When Hans approached Uncle Ed to talk about Kane’s tournament aspirations, he found him readying his wagons for another run to Raven’s Hollow. Hearing the topic, Uncle Ed suggested they include Galad, so they agreed to meet at Ed’s house later that night.

“I’d be honored to be a father to those boys,” Uncle Ed said, “but I have no right or place to make them do what I say, so whatever answer I give has to make enough sense that Kane agrees.”

“My deal with Kane and Quentin gives you that right in this case. Roland too.”

“What did Roland say?”

“Don’t know yet,” Hans admitted. “He’s on a hunt right now.”

Galad, sitting across the kitchen table from Hans, said, “I’d expect him to defer to your opinion, Ed. Maybe not completely, but you’re the only one of us who has been outside of Gomi in the last year to know what it’s like.”

Uncle Ed tilted his head and scratched his beard as he thought. “Okay. I have some questions. First: should I be worried about Kane’s safety in a tournament like this? I’ve never seen one and don’t want to send him to get killed.”

“There’s always a risk in combat, sport or otherwise,” Hans answered, “but these days, tournaments following Guild rules are fairly safe. No one has died in one for maybe ten years now.”

The smuggler nodded. “Who all would go?”

Hans said that Kane and Quentin were the only students he’d be remotely comfortable sending to Osare. Kane was a local at this point, so it was possible that any previous visitors from Osare would remember him. If he sent the other tusk Apprentices, they would raise questions Gomi wasn’t ready to answer.

For Hans to tolerate the risk, he wanted Ed, Roland, and Terry to accompany the boys. All three of them could fight, and any one of them might be familiar to someone in Osare, though Ed was most likely given his wagon trips. Hans believed familiarity would reduce the chance of violence.

“I’d prefer you join us as well,” Ed said, “but I suppose your duties here won’t allow that.”

The Guild Master said that was indeed the case.

“I hate even asking this, but what if we get to Osare and they come after Kane like they did Bel and Lee?” Ed asked. “We’d do our best to run, of course, but we’d be running right back here.”

“I’ve thought about this topic since word of the war reached Gomi,” Galad said. “You’re right about the risk, but no matter what we do, we will reach this same crossroads. The only way to really know if it’s safe is to send a tusk to see if it’s safe. Like you said a few weeks back, a human gets treated differently.”

A memory sprang to Hans’ mind. He recalled getting along with Samson, a visiting worker from Osare and retired adventurer. All of his interactions with Hans and later with Charlie seemed warm and genuine, and they may have been. When Galinda appeared for a few moments, however, Samson made it clear that he felt no such warmth for tusks.

Hans looked at Galad and said, “When I first arrived here, you and Charlie were pretty adamant about not mentioning tusks in guild reports, but you’d be okay with this?”

“Ideals rarely survive against practicality. I don’t want any of our people to start traveling yet, but this isn’t a prison. Like Ed said, Kane is his own man. He’s headstrong enough that he might go on his own, and that’s the least safe for all of us.”

“I don’t like the idea of Kane being the first,” Ed said, bluntly. “He’s still a boy.”

“Is that your conclusion?” Galad asked.

Ed hesitated. “I know how much he wants this. When I get back from this delivery run, I’ll give you a firm answer. I’ll see if I can ruffle any feathers with tusk talk while I’m out. We’re far from the Capital, but a decree from the King might scare enough of them straight that they keep their thoughts to themselves.”

Hans and Galad agreed with that plan.

“For what it’s worth,” Ed said, “I hope he can go. Kid like that doesn’t deserve to be held back.”

***

Olza set a rack of test tubes on her shop counter and pointed to the one on her far left. It was half-full with a milky yellow liquid. “This is how much toad venom a Cure potion uses according to established recipes. You can make Cure potions with other ingredients of course, but if you’re using the goliath toad recipe, this is what all the textbooks say.”

The next vial over was a third full with green mucus, which Hans knew immediately to be slime. That too was the recommended amount of slime for the recipe.

“Then the last ingredient would be 2.3 ounces of ground garlic, which is about two bulbs. The garlic is important for the recipe, but I figured you knew what that looked like.”

