner city that he had visited before didn't have this much crowd. He wasn't used to this kind of crowd.

He walked through the crowd of black hairs and turned his head left and right, combing through the shops.

Dan checked every shop as he travelled deeper searching for Tej leaves and a couple of minutes of search later, he found one shop with a basket full of herbs that looked like Tej herbs.