The following morning, though, after a bit of sourdough toast with butter and jam, Kene, Dusk, and I all headed out to the village blacksmith.

For my part, I was amazed that the village actually had a blacksmith.

Mass production and imports from Teffordshire had all but replaced the role of the humble blacksmith for my life, and while there were probably specialty shops that could make a sword or whatever, but I wouldn’t head to a blacksmith to get a new door hinge or anything.

I supposed that the supply lines to get things out to a small village like this one were harder, though. You could only load so much onto a flying carpet, after all, even with expanded storage crates.

The village’s blacksmith was a tall woman with short cropped salt and pepper hair, and arm muscles so big that it looked like she could crush my head just by flexing.

“Ah, Kene!” she said when we walked in. “Looking better. Who’s your… friend?”

“I’m Malachi,” I said, shaking her hand, then nodded to my shoulder. “And this is Dusk.”

“We need a cauldron made,” Kene explained. “Unless you’ve got one already.”

“Oh, sure,” she said. “Is there a size you need?”

I looked at Kene, who scratched their chin. I felt a flash of dysphoria for a moment and sighed.

“We need two sizes,” Kene eventually said. “One of them about a gallon and a half, and the other one somewhere in the fifteen-to-twenty-gallon range.”

“So big?” I asked.

“There’s two general approaches to brewing potions,” Kene said. “Small batches, which are what you’ve done so far. But when I need to whip up a massive amount of cough medication for the village, a big old cauldron’s the best tool for the job. You may not need to brew that specifically, but if you wanted to mass produce potions, the big cauldron’s definitely the better method.”

That made sense, so I didn’t contest it. The blacksmith actually already had an eighteen-gallon cauldron readymade, cast iron with a layer of ceramic on the inside that could stop things from sticking, and stopped things from leeching through the metal.

The thrice-cursed thing weighed more than a third of what I did, though, so I was glad for the blacksmith’s help in bringing it into Dusk’s realm.

“Making the smaller cauldron’s probably gonna take me about four hours,” the smith warned. “You can come back later today to pick it up.”

I wasn’t sure how long I expected making a cauldron to take. Four hours felt both shorter and longer than I’d expected, though. On one hand, she was taking bars of metal and turning them into something actually useful. But on the other hand, magic. I felt like she could wave her hand and cast ‘Create Cauldron’ or something.

Maybe she didn’t use telluric magic, though. I had no idea. I paid her, and then we left, entering Dusk’s realm to begin the process of turning a large cooking vessel into a witch’s cauldron.

Kene rooted around in his closet for a while before finally emerging, leaving me tempted to make a joke about him coming out of it. I opted not to, however, because he was carrying a thick, leatherbound book. It looked old, too.

“This is one of the gifts that my grandmother gave me,” he said. “It’s an introductory guide to witchcraft. It has all sorts of instructions in here for basic potions, the rules of alchemy, basic enchantments, and that sort of thing. Most importantly for our case, it contains the spell diagrams needed for a cauldron.”

I waved my hand and snapped a portal to Dusk’s realm open.

“Let’s work in here, since the cauldron’s already inside.”

They looked uncertain for a moment, so I stepped in and held out my hand.

“It’ll be fine,” I promised. “The small folk won’t mind you.”

Kene looked unconvinced, but they followed me inside anyways, and we made our way over to the cauldron. Kene plopped down in the grass and paged through the book, while Dusk and I set about preparing the area around the cauldron.

A ring of river stones would make for decent containment for the fire, and Dusk was able to shift the plants out of the way, then dry out the earth underneath.

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I didn’t have any firewood on hand, and there was no way I would be turning any of my plants into them, so while Kene refreshed themselves on the methodology, I quickly nipped over to the store to pick up a bag of coal.

When I got back, Kene had turned the pot upside down, and nodded to me.

“Ready?”

“Yep,” I said as I put the coal down.

First, they showed me a spell that reminded me a lot of a simplified version of Capture Moment or Spatial Anchor, and I used my ungated mana to cast it into the cauldron.

It burned through ungated mana at an absurd rate, so I converted down my gated mana in order to get it done. Once it was finally finished, Kene nodded.

“Alright, we’ve created the cauldron’s sustaining core,” Kene said. “Now, we need to infuse the mana channels for the other functions. The pseudo-harvest-enhancing is needed obviously, but there’s also a few in here that I’d recommend. Even heating, for example. A few cleaning ones… Actually, grandmother put in nearly three dozen cleaning ones, and I’ve no clue why. Most of them do the same thing, just different designs.”

“That one sounds useful,” I said. “Maybe not… Thirty of them, though.”

