Once we were inside the city the men left my wagon. Apparently they planned on resupplying and taking a few days off before leaving again. As I was there as a healer, I drove directly to the Healer’s Union. When I entered, a well-endowed goblin woman behind the desk greeted me. Apparently, they also preferred hiring attractive women as receptionists to lure in recruits. Unlike in Starshine City, though, the healers here were either all in one of the classrooms learning the various skills or at the guard barracks, practicing their healing and dodging. According to the receptionist, over ninety percent of recent graduates were joining the military, leaving only ten percent to deal with the sick and injured civilians.
As I was at another healer’s guild, I tried to purchase more training manuals, reasoning that I could leave them in the villages I passed through in case anyone wanted to learn healing. Unfortunately, they were out. All of the printing presses in the city were busy making military training manuals for the recruits. They had managed to schedule the printing of another thousand copies each of both the combat healer’s manual and the basic manual, but it would be at least a month before they started printing, and at least a week after that before the first lot of one hundred were received by the guild.
I checked in with the shrine of Keshan that was here in the Union, and informed them of what I had found while traveling here. Unfortunately, the people I had helped were actually better off than the people in most areas of the nation. The further you got from this city, the harder it was for people to feed themselves, as this city was the only food exporter in the nation. For that reason, most merchants purchased food here and sold it to other cities or settlements in the area. There was only so much this shrine or the temples in town could do, so they were sending people here to the union to learn healing to help deal with the sick and injured civilians and were occasionally buying food to send to the worse off areas of the country.
This gave me an idea on how to help the people. What if I opened an alchemy factory in this town as well, only it specialized in making nutrient potions? That would go a long way towards relieving the food shortage. The local priest liked the idea, but warned me that a foreign noble opening a business in the city, especially a Farin noble, would require meeting with several government officials. I offered to donate the money if he wanted to start the company, as, because he was a citizen of the city, he would face fewer regulations, but he turned me down. People would question where he got the money and if they found out it was given to him by a Farin noble, even one that was here as a healer, he would be suspected of treason.
He told me where the minister of commerce was working, and suggested that I start there, so I thanked him and headed over. The minister loved the idea of my business, but unfortunately he could only issue business licenses to people of the city, not foreigners. He instructed me to talk to his boss, the minister of Internal Affairs. The meeting with him lasted longer but essentially ended the same way. He could issue allied and neutral foreigners business licenses, but as they were currently at war with Farin, he couldn’t grant me a business license. The only one who could do that was the Governor, and I would have to make an appointment to talk to him.
I talked with the governor’s assistant and set up an appointment for the day after tomorrow at two in the afternoon, so I had time to kill before the meeting. As I would need to refill my food supplies before leaving the city, and could purchase food to take to other settlements, I went by one of the food wholesalers in town. None of them had any food left for sell, however. The way the businesses worked, the city, food vendors, restaurants, and food factories got priority on purchasing any food that was produced; the city because they needed to fill the emergency food stores in case they were under siege or there was another food shortage here, and the other three because they sold food here in the city. Only after all of those orders were filled would the wholesalers be allowed to purchase what was left for export. I checked with all seven wholesalers in town, but only the last one had any good news.
He had arranged to purchase all of the excess gabo that one of the larger farms in the city were producing. Gabo were kind of like sweet potatoes on earth, but with a few exceptions. They required a mana pressure of at least one to grow, as they were technically a magical plant, grew to maturity in less than a month, and, though they produced yields comparable to potatoes every time they were harvested, they tasted too bitter even after cooking and their leaves were only edible for most animals and some of the more animal-like beastfolk, like minotaurs. For that last reason, the leaves and dead plants were almost always sold as animal feed instead of people feed. The gabos that were harvested were usually used to feed slaves and prisoners, but with the food shortage the poor had also started eating them. The fact that humanoids and goblinoids lacked the enzyme to break down a toxin in the leaves didn’t prevent them from being used in potions, however. The extraction process, after all, would separate out the toxin, or, if I could find certain other medicinal or magical herbs to add in, could destroy the toxin, allowing more efficient extraction of the vitamins and calories from the leaves.
He was willing to purchase large amounts of dead plants and sell them to me if I wanted them, but I would need to tell him before the crop was harvested in one week. Otherwise, all of the plants would be sent to the fields near the outer wall to be used as pig and cow feed.
While I didn’t have permission to set up a business yet, I could rent property in the city for personal use. The city guard would be told about it, as I was a foreigner, and a citizen of an enemy nation, but as long as I didn’t break the law they wouldn’t stop me. I talked to a company in the factory district that built rental workshops and factories, and found out that they had several breweries that shut down due to the inability to get grains and/or fruits to turn into alcohol. As a result of their inability to find another client to rent it, I was able to rent one of those fully furnished breweries for only one gold per month. They warned me that without a business license I wouldn’t be able to hire anyone to work there, but there weren’t any laws forbidding me from making potions there by myself or even selling them afterwords, as freelance potion making was allowed so that those apothecaries and alchemists that operated outside of businesses could still earn a living.
