"6 years of hard work, and I almost didn't make it. My current affinity with soul energies is barely enough to learn the Spirit And Ghost Memory Observing Technique. Now I can finally start learning the secrets of profession guilds and cultivation sects and magic towers without joining any of them."

"Time to finally leave this inheritance area, so it can be locked away from the rest of the world for a few centuries or millennia, to recharge it's power."

And after a few days of packing things up, I was finally ready to leave. Packing things up took a lot of time, using the few spatial storage artifacts I had, most of them with only a small space, and most of them gotten as a reward for learning skills and techniques and using them in this inheritance area.

Taking a deep and long look at the inheritance area I was leaving behind, I bowed in respect and said a few word, before taking another look at the inheritance area and leaving through the teleportation area.

"Thank you for everything! I will try to make good use of it."

= = =

Just like when I got into the inheritance realm alone, when I got out of it I also somehow ended asleep. Thankfully for me, the inheritance realm placed a few protection spells on me, and they will thankfully last for a few more hours, allowing me to get back to a village only a few hundred kilometers away from the inheritance area which is now hidden from the world for a very long time, thankfully again.

"The journey would have been much longer, if not for there being a lake roughly 5 kilometers away from my current position, and that lake extending to as close as 40 kilometers from a village, from which I could join a caravan in exchange for using my energy to power up the caravan's defenses."

"With my current level, I should no longer need to spend a long time charging the caravan before being allowed to join it. When I was getting here to look for herbs to sell to the alchemy guild, I had to spend two days charging a battery, and slept like a log after each of those days, and still had to keep charging it during the one-day journey, and slept like a log after arriving, too. I barely had enough money to rent a tiny room with a single bed and a tiny window, both in the city and in the village, to be able to sleep without having my things taken away in my sleep."

"If I wasn't so poor, I could have simply used money to travel directly, but many transport companies allow people to tag along in exchange for charging the batteries of one of their vehicles for each person transported, to avoid having money exchange hands, and thus avoiding taxation. In short, they can save the cost of charging one vehicle, in exchange for having to pay someone to recharge it, and then receiving that payment from the same person, and then having to pay taxes for that money. They still need to pay taxes for that exchange, but a very small sum compared to the other way."

= = =

After a few hours of trekking, MC finally found the lake, and after a few more hours of making a raft and paddle, using vines underwater and waxed rope above water, and two paddles of different lengths, he was finally able to start heading to to the village.

Before heading for the village entrance, he decided to bring a large backpack from his storage items, to make himself less obviously holding storage items, and to make it less likely that people would target his goods. Carrying a backpack would make it more plausible to assume that he had no storage items, if he manage to hide them well.

A pair of summer clothes, a pair of autumn and spring clothes, and a pair of winter clothes, when paired together could stand even some of the worst winter days in the area, so they were obviously used, and the backpack itself was the quilt used as the mattress of the bed during summers, and used to cover both sides of the body during winters.

A thin cooking pot and cooking pan, a few wooden tools, a short knife, a short axe, and a foldable saw, was all that was needed to make others believe he was a traveler who braved the wilderness, and he used the rope he had, in order to tie it all together into a backpack.

And with the logs he left behind, his cover story of having used the lake to get here after leaving another village in which he worked as a coal mover for a coal mine, spending the whole day moving coal by dragging around a small coal cart he could carry, and spending the whole night sleeping, leaving him no time to do anything else in the last few years.

And to make the story more believable, he left because the mine got a new manager, so after getting his payment, he used most of it to get the things he needed to travel on foot, and having saved just barely enough money to get a few nights of sleep in the city, at least if the prices remained the same as he knew them to be the last time he visited, time which he hoped to spend finding a new job.

= = =

The journey was uneventful, and he finally landed a few meters away from the village entrance, beaching his raft, taking his rope, and leaving the logs to dry, so they can be taken by poor villagers, to use for heating their home, or for cooking.

With everything ready, he headed for the village's entrance.