In the end, we settled for a heat distribution, cleaning, and a variant of cleaning magic that would allow me to use the cauldron as a combination washing and drying machine in a pinch.

All of them required the cauldron to be fed with a continuous stream of ungated mana in order to function, which meant the washing and drying machine effect was undeniably worse than the real thing, but it was still better than nothing at all.

We covered the inside and outside of the cauldron in chalk, shaped into the spell diagrams for each of the effects, as well as the connections that would let them connect to the core. Once the chalk was done, Dusk and I had to go in and layer heavy bands of ungated mana into them to actually conduct mana and form the magic.

They’d also serve as something of a connection between Dusk and the cauldron, which could let her do a bit of alchemy of her own.

“My fingers are cramping,” I complained as I traced through the chalk.

“You’re lucky that you’re only using ungated enchantments,” Kene said. “For something like a broom, the cores require a lot more power to get off the ground, and typically the arrays need to be reinforced with the use of solidified mana. It’s way harder to try and arrange rituals with that than chalk.”

“I feel so lucky,” I said dryly, then reconsidered. I was saving a lot of money. I could deal with a bit of finger cramps.

“Well if it helps, the smaller cauldron won’t need the washing machine effect,” Kene said with a grin. “And you’ll only have to empower the core when you advance. Since they’re connected, you don’t have to do it all over again.”

By the time we were finished, the small cauldron was nearly ready anyways, so we had a quick lunch of cold cut sandwiches and went out to fetch it and repeat the whole process.

The hand cramping was even worse in the small cauldron, since I had to try and write the diagrams in a much smaller space, and Kene laughed at my good-natured complaints.

“Done, finally!”

“Congrats,” they said with a lazy grin. “Now you’ve got some of the tools of alchemy.”

“Maybe one day I’ll even have a proper alchemy lab and house in here,” I said, glancing around. Dusk chimed cheerfully, telling me she hoped I would soon.

At the end of the day, it all came back to money, though. I needed money to build a house, even if Dusk was able to help me cut down on a lot of costs. I needed money to repay Orykson.

“How’d you get your house?” I asked Kene. “I mean, you’re about my age, maybe a year or so older, but you already have a house and shop and stuff.”

“I didn’t exactly buy it,” Kene said. “You have to understand, there are only about a thousand people in the village. I may not know every one of them by name, but I take care of all of them. I charge them for stuff, sure, but a lot of them need things and can’t pay. So, we usually work out an exchange. That’s how I got the house and shop. It was an investment that they made in me, in order to let me invest in them. I helped a lot of people with their problems.”

“Huh,” I said. That concept was so foreign to me, but… I supposed that if it worked, it worked.

“Speaking of, though, if I’m going to head into the city for the Festival of Color, I should get things sorted out here,” Kene said. “And as fun as it’s been to have you around, it’s going to be pretty boring.”

“Kicking me out already?” I asked, putting on an overblown pouty face.

“Hey, hey now,” Kene said. “Kicking you out is a strong way to word it. If you really want to stay and listen to me doing the most boring things imaginable, then you’re welcome to do as much.”

“Nah, it’s fine,” I said, shaking my head. “I do hope you can get it sorted, though. Is there anything I can get you? Even if it’s just some extra mana or something.”

Kene actually paused and seriously considered it for a few moments before they shook their head.

“I don’t think so. Thank you, though. By the way, how’s your magic going? Are there any spells or mana types you need to work on? I remember you looked at Verdant Pasture Powder once. Do you need more life mana?”

I paused, completely thrown off by the random question, and squinted at Kene. They gave me an absolutely cherubic smile that only served to make me more suspicious, not less.

“Spatial magic’s the main thing I need to master more spells in,” I said. “Though really, everything needs help there, apart from life. I need to raise the walls in my entire mana-garden, but I can work on that later, once I get everything up to standard.”

“I see,” Kene said, still giving me an innocent smile.

“Is there anything you’d want?” I asked, putting on an innocent smile of my own.

“Weirdly enough? Clothes,” Kene said. “Also nail polish. There are some options for both in the village, of course, even a charity shop for those who really can’t afford it. But compared to downtown? There’s nothing at all.”

I made a humming sound of agreement and squinted at them, trying to guess at their sizes.

“Noted,” I finally said. They gave me a grateful smile, then paused and pulled me into a brief hug.

“Thanks,” they said, then let me go. “I’m looking forward to our date.”

“Me too,” I said, smiling back at them. Another round of goodbyes passed, and then I headed out to fly back to the city. By the time I finally got back, it was incredibly late in the evening. I still woke up Ed and my dad for just a moment to let them know I was doing okay, before I passed out.