I wasn’t planning on selling most of these, however. I arranged with the wholesale vendor for five tons of gabo leaves, about what I thought I could personally process in the next month, to be delivered to the brewery. After that I checked in with several local apothecaries to see what they had in stock. All of them had been purchasing large amounts of material to extract nutrients from it, including all of the food that was too poor quality to legally be sold, so they lacked those ingredients, but they had plenty of the herbs I needed to neutralize gabo toxins. After all, it’s only normal use was to neutralize poisons, and few of the medical problems in town were people were being poisoned, other than food poisoning which was a bacterial infection. I bought several kilograms of the needed plant, then went to the adventurer’s guild.
What I needed most was Essence of Nutrition, as it made the body absorb all of the nutrients and continued to make food more digestible for around a week after consumption. Most sources of that Essence, however, were food products, which is why I used flour to extract it last time. Gabo did contain it, as well as a large number of calories, but I was planning on buying them as food, and I didn’t want to use a food source as a source of the Essence unless I had to. There were also a few inedible plants, including magical and monster varieties, which contained it. If I could get the local adventurers to gather those ingredients, I would have a source without having to destroy food.
The local guild informed me which plants were available in the area around the city, and after checking some of the dried samples from the area, I settled on three of those plants. As the essence was almost equally available in all of them, I asked the guild to get me ten kilograms of the dried herbs, any mixture was fine, and paid one gold per kilogram in advance. I had entered the city with twenty six gold, some silver, and some copper, but had spent two gold on first and last month’s rent, one for the five tons of leaves, three for the herbs at the apothecary, and ten here, leaving me with only ten gold left. I hoped I could get the license soon, though if I didn’t I could still sell the potion. I would just need to get a license if I wanted to sell in bulk.
As it would probably be two days before the herbs were delivered, I hurried over to the apothecary’s store where I had bought the herbs before they could closed. I asked if she could sell me protein extract, as it was the one ingredient I still needed, but she shook her head. The best source of protein extract was the corpses of the animals they slaughtered, but the extraction process could only be done near the outer wall where the tanners were, due to the smell. For that reason, she never kept it in stock, as she couldn’t produce it here. As it was already past sunset, and therefore most of the businesses in town would be closed, I would have to look again tomorrow.
After unloading my wagon into the brewery I had rented, I went to the tavern. The food was pretty basic, and I didn’t buy meat because it cost extra, but it wasn’t bad. They had even figured out a way to mix certain herbs in with the mashed gabo to make it taste decent, though it still wasn’t good.
I slept in a cot in the office of the brewery, and the next day I headed out to the outer wall. The smell was almost overpowering, but luckily I knew a Death magic spell to weaken my own sense of smell. I don’t think this was the way debuff spells were meant to be used, however. Once I was there I quickly found someone who was lowering a stripped pig carcass into a large metal vat while his employees wer dumping buckets of entrails in the vat with it. “Hello,” I called out, and once the man had started the fire under the vat with a quick spell, he walked over.
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“How can I help you?” he asked, eyeing me suspiciously. My robes, even though they had the mark of Keshan, were a lot nicer than you would normally see in this part of the city.
“I was hoping you could sell me some protein extract.” I said. “I’m planning on making a large amount of nutrient potions and distributing them to the malnourished people in the area, but I don’t have enough protein to make it.”
He nodded. “Well, I can provide you with what you need, but it won’t be cheap. I currently sell it for a silver per kilo to the folks in town.” In Starshine it only cost three or four coppers per kilo. Food prices really were getting out of hand.
“And do you charge the same for the Carb extract?” It would mostly be fats and oils, but I could use it to bulk up the calorie density of the potion.
“Eight coppers a kilo on that. How much do you want.” I negotiated with him for a while before we settled on eight coppers per kilo for the mixture before he separated them. The last step was to separate all of the fats from the proteins, and that was a slow process if you wanted to get fairly pure extracts of both. As I was using both, and could even use the extra minerals that got left behind in the mixture, I just bought it before the separation step. This meant that I could get thirty kilograms per gold. I bought sixty kilograms at two gold and promised to come back for more if I got a license to open my factory. Thanks to the magic backpack I had brought with me, I had no trouble carrying that much weight.
With my ingredients now procured I headed back to the brewery and used a bit of the extract to mix up the last of the materials I had prepared two nights ago. Once I was finished, I took my fifty five liters of prepared potion, loaded it into the back of the wagon, and headed to the poor part of town. The people in this part of town weren’t as malnourished as in the villages, but I gave each one that wanted some a glass of water with a shot of the potion mixed in. I didn’t have any potion bottles and only had one shot glass, but I could distribute it like this.
