It had been months since the incident with that young adventurer ending up in the sewers, but Pill still made sure to rigorously check his basement for any structural flaws, also taking the time to double check the quality of his supplies as well. In truth, he’d been rather lax with this in the past. These kinds of checks were always done by his father, so he tended to ignore them in favour of the things more directly related to his work.

Nothing made that more clear than the level he’d gained from just the first one, just this one extra addition to his routine was such an improvement that he got his first level in months.

Such a time consuming task was difficult to slot into his already thoroughly well balanced routine, but that was easily solved by waking at 6:00am instead of 6:30, which was a minor issue. In fact, his routine was largely unaffected, the task never took longer than expected because he never needed to do anything other than check. One would think that made the whole endeavour useless, but all it took was one day without and problems could begin to arise.

No, it’s best to be Meticulous whenever possible, especially for an Alchemist. It was as his father always said, “If an Alchemist is not Meticulous with everything they do, then even a minor failure could be disastrous”. Perhaps it wasn’t the most concise saying, but it got the message across and that’s what mattered.

At 6:30, after finishing the necessary checks on the basement, Pill would do a quick once over of his alchemy equipment and, seeing no missing or damaged equipment, get to work on replenishing his stock.

This generally takes the better part of the day, and most of that time would be spent on producing Low to Mid-Grade Healing Potions. Once a month he was also able to make a High-Grade Healing Potion, but that took so little time that it tended to lay within the usual margin of error for making the rest of the potions for that day.

Generally a few buffs and utility potions would also need to be restocked, but aside from a few outliers (such as when the young adventurer, Robert if he remembered correctly, came to buy nearly a dozen) he would only sell a few every day.

Throughout this process he would often be interrupted by customers coming in and out of the store to purchase this or that. Most of what he sold was potions, but he preferred to think of his store as one for Alchemists to get their supplies from, so several people would come in looking for equipment and ingredients.

Finally, at any time between 3:00 and 4:00pm, he would finish with the necessities and begin work on his own personal projects. Many of these are simply for his own amusement or just to see if he can, such as when he made a potion that cycled through a variety of colours but had no effect when drunk, but he often also used this time working on special orders and experiments designed to assist in levelling his Skills.

On this day in particular, he was working on a potion that could be spread across a suit of armour in order to disguise the affinity of the person underneath. They didn’t specify any particular affinity, just that it had to be high, so Pill opted to attempt to create what he had taken to calling a Life Mage Disguise Potion.

The individual who asked for this was quite peculiar, but that was nothing new when dealing with adventurers and the like, so he thought little of it. Although this one was strange even among such a diverse group. Their armour in particular was very… Well, eye catching would probably be one way to describe it.

Pushing these useless thoughts from his head, Pill got to work on the potion. It was actually quite a challenge, and he found no notes on any similar potions in his recipe book so he would have to work from scratch on this one.

Not that that was any trouble at all, his particular Skill set lent itself quite well to experimenting with unknown combinations so it was highly unlikely that he’d face any negative consequences. The cost didn’t matter at the very least, the adventurer had been willing to pay more based on how long he needed to work on it. Honestly, they were lucky that he wasn’t the type to take advantage of those who didn’t understand how to properly barter, it would be trivially easy for any Alchemist to pretend the potion was more difficult than it truly is.

After working for the remainder of his open hours, and then some, Pill had yet to make much headway. The difficult part was creating a substance to block any outgoing affinity, but he imagined that getting it to play nicely with whatever high affinity substance he used to make the disguise would be even harder.

At 9:00pm, he turned the sign on the door around and locked it before properly cleaning his equipment and placing the remaining ingredients into their places. He’d managed to take quite a few pages of notes on his progress, which would be sorted and reduced in size for his recipe book once he managed to finish the potion.

The remainder of the evening was spent doing any of the household chores that needed doing, preparing then eating a meal, and taking a short time to relax and read whatever book he’d recently taken an interest in. Finally, at 10:30pm, Pill went to sleep and woke up at exactly 6:00 the next morning without dreaming at all.

----------------------------------------

Over the next few days Pill continued his routine with the same regularity that he’d been practising since he began his apprenticeship under his father, such that almost every aspect repeated itself in the same way.

The main thing that differed, of course, was the time he spent on the Life Mage Disguise Potion. Thus far he’d been able to make a great amount of progress. Using the hide of a Dark Stalker, he was able to produce a clear substance that was able to either absorb or reflect the outgoing effects of the affinity present in a human body. It was hard to say whether it would work for the other races without one of them here to test but they weren’t so different that affinity would work any differently so that was likely unnecessary.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

The difficult part was, as expected, combining the effects of the concealment with something that could mimic the affinity of a skilled Life Mage.