Hans said he did.

“Okay, so technically there are other ingredients, but no more than a pinch during the brewing process. Little bit of charcoal, a few drops of water, but nothing substantial or expensive.”

When Olza pointed to the other side of the rack, Hans saw two vials, one for slime and one for goliath toad venom. The quantity of slime was slightly less in this vial, but the difference was minor enough that he had to look back and forth between the two to confirm. As for the toad venom, the difference was stark. That vial was only a fourth of the way full.

“When you said the toads would grow soon, I planned and prepped a few experiments. Most of them were around ingredient ratios or brewing steps, like boiling the mix for less or more time or using a higher or lower temperature. So far, I have found that the potion tested at the same potency with an increase in garlic, and a reduction of toad venom. It wasn’t as big a difference in volume as you see with these, but enough to slightly reduce the cost of producing the potion.”

Hans frowned, and Olza stopped her explanation to ask him why.

“This is probably the wrong thing to say to an alchemist,” Hans began, carefully. “But those experiments sound kind of obvious.”

“I’ve never been put in charge of research practices kingdom-wide. If it were up to me, these tests would have been done decades ago, but alchemists running businesses aren’t interested. If they have access to the toad venom, they already have a recipe that works and is pretty profitable. Fiddling with a pricey ingredient like that when you can just apply a predictable markup and be done with it isn’t appealing to most.”

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“Understood. I apologize if it sounded like I doubted you.”

“Did you doubt me?”

“Not directly…”

Olza squinted. “What does that even– No, we’ll have that conversation later. As I was saying, I think I found a better way to optimize the existing recipe, but what’s more interesting is my new recipe.” She pointed to the less full vials. “For this side, I used what I’m calling Mazo garlic.”

“Grown with your Blood magic technique.”

“Grown with my Earth magic technique. Stop calling it Blood magic or I’ll poison the next potion I give you.”

Hans held up his arms to surrender.

“One bulb of Mazo garlic, optimized for potency, reduces the volume of expensive ingredients needed while also being stronger than the current recipe.”

“How much Mazo garlic do you have?”

The Alchemist looked slightly defeated by the question. “I only had a few bulbs, and I used almost every clove in these experiments.”

Currently, Olza admitted, the need for Mazo garlic made the potion cost-prohibitive. Regular garlic needed the better part of a year to grow. Mazo garlic was ready in about half that time, but the nature of the Earth magic technique limited how often she could influence the growth of her plants. The process required substantial amounts of mana, and alchemists didn’t work to grow their mana pools. Typically, they never needed more mana than they had naturally, so training to improve it didn’t make sense.

Which also meant she couldn’t grow a field of Mazo garlic.

If she couldn’t scale how much Mazo garlic she grew, her discovery was much less valuable. The old recipe was more economical in that case and substantially so.

“Is garlic used in a lot of potions?”

“Nearly any potion with restorative qualities of some kind requires garlic. Cure Disease and Healing potions are the other big ones.”

“Does this same method work for Healing potions?” Hans asked.

“I don’t know, Hans,” Olza said, a tinge of frustration in her voice, “I didn’t order more mandrake because someone promised me an ‘endless’ supply. Now I barely have enough for orders let alone experiments.”

Hans argued that it was not his fault. The Lady of the Forest planted the deceptive memory, and he had no reason to suspect it was anything but a mandrake elemental. The bestiary didn’t even have an entry for fool’s root elementals!

“I can test Cure Disease next and by then I’ll have mandrake, so I’ll just do that test last. But I need your perspective. Do we continue down the path of the Mazo garlic? At which point our challenge will be finding a way to grow more and do so more efficiently. Or, knowing we could spend months on the garlic with no results, do we mark this down as a novel observation and move on to other experiments?”

“Now you want my opinion?” Hans grinned.

Olza scowled.

“What are your thoughts?” he asked.

Olza shook her head. “I want to hear yours first. My answer might bias yours.”

