I’d offered to make extra potions. I’d offered the town storage crystals packed full of mana. I’d offered them a teleportation platform – though to be fair, I’d given a few dozen of those away already, so that last one wasn’t much of an offer.
Shel had declined all of that. She knew what she wanted, and she knew I wanted access to their reagents bad enough that she could push for it. I spared a moment to remember the old days, when I just took what I wanted, stepping over literal bodies if I had to. I was a very different person now, and had been for centuries, but at the moment, it had a certain appeal.
But no, this was a petty annoyance that didn’t actually cost me anything other than an extremely limited amount of extra mana teleporting her along with me. Somewhat ungraciously, I accepted the deal. It stung all the more because I could see an amused twinkle in Karad’s eyes.
“Fantastic!” Shel said. “I’ll have my people start gathering everything up immediately.”
She rushed out the door, followed by the other Arborists, leaving me alone with Karad. The former leader of Alkerist regarded me silently for a second, then said, “So how many years did you give up to make yourself look like an adult.”
I shrugged. “A decade or so, I suppose. It hardly matters much when I have a lifespan measured in millennia.”
“You haven’t changed much, have you?”
“It’s a little late in life to still be figuring out who I am,” I said dryly. “I’m at the point where I’m rounding my total age to the nearest century and occasionally losing track.”
Karad shook his head, bemused. “Ancestors guide me. I can’t even imagine what kind of thinking a life like that leads to. It’s a wonder you’re as well-adjusted as you are.”
“Some people wouldn’t agree with your assessment of me. I can think of more than a few who think of me as a right bastard.”
“Oh, you are,” Karad agreed. “It hasn’t been so many years that I’ve forgotten what dealing with you was like. As soon as you told us what you wanted, I knew you’d get it. The only real question was how much we could convince you to pay for it.”
“I’m not that bad,” I protested. “I always paid a fair amount for anything I needed.”
“Negotiating with you is like trying to talk the weather into behaving. Maybe the village gets what it needs, but it’s more of a coincidence than because of anything we did. That’s one of the big reasons you rubbed so many people the wrong way. That and the fact that no one likes being bullied by someone who’s less than three feet tall, regardless of how old they actually are.”
“Yes, I recall that being a point of contention.”
Apparently, Karad was planning on babysitting me while we waited. That was probably just for his own peace of mind rather than out of any foolish belief that he could stop me if I decided to do something he didn’t like. If he was here, he could at least try to talk me out of it instead of having to clean up after I was done.
“For all you rubbed us the wrong way, though, you’ve honestly done a lot to help this whole island. Heh, ‘island.’ We didn’t even know we were on an island ten years ago. We barely knew the names of the next village over and the city Noctra came from. And forget about magic. I kind of suspect, looking back on it now, that Noctra knew almost nothing, too. There are probably six or seven people in this village now who are better mages than he was.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me, to be honest. You’re right that Noctra was not a very good mage. I don’t know if he was even technically a true mage. His core was ignited, but his skills were lacking. His assistant knew more magic than he did; she just lacked the ability to generate her own mana at any appreciable rate.”
“Ah. Her…” Karad trailed off with a dark scowl. I supposed his position as the guy who enforced the rules had probably put him in close contact with Iskara, the governor’s aide and the woman truly in charge of everything. No doubt he had plenty of bad memories that he’d recovered after I’d killed both Noctra and Iskara. Without them there to maintain all the mind magic they’d been laying on people, a whole lot of negative feelings had cropped up about the pair.
“Enough of bad times,” I said. “How has this new village been doing since you founded it?”
“A bit of a rough start, but having everybody here able to produce mana with an ignited core has smoothed things out considerably. Other than a few kids who haven’t reached that point yet, we’re all able to spend mana freely to grow crops and defend Vestrus from the rare monsters that find us all the way out here.”
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“No teleportation platform, though. You’re completely disconnected from everywhere else.”
Karad shrugged. “For now. Someday, I’m sure we’ll reach out to your new town to buy one.”
I laughed. “Nobody buys one. I give them away.”
“You do?”
“You have to power it yourself, but yes. It doesn’t take very long to make a platform. The mana banks are the expensive portion. The rest is just a chunk of stone. Do you want one?”
“You’re really just giving something like that away? There has to be a catch.”
“There isn’t, but you don’t have to accept it. I don’t really care one way or another. I doubt I’ll ever be back after today.”