= = =

It was another day of watching the empty village entrance, for the city guard with an injured leg, when a figure started approaching. After a few minutes of walking, the figure turned out to appear as a roughly 25 years old boy, though magic and cultivation makes appearances almost irrelevant, but the figure was leaking energy from his body in quantities indicating he is a mere level 6.

Not a threat, so far, but the guard was still prepared for the worst, as he was trained to be, and as he was reminded to be after his leg was injured by a running person trying to enter the village to hide from an angry group of sect members. Thankfully, he managed to stop the person, otherwise the sect might think he is siding with the runner and punish him, too.

And remembering those things helped pass the time until the figure approached him.

[Boy] "Hello! I would like to enter the village."

[Guard] "That would cost 10 copper coins or 10 units of energy. If you agree, state your name and purpose, otherwise leave."

[Boy] "I am Mirru Cartrack, I want to get something to eat and find a merchant leaving for a nearby city, and I will pay with energy."

[Guard] "Go to the wall and push your energy into the yellow metal plate, until the glass tube above it lights up."

[Guard] "Another one passing through. If not for the wild herbs in that forest being useful for alchemy, most people would have no business in this village, which would leave the village much poorer and worse defended. Unfortunately, there are still plenty of villages not as lucky as this one."

After paying with energy, the boy was allowed inside the village, no longer being the guard's problem.

= = =

Finding food was no problem for Mirru, and they, too, received payment in energy. A big sandwich with mostly bread and carrots, and a very thin slice of salted meat, should be enough for a day.

The inheritance zone used energy to constantly heal everyone inside it, and there were a few plants growing inside, and there was even a kitchen for cooking the plants, and a water fountain through which water was flowing all the time.

But outside the inheritance area, Mirru eventually grew hungry, especially after using a few fallen trees and vines to make a raft and some paddles.

And after eating the big sandwich, for which he only paid 4 units of energy, he started looking for the notice board where businesses passing through often left notices with their group size and destination, hoping to leave in a bigger group for better safety, and many also included how much free space they would have when leaving, and how much more weight they can carry, in case someone else wanted to pay them for joining the caravan until they reached the next settlement or even their destination.

= = =

Although the village only had 20 houses, the notice board was a bit more difficult to find than he expected, especially since it's location changed since the last time he visited, which was a few years ago, before Mirru entered the inheritance area, and at that time the village only had 7 houses ready, 2 more were in the process of being built, and a third was planned to be built but it's location was not yet decided at the time.

After finding the notice board, it only took a few minutes to find the caravans going in the direction of the closest city. And he even had 3 choices, two of them leaving at the same time, the first one only accepting money and only the weight of the person, meant to only be used by people who could accord storage rings, the second only accepting payment in energy and having about twice as much space and weight limit as what Mirru and his backpack had, but both of those options were planning to leave in 2 days, and the third choice was leaving in a few minutes, accepted either money or energy, and had just a little more weight than what he and his backpack had.

So he hurried to find the merchant in charge, in hope it was not too late to join the group.

= = =

[MC] "Hello! Where could I find the caravan going to the Creak Woods city? I saw on the notice board that they should be leaving around now."

[Merchant] "Hello! There's no caravan, only my cart. I have to deliver fresh fish, and carrying more fish will end up with the fish going bad, so I'm only carrying a bit more than what is usually consumed there, and if there is anything left, it will be donated to the church as soon as it looks like it will start going bad, and the orphans in the city are always happy to eat something other than the cheapest foods they can find, and what little they grow in the orphanage's garden."

[MC] "I see. I would like to join you on your journey to the village. Do you receive payment in energy?"

[Merchant] "Of course, young man. 37 energy units, or 25 copper coins. I assume that backpack is all of your luggage."

[MC] "Yes, this is all I am bringing with me. I'll pay with energy. Do I recharge the cart's battery, or some other battery you have?"