A little after noon I ran out of potions, so I started healing people. Some of the injuries were broken bones from the malnutrition and some were poorly healed injuries. They looked like they were healed by a mage at some point, but due to the large amount of nutrients healing requires the wounds hadn’t healed properly. Now, with the nutrient potions in them, the healing would probably work better.
Some time after sunset I told the people that I was tired and would be back tomorrow morning. I bought some food from a street vendor and went back to the brewery. I would only have five or six hours to heal everyone tomorrow before the meeting, so I went to bed early to recover from the day’s events.
After eating breakfast the next morning, mostly flat bread I made with some of my three kilograms of remaining flour, I took my tent back to the refugee district of the city and started healing the people again. As most of the people there had a nutrient potion yesterday and at least one meal since then, the healing worked even better than last time and by noon there were only a few people who I couldn’t treat due to malnutrition. I promised everyone that I would do my best to bring by more nutrient potions as soon as I had made more of them, then packed up my tent and left. Many of the people looked disappointed that I had to go, probably because I had helped them and their families so much in the last two days.
Once I was packed up I took my tent back to the brewery, then went to the public bath house. I brought my nicest set of clothes with me, though I hadn’t brought anything too fancy because I was traveling. I also carefully used the Cleaning spell on my robes, as I would be wearing that over my other clothes like a labcoat, as it was tradition so that people could identify those working for Keshan to do so that they weren’t confused with an enemy combatant on the battlefield. No one would attack a healer, especially one working for Keshan, as they were neutral in conflicts and attacking them risked inviting the god’s wrath.
I arrived at the castle at one thirty and was escorted to the waiting room by a servant. There were two other merchants there who were hoping to negotiate some sort of special deal in working with the government, one wanting tax breaks and the other wanting a contract allowing them priority purchasing on food in exchange for them bringing back iron and steel from another city in the country, but from the way they were acting they had likely been waiting there for quite some time. I explained to them that I had an idea for a business that would help solve the food crisis in this country, and they seemed concerned. If I was being pessimistic, I would think that they were putting the large profits of food exports above the lives that were being saved, but when they saw that I didn’t share there opinion on how good relieving the food crisis would be they assured me that they had merely not thought about the people outside the main trade routes that I had mentioned, and how bad the shortage must be for them, as they didn’t have the opportunity to buy more food. I seriously doubted they would actually send trade wagons out to those other villages, though, as the profit margins in selling to them would probably be too small to justify it.
Once I was called to meet the governor, I explained the situation to him and how the potions could solve it. He had never seen one of those potions, or faced a food shortage, and was looking a bit plump, so I had to explain to him that it would allow the people to survive without having to eat as much, thus making what food they had last longer. He raised the possibility of having everyone drink one once a week to lower the city’s demand for food and improve exports, and I explained that, while that might be possible, that method was rarely used due to the cost of food being so low normally. The potions also weren’t very palatable so, while people in need would gladly drink them, most people wouldn’t like doing so. In this situation I would also have a hard time supplying everyone in the city or country as the local supply of materials to make them would run out after making enough for around a hundred thousand people per month. This city had over two hundred thousand people living in it, and I wouldn’t be able to export any to the other cities or settlements if it was all used here.
The argument wasn’t seeming to get to him, but when I brought up the possibility of exporting the potions he perked up. No wonder the merchants were having a tough time talking to him. They wanted to improve their own financial situation in a way that helped the country, but not him personally. I explained to him about how I was making luxury potions in a factory I owned in Starshine, including infertility and aphrodisiac potions, and he loved the idea of opening up such a factory here. I brought him back around to the nutrition potion and he offered to become a guaranteed client, essentially signing a contract with me to have his personal company buy one thousand liters of potion per month at half a silver per liter, totaling twenty five gold per month. He would then send them to the other two major cities to resell at a copper per dose, more than doubling his money. That was a bit much to charge for one, but such an agreement would allow me to open my factory and distribute them all across his territory, if not the country, so I agreed to it.
I brought up that, while I could start making those other specialty potions once the adventurer’s guild brought me the materials and I had hired enough people for the job, there were some of those potions already in the country if I could just find them. I explained to him about how the trade caravan was attacked and all of its goods and people captured, and he brought in one of his military advisors to ask about it. Before long he had tracked down where the goods and people were taken and told me where that was. Apparently one of the nearby towns of eight hundred people needed more farmhands to clear their fields, so that they could be planted when the spring got here, so the POWs had been sent there to work as farm hands.
It wasn’t long before I had agreed to sell any recovered potions to the governor at the caravan’s cost, and in exchange he would grant them permission to pass through and trade non-strategic goods within his territory. As they mostly had exotic foods, magical trinkets, those potions, and some luxury clothing with them this time, I was sure that would be fine. Selling luxury