While Karad turned that offer over and tried to spot the non-existent trap in it, I watched Shel organize about twenty people into harvesting herbs from various gardens scattered throughout the village. She personally hit no less than three greenhouses, where I was pleased to see her gardening skills had grown considerably since back when we’d been working in the greenhouses of Old Alkerist. The various plants that required mana to thrive were all healthy and green. Even some of the tricky ones that could die if they were oversaturated were in perfect condition.
It was going to be a few hours before everything was packaged up, which unfortunately left me with some time to kill. I looked back at Karad and asked, “You make a decision yet?”
* * *
Shel and I stood on Vestrus’s new teleportation platform while I filled it with enough mana for a single trip. All the herbs were packed up in baskets or crates and safely stowed away in my phantom space, meaning we’d be leaving in about twenty seconds.
“—tell her I’ll deal with it tomorrow when I get back,” Shel was telling one of the Arborists.
“But Shel, you know she’s going to want an answer now. It’ll only take a few minutes. Can’t you take care of that before you leave?”
Shel shot a glance at me, but I shook my head. Turning back to the Arborist, she said, “Guess n—”
Then the world vanished and we reappeared in my biggest alchemy lab inside my demesne. “—ot,” Shel finished. She blinked and looked around. “Oh, damn. This is a lot of equipment. Is this how you’re going to make everything so fast?”
“It’s part of it,” I said. “Having six tables and being good enough to keep all of them running smoothly at the same time will speed things up, but the real trick is the refined recipes. Alchemy requires a lot of expensive trial and error to truly distill a potion down to the fewest steps and least amount of materials, but fortunately for us, I’ve long since done that work.”
“Or stolen someone else’s work,” she added.
“Yes, or that. Now, let’s get started processing this stuff. You can help with that while you bombard me with questions.”
I set her up with a mortar and pestle to pulp a stack of leaves into the powdered base we’d need for the ointments while I used some very precise force spells and delicate telekinesis to dice up everything else. While we worked, I explained what spells I was using, how to cast them, and what sorts of drills worked best for practicing this kind of magic without wasting expensive materials.
Shel’s questions, just as annoyingly thorough as I recalled them being, did not stop there. She got ahead of the process and started questioning me on the tools filling the work stations, with a special focus on the heat emitters. Those had been finely tuned by various enchantments to hold exact temperatures, something that was vitally important in alchemy.
“I want one,” she said. “No, actually, I want five of them. How much would you charge to make them?”
“I won’t make them for you, but if you really need them that badly, there’s a guy named Tetrin who makes his living off commissions like that. I’ll help you get in contact with him and you can negotiate the rate.”
“Will they be as good as yours?”
I pointed to one of the heaters on the back table. “He made that one. His work is good enough that I have no problem using it.”
She considered that for a moment before putting down the mortar and walking over to examine the heater. “I can’t see a difference between this and the one I was looking at before.”
“How about that?” I deadpanned.
“I know, I know. But can you blame me for wanting to experience it for myself? Why take someone’s word for it when you don’t have to?”
It went on like that for another hour or so while we finished prepping anything. Then I started loading up the tables, which prompted a whole new round of questions every time my method deviated from the one she knew.
“Why are you putting the base in first? Isn’t there too much air in the flask if you do it this way?”
“That’s not enough calbera root for a full dose.”
“Why doesn’t your recipe use gold thistle? And what are you substituting for it?”
Some questions I answered. Some I ignored. Shel seemed to have a sixth sense for when she was growing too annoying and would occasionally get quiet for a few minutes. It never lasted though, and it was with a great amount of relief that I finished up the last part of the order a few hours later and placed it in the box.
“Here you go. One contract fulfilled, and the leftover reagents are now mine,” I said.
She peered into the box and silently counted it all up, even though she’d done that several times already while I was preparing the very last part. While she was busy doing that, I teleported us both across my demesne to the platform I used for traveling to the outside world, causing her to start and almost drop the box.
“I’d appreciate if you didn’t destroy all of that,” I told her. “I’m not in the mood to make it again.”
“No, that would be bad,” she agreed. “The sudden jump was just surprising, is all. I suppose this is goodbye for now, then?”
“For now,” I said, having absolutely no intention of ever seeing this most annoying of temporary students ever again if I could help it.
I sent her back to the new platform in her home village, then let out a long groan. “What a day,” I muttered.
Querit appeared next to me just then. “Who was that?” he asked.
“It’s a long story. Trust me, that one’s too much of a nuisance to want to get to know. What’s important is that I got what we needed to start running the experiments on dissolving mysteel.”
“So soon? And here I thought we might actually get a few weeks off.”
“No such luck,” I said. “To the lab.”