[Merchant] "The cart's battery. The energy transfer plate and signal light is on the left side of the cart as it moves away from you. You're lucky you got here before I recharged it myself, or I would have charged you 40 energy units for it, to account for the losses of transferring from one battery to another. The costs of making the battery replaceable are too high to be worth it, for this cart. While it's efficiency is rather high, it doesn't have a lot of power, and I'm using it as a fifth of the power it is rated for, in order to not have it explode on me. If you get a powered cart, heed my advice and modify it as soon as possible, to use no more than 8 out of 10 parts, compared to how much power it is rated for. Do that and the cart's engine will last a few times longer, and with cheaper maintenance, too. Though it might have lower efficiency, it more than makes up in savings by not having to replace it, and especially by not having it explode near you."

[MC] "Thank you! Where should I sit and place my backpack, after I'm done?"

[Merchant] "You see the plank on the back of the cart? Below it should be enough free space for your backpack, and you will sit on the plank with your feet either hanging on the side of the cart, or behind the cart's back door. You can place your backpack now, then after charging and after I'm done hooking the donkey to the cart, you can hop on, I'll get the donkey some water, and we will be good to go as soon as you're done."

[MC] "Thank you! By the way, I'm Mirru Cartrack. Nice to meet you!"

[Merchant] "I'm Andreres Wallweave. Nice to meet you, too, kid!"

= = =

Around an hour after leaving, Mirru finally decided how to ask the merchant about information for the time he was in the inheritance realm.

[Mirru] "Sir Andrares, I-"

[Andrares] "Drop the sir. I'm only 34 years old. I dress to look older in order to get better deals, but I'm not an old man."

[Mirru] "Yes, I've been meaning to ask, what happened around in the last 5 or 6 years? I've been working in as a coal cart mover in a mining village somewhere around this nearby lake, and was fired after it got a few manager a month or so ago, and that mining village was quite small and very remote from civilization."

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

[Andrares] "Oh, One of those unnamed mining villages, I guess. Those are on the other side of the lake. How did you get here? I thought they were bought last year. Didn't they replace most of the people in charge?"

[Mirru] "The one I was in didn't get any change I knew of until a few months ago, when I lost my job. After that, I bought some camping supplies to last me a few weeks, then I used a fishing trap to catch fish near the shore, and I was able to find quite a lot of edible foods in the forest, which made my food supplies last until now."

[Mirru]"I would have probably gotten here sooner, but I sprained my ankle, which led to using up most of my camping food supplies, and after it no longer hurt to hike for an hour, I decided to eat well and make a raft to move faster, and I kept moving along the shore, only stopping at night in order to sleep safely away from the water, tying the raft and the fish trap to a tree, to make my rations last a little bit longer."

[Mirru] "Yesterday morning I finished the rations, and yesterday afternoon I finally saw smoke coming from the village, so I decided to stop sooner, then I spent a bit of time in the forest to get some food to go with the fish I caught, and in the morning I finished the last of my camping food."

[Andrares] "You've got quite the story. We're not going to stop until we get to the city, but you should be able to find some cheap food after we get there. Did you eat anything in the village?"

[Mirru] "Yes, I ate a sandwich, mostly bread and vegetables, and a thin slice of salted meat."

[Andrares] "Then you should be good, until we get there. And you were really lucky to leave that mining village when you did. Things got really ugly. Some miners found out that they were supposed to receive double their pay in one village, in another village the manager reduced their salary, and in both villages there were fights, in a third village one of the guards of the manager has beat up a miner, so the next day the manager and his guards met their untimely end, which caused the new owner of the mines to send more guards to each village, and those other two villages got into a big fight with the guards, and in the end most miners ended up fighting the new owner's guards and attacking the new owner's villa, which caused all of the miners to meet their end together with half of the people in the villa, including the son of the new owner and the new owner's grandparents, and one of the miners who ran away before the fight ended up going to the local guilds telling them about what happened, and before the guilds decided to investigate, the new owner of the mines ended all the other surviving miners and quite a few of their families, in revenge, including someone form the family of the miner who notified them of what happened, which caused the local guilds to decide to make an example of that new owner and end everyone related to them and confiscate their properties."

