Looking through my carriage, I soon found the chest I was looking for. As I took a few steps to look around, the carriage moved slightly, causing the glass canisters held within a separate chest to clink against each other. In the center of the carriage was all my transmutation equipment.
I had scaled up my operation since I started more than six years ago, so the flask I used to hold the active ingredients in my reaction had grown significantly, and the rest of my equipment had grown to match it. The central iron structure that held the flask and various transmutation circles was so large that I had difficulty moving it without assistance.
I grabbed the chest holding the drugs and dragged it across the floor. It was far too heavy for me to lift, but I was able to drag it a single meter to the edge of the carriage. Once there, I waved for Eadric to approach and said, “Hey, Eadric! Come help me with this thing!”
The chest weighed about thirty kilograms. I could have lifted it easily with my old body, but the frail teenage body I was inhabiting could barely lift its own weight.
Eadric walked to the side of the carriage and picked it up with ease. His physical stats were higher than any normal human could possibly achieve without the assistance of the System by that time, so a mere thirty kilograms was practically nothing to him.
Eadric placed the chest lightly at the Merchant’s feet, and the Merchant knelt down to inspect its contents with a broad smile on his face. As he inspected the chest’s interior, I circled around and peeked inside over the heads of the Merchant and the Fighter who had dipped their heads down to look at the contents.
Both wore the facial expressions of people who were looking inside of a chest filled with gold. From their perspective, that might have been the case. The miracle powder sold for anywhere between fifteen and twenty gold coins per kilogram. As a conservative estimate, that chest held 360 Etronian gold coins worth of my product.
“It’s all there,” I assured them, feeling uncomfortably similar to a two-bit drug dealer. “As ordered, I synthesized four kilos of Drug Alpha, eight kilos of Drug Beta, four kilos of Drug Gamma, four kilos of Drug Delta, and four kilos of Drug Epsilon. This brings us to a grand total of twenty-four kilos.”
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By that time, I produced five drugs for Sendrick. I had produced many more recipes, and their transmutation disks were still in my carriage, but none of them sold well enough to warrant their continued presence on the market. The drugs that I routinely synthesized for Sendrick were Adderall, two types of painkillers, Melatonin, and Cialis.
Drug Beta, known as Cialis on Earth, sold far better than any of my other drugs. It was a cure for impotence, so its extreme success was understandable. Nothing else on Ferrum served the same purpose as Drug Beta. Sendrick had requested that I drop production of one of my painkiller drugs in order to produce more of Drug Beta, but I protested heavily. I didn’t want my work to be entirely suborned to such a vulgar goal. There was no doubt in my mind that I could have filled that whole chest with Drug Beta, considering the absurd profit it warranted.
Looking inside the chest, I saw that it was cordoned off into five sections, with one section being twice the size of all the others. The Merchant pulled one gloved hand through each pile of black powder. He rolled the powder around, making sure that the pile was consistent all the way through.
“You’ve got something special with this,” the Merchant said as his gloved hand touched the pile in the largest section. “Everybody in Rubigo is looking to get their hands on the ‘Caligan Spice.’ We could probably sell ten times as much of this stuff if you could make it.”
“Caligan Spice? Is that what they call it?” I mused. On Ferrum, “Caligan” essentially just meant “exotic,” since the continent of Caligo had been discovered very recently. Of course, Drug Beta had nothing to do with Caligo, but it was a rational advertisement strategy.
“I’d make more, but I only have so much mana,” I said, telling a half truth. If I spent all my mana constantly making drugs for Sendrick, I could produce about a hundred kilos a month. I could quadruple the profits for myself and Sendrick, but my goal was not to simply acquire gold. I had a mission to complete, and I couldn’t spend all my time sitting on my ass making amphetamines and vasodilators.
“Okay,” the Merchant said as he got to his feet. He closed the chest, and the Fighter picked it up. “The product looks good. We’ll be on our way soon.”
The Merchant reached into a pocket on the inside of his jacket in such a way that it made one of my fingers twitch toward my wand. The tension in my hand disappeared when the Merchant produced a leather pouch.
“Here’s your payment for the last month,” the Merchant said as he handed the pouch over to me. “Forty Etronian gold coins.”
I took the pouch and, without looking inside, threw the pouch over to Eadric, who caught it with ease. I said, “Count the coins, and put them with the rest, please.”