After the first failures he made sure to check a few other affinities to see if they could be any more effective, but whenever any affinitied substance was mixed with the concealer its detectable effects were reduced by as much as 95%

There were very few materials that could produce as much affinity as even a rookie Mage, at least out of those that were accessible to him, so his best bet was likely still the Life affinity, thanks to its abundance in Dillak.

Pill frowned as he looked through his notes, the only thing that would be able to produce enough would be the Life Essence he could extract from a Life Core, but his was still over a week from producing anything substantial, and he would much rather use it for High-Grade Healing potions anyway.

How very puzzling. What to do?

He was broken from his musings by the bell above his door ringing, so he put those thoughts aside and hastily put away anything that couldn’t be left in the open before heading out into the store front.

As he walked up to the door, he immediately sensed a great amount of Life Affinity, accompanied by a comparatively great amount of Lightning Affinity. The Lightning looked to be similar to that of Robert, however the Life threw him for a loop.

Could he be accompanied by a Life Mage? How peculiar.

Of course, such thoughts were useless when he was about to go out to greet the pair anyway, so they were put aside in favour of preparing to greet them.

Opening the door, he began to greet Robert before being stalled by the shocking presence of the one accompanying him. Or, more accurately, the thing. A medium Life Core floated beside him, wreathed in ropes of Lightning that seemed to be what held it aloft.

“Is that a Life Core? I take it you came across a Life Slime in your travels.” Of course he could already guess that, but it was polite to make an attempt at conversation, and being polite was the best way to retain a good relationship with customers.

“I had a job to kill a Giant Slime, that’s where I got it,” Ah yes, I forgot about their more common name.

“Yes, that’s the same thing. Life Slime is the more accurate name,” Time seemed to slow as his Fast Thoughts Skill activated, and he foresaw that an explanation would not go well with the boy, quickly changing courses to something more relevant “but I supposed you’re not here to learn why, are you? You want to sell it to me?”

“Yeah, I heard it was valuable to Alchemists.”

“Very much so, any self respecting Alchemist has at least a small part of a Life Core, for some of the more potent healing potions and such. This isn’t the largest I’ve seen, but it will certainly be good for a dozen shards or so,” This was quite a fortuitous encounter and, though not usually one to rely on luck, he was quite grateful for it on this day. With such a large Core getting the required essence for a functioning potion would be trivial, and each of the shards should sell for enough that he could perhaps spend more than usual on some esoteric ingredients.

“Yeah, yeah, that makes sense,” Robert paused for a fraction of a second, short enough that someone without Fast Thinking would be unlikely to notice, “So how much is it worth then?”

"Let’s say 20 silver,” He planned to start with a lower amount in order to make him more amenable to something closer to the actual value, but he instantly foresaw him accepting thoughtlessly and had to stop, “No, wait. You were about to accept weren’t you? I understand that you’re not an Alchemist yourself, but I just told you how valuable this is.”

Pill sighed internally before deciding to just stick with the most widely accepted value, “One of this size would typically sell for 30 silver, so let’s do that, hmm?”

“Ok, sure. For real this time?” He sighed externally this time, before nodding his assent and collecting the required silver from the safe under the desk. The Core was floated towards him, where he held out a palm to catch it at the same time as he handed the money towards Robert.

The adventurer spent a few moments attempting to make polite conversation whilst Pill tried to politely tell him to leave so that he could close shop and finally finish the Life Mage Disguise Potion.

And then I need to break the Core down to shards of the standard 2cm diameter. It should be manageable.

Now that material concerns were less of an issue, finishing the potion was the work of just a few minutes in real time. Though to him it felt like much longer, thanks to a combination of him constantly using Fast Thoughts and checking to make sure each movement wouldn’t cause the potion to fail before he made it.

The rest of the evening was spent carefully breaking apart the Core, making sure that no shards smaller than 2cm fell off so as to not waste anything. This was possibly more challenging than the potion, since his Skills only technically helped at all. It was really the job of a Craftsman, but he was quite adept at pushing his Skills to their limits, so it was eventually completed with no further issues.

Once that was finished he went through his usual evening routine of chores and relaxation before, as he does every night, checking the changes to his Status at the end of the day.

Pill Meldrum Oath: Meticulous Alchemist 35 Level 32 Willpower 21 Wisdom

36 Strength

8 Agility

15 Path Skills

Thoroughly Inspect Ingredient

38 Cleanly Cut Ingredient

35 Perfect Memorisation

46 Understand Properties

49 Combine Effects

28 Educated Prediction

General Skills MAX Fast Thoughts

MAX Restful Sleeping

MAX Cleaning

8 Barter

7 Efficient Note Taking

9

Educated Planner