[Mirru] "Damn, a lot of things happened since I left."

[Andrares] "Yeah. If you did not get your ankle sprained, you might have been found by that new owner, too, so that sprained ankle was a disguised blessing."

= = =

As they kept talking, the sun was moving through sky, and they received right before the sun was starting to set. They split up after getting to the market, with Mirru getting another big sandwich to eat, this time for 7 units of energy, making a total of 38 units of energy he spent paying, and 11 units of energy used to make the raft, totaling 49 out of the 52 units of energy he has when he left in the morning, but he was able to replenish 7 units of energy while traveling, leaving him with a total of 10 units of energy left to use.

And before starting to search for an inn to spend the night, while there was still sunlight outside, Mirru decided to take a quick look with his soul sense, to see if there are any spirits or ghosts around.

And lucky for him, he found a ghost around the house of an alchemist shop in the city, which previously was owned by an old man who ended tragically at the hands of some criminals, who illegally took over the shop until the the guild recovered it and ended all the criminals related to the deadly hostile takeover.

8 energy units left, and it takes 5 of them to store capture the wandering spirit, and another one unit of energy to pull the spirit outside the house before capturing it, and another 3 to store it inside one of his storage artifacts, in order to observe it's memories during the next week.

Which means he will be left with only 1 unit of energy, which means he would have to finally start using actual money to pay for his first night of sleeping into the city.

So he decides to do just that. So after capturing the wandering spirit of the old alchemist who passed on a few months ago, he heads straight to the inn recommended by Andrares, where he pays 25 copper coins, instead of 30 units of energy, to sleep in a room with barely enough place to walk next to the 1-person bed, and a tiny window covered with greased paper, to let sunlight in in the morning, in order to wake up the tenant.

And before sleeping on the bed, he decides to put his backpack into his storage artifacts, and bring out a sleeping bag artifact he got in the inheritance area. It was actually the second artifact he got in that inheritance area, the first being a storage ring so he can store his things, especially the heavier things, and the sleeping bag being the second because it makes sleeping so much easier, even in places infested with trouble he would rather avoid.

And as a bonus, the sleeping bag is completely sealed from the outside, having only a transparent visor around the face, and using multiple small filters to filter the air from both inside and outside the sleeping bag, choosing to use only the cleanest air inside the sleeping bag, even if that cleanest air is the one already inside the sleeping bag, and since Mirru keeps it fully charged, he does not need to worry about fresh air for at least 24 hours, meaning that he can sleep safely even if someone uses toxic gases around. Oh, and it has an alarm for that, which can only be heard inside the sleeping bag, so he can wake up if the inn is on fire, and he also has a gas mask with similar functions, in case he needs to leave a building on fire.

And so, he falls asleep, tired, but excited to finally put to good use the technique of observing the memories of ghosts and spirits.

= = =

Once he woke up Mirru noticed that one of the benefits of the inheritance area was gone, so now his energy was recharging much slower passively, so his energy went from 1 out of 52 to 19 out of 52, so he started meditating a bit before leaving the room, and he noticed that he needed 1 hour to recharge 2 units of energy, and if he used one of the artifacts he got as a prize from the inheritance realm, that would go up to 1 hour to recharge 4 units of energy.

So he started making plans for the near future.

4 energy units per meal, meaning at least 8 units of energy every day, ideally 12 units of energy every day.

30 units of energy for a room to sleep in.

That means 45 units of energy he would need to spend every day, in order to keep living in the city.

And he recovered 18 units of energy after sleeping for 9 hours.

So that meant 27 units of energy left to recharge.

And he would recharge 28 units of energy in 7 hours of meditating.

And he would need around 1 to 2 hours every day to eat. And 9 hours every day to sleep, to be completely rested.

So that would use up 18 of the 24 hours in a day.