Staring at the vials on the counter, Hans thought. Olza knew that might take the Guild Master a few minutes, so she excused herself to check on her active projects in the lab.

When she returned, she asked if he had an answer. He did.

Hans said they should pursue the Mazo garlic, arguing that the potential of the impact warranted the risk of not finding a viable solution. In his mind, garlic was a known crop grown throughout the kingdom. Any solution they considered would be measured against that. If Mazo garlic was more difficult to grow than regular garlic, they would be back to the original recipe because it would be cheaper and easier.

But if they figured it out, the cost of potions critical to life would drop substantially. If the common ingredient–garlic–was now more effective, alchemists would need far less of the costly ingredients to achieve the same effect.

“When I say ‘we’ should go that way,” Hans began to say, “I know I’m really saying that you do the work while I give you verbal encouragement but contribute nothing else of value.”

Chuckling, Olza said, “My thoughts were the same as yours. I asked Galad about growing garlic already, and he said I should talk to Luther. I didn’t know this, but apparently the way the Tribe rotates crops is all Luther’s doing.”

“I didn’t know that either.”

“So I’m going to talk to Luther next time I’m up the mountain. In my mind, every solution ends with Mazo garlic being a farmable resource.”

“Because no matter what, you ultimately need garlic seeds for this to work,” Hans added, building on Olza’s thought.

“Cloves–garlic is normally grown from cloves–but yes. The fastest way would be planting Mazo garlic cloves, which we can start tomorrow if we want. I saved three cloves from my batch for that reason. If those cloves won’t grow or the influence of my Earth magic doesn’t pass on, then we’d have to try selective breeding. Look for the garlic with the most potion potency, replant those, pull the most potent from that batch, plant again, and so on.”

Hans said that sounded slow.

She agreed. “It might be too slow to bother trying, honestly. We’d be working with regular garlic, so we’d get one new generation a year of very incremental changes. Most plants you can cross-pollinate two strong specimens each generation to speed this up, but that’s not possible with garlic. Our only option is to replant and replant and replant.

“But if we pull this off,” Olza said, wistfully, “we can help a lot of people.”

When Hans asked whether or not this project would cut into her fool’s root distillation time, she pushed him out of her shop and locked the door.

***

Hans read his table of contents by lamplight. The manuscript for The Next Generation: A Teaching Methodology for Training Adventurers was not complete, but the more he wrote, the more he realized he couldn’t reasonably fit everything he wanted to cover in a single manuscript. Instead, he would divide his idea into multiple books based on rank.

The first volume would start with a person’s initial interest in adventuring and cover everything up to Iron. Iron to Bronze would then be its own book, then Bronze to Silver, and so on. He didn’t need to cover up to Diamond from the start to make a difference, and forcing himself to do so would delay the adoption of his methods by years.

If they’re adopted at all.

Galinda said one of Gomi’s newcomers had scribe experience. When Hans heard that, he was happy to pay for her services so he could finally send a copy to Theneesa. She had requested more material for years, and he could finally make good on obliging her. Yet, he hesitated. Having the manuscript copied felt like sealing the words in resin. Once Theneesa had her copy, she would start implementing changes right away, making the future of her students at least partially reliant on Hans’ teaching for their survival.

What if he was wrong?

As he considered his answer, a new question formed.

What if he was right, and he held back knowledge that might have saved lives?

He gathered the pages and slid them into a leather pouch. If he gave the manuscript to the scribe tomorrow, she might have it completed in time for the next merchant caravan.

He still couldn’t think of a penname though.

***

Open Quests (Ordered from Old to New):

Progress from Gold-ranked to Diamond-ranked.

Mend the rift with Devon.

Using a pen name, complete the manuscript for "The Next Generation: A Teaching Methodology for Training Adventurers."

Expand the dungeon with resource-specific monsters for each of Gomi’s major trades.

Find a way for Gomi adventurers to benefit from their rightful ranks in the Adventurers’ Guild.

Secure a way to use surplus dungeon inventory for good.

Expand the dungeon using the ogre valley job as a blueprint.

Investigate entering Kane and Quentin in the Osare combat tournament.