So he would have 6 hours and 1 unit of energy left every day, in order to both recharge more energy units, and use them to read the memory of that wandering spirit he obtained.

And it would cost 6 units of energy for every hour spent going through that spirit's memories.

So for 3 hours of energy, he would get 12 energy units, which would be enough for 2 hours of spirit memories.

Which would leave him with one hour every day for other purposes, like taking a stroll, or looking for a job, or even just simply going to the toilet.

So he set himself into a daily routine, for the next 3 months and a half, before he was forced by the circumstances to stop his daily routine.

And his cover story for doing that would be needing to sleep and meditate for most of the day, in order to have enough energy to pay for his food and inn room.

And so, he started observing the spirit's memories, in search of secrets many would kill to get or keep secret, as they almost certainly did to cause the old alchemist to meet his end and leave his spirit behind.

= = =

"Blood! Blood is the secret ingredient! Each animal and human has different energies in their blood, so mixing blood with alchemic ingredients would allow the alchemist whose blood was used, to better control the energies, even if the price is contamination."

"But blood can only contaminate things if they are not stable. So we can use existing pills instead. Let's see how much of a pill's energy can be extracted this way."

= = =

"Great! So far, I can extract half of the energy from most pills, and I can push that energy into another pill, which causes the source pill to crack and dry out, even if placed in liquid, and the destination pill to swell, and if not done slowly enough, the destination pill will crack and release a significant part of the energies, and a competent alchemist can keep most of those energies around, and push them back into the pill slowly, to reduce the losses from rushing the process."

"And now the question is, could we use any pill for it, or does it have to be a useful pill. For example, could I use a pill with healing energy together with a pill of speed energy, both of them useless by themselves, to make or improve a pill of quick healing? And could I use a pill of speed energy to turn a healing pill into a quick healing pill? If I can, this will revolutionize alchemy!"

= = =

"Great! It works! It really works! Now I can finally work towards making a youthfulness pill! I can finally get younger, to continue developing my alchemy skills and knowledge! And right in time, since with my current skills, I am barely keeping up with my age! The youthfulness pills I could make until now had so much toxicity that I was losing a year of lifetime every 2 years of my life, but with this, I could even begin to gain lifetime, in a few years!"

"Now I only need more alchemical ingredients, for those pills."

= = =

[Younger old man] "Say, old man, have you finally found a way to improve your youthfulness pills?"

[Spirit's old man] "I wish! I'm slowly running out of life, so I want to make sure I have enough pills saved up for when I will inevitably become unable of making any more. And I feel that unfortunate time is almost upon me."

= = =

[Younger old man] "You say you didn't improve your youthfulness pill recipe, but you keep getting healthier!"

[Spirit's old man] "Since I'm making so many of those pills, I'm choosing to take the best ones I make, so I can keep making pills for a longer time. Maybe if I spent all of my money on making those pills, I might get lucky enough to get some better pills by pure luck, and those might actually get me to turn younger." Said the old man, before laughing with a sad face.

[Spirit's old man] "Who am I kidding? As if that would actually happen.

[Younger old man] "Still not willing to join a guild?"

[Spirit's old man] "As if I would give them all of my secrets for free, so they can discard me immediately after. I've seen that happen to too many of my disciples."

[Younger old man] "Well, you could always trade your secrets for some pills to turn you a few decades younger, at the very least."

[Spirit's old man] "if I turn six and a quarter decades younger, I would still be 203. Or was it 204? I would still be an old man, but I would no longer have a source of income, so I would end up dying even sooner."

= = =

[Young man] "Teacher, when are you going to sell those new pills you have been making?"

[Spirit's old man] "You might be my assistant, but you don't know how difficult it is to earn money if you sell your secrets to others. Why do you think I haven't taken a new disciple in four decades, and I only take a new disciple a few years after another one of my disciples meets their end?"

[Young man] "Because you don't want more competition from them?"

[Spirit's old man] "No, because it takes that long to find people who would even consider not selling their secrets to one of the guilds, especially since after they start learning, their secrets would also include my secrets."

[Young man] "So you would rather let people learn your secrets and then run away from this city, to one of the cultivation sects or magic towers, like your last 5 disciples did?"

[Spirit's old man] "At least the sects and towers know how to keep their secrets. The guilds would immediately sell that knowledge to wealthy people and other guilds, who would do the same, and eventually those secrets would cost less and less, until they became known by everyone with a bit of coin to pay."

= = =

[Angry man] "Efbie Aye, open up!"

The insistent knocking got louder and louder, until the old alchemist opened the door.

[Spirit's old man] "What do you want?"

[Angry man] "We're here to buy your new pills! You student keeps bragging about you making pills he hasn't seen you making before."

[Spirit's old man] "He hasn't seen me making most of the pills I know how to make, that doesn't mean the pills are useful."

[Angry man] "So you kept using old pill recipes so you don't forget them? Do you take me for a fool?"

[Spirit's old man] "I was planning to teach that young fool of a disciple of mine how to make those pills, even if they cost a few times more than the pills I already taught him how to make to get the same effects, but it seems that fool doesn't deserve that kindness."

[Angry man] "Stop lying! You think I'd get here if he didn't bring some of those pills for us to see? Those are a rank higher than your alchemy rank! And they're not training pills, that's for sure! I almost couldn't believe how quickly a bird's wing grew back after consuming your pill."

[Spirit's old man] "Now that fool is stealing the pills I paid good money to buy from the guild? And he thinks I made those pills? My disciple is a lot dumber than I thought." Said the man, getting angry.

[Spirit's old man] "And I'm not selling those pills! You lot are not going to want to pay the kind of money those pills cost."

The angry man kept getting angrier, and with an angry grid, he said:

[Angry man] "Oh, I'm not here to buy the pills! I'm here to take them for free!"

And them the old alchemist fell to the ground, clutching his stomach and gasping for air.

= = =

Mirru was just done observing the spirit's memories for the day, when his stomach started rumbling.

"Damn! That man really got sold by his disciple. And knowing how greedy people are, the disciple also didn't escape that easily. Especially if they found those higher level pills. Now I just have to make sure that the pills I make will not be discovered by others. Especially since I should not know how to do alchemy, since I didn't go to an alchemy high school. But the old man did, so now it's like I went there, too."

"Good thing the old man forgot most of the people's faces and names, otherwise I might end up knowing the names and faces and maybe even other private information of people I have not personally met, which would make more difficult to keep the secret of the Spirit And Ghost Memory Observation Technique. And it's great that it lets me learn things from those memories faster, too. Otherwise, I might need to spend close to the full 4 years of high school, in order to learn what was taught there, and even more time learning the old alchemist's alchemy progress after leaving the high school. Now I finished combing through all the spirit's memories in a mere 3 months and a half."

"And I really should start switching to a meat based diet for a while. All this plant-based diet is making my stomach not happy at all. Always having gas, and having to eat lots of fibers in order to not get constipated."

And so, Mirru decided to take a break from going through the spirit's memories, deciding to go back through those memories once more, after he starts practicing alchemy.

So he would have 6 hours and 1 unit of energy left every day, and he could get 4 more energy units for every 1 hour spent meditating.

And he would need to spend most of that time meditating, in order to be able to switch to a meat based diet, for a while. And then he would need to find a job in the city, so he can have more free time.

"Maybe I should buy pills and then use the old alchemist spirit's techniques in order to improve them and sell them through the auction house owned and directly operated by one of the magic towers or cultivation sects. The guilds are obviously not to be trusted, considering how dead the old man ended up."

"Oh, now that I think about it, the old alchemist only used alchemical ingredients. But I might be able to make pills using random ingredients with some useful energy, in order to improve existing pills, even if I cannot use them to actually make new pills."

And so, Mirru falls asleep, preparing for new opportunities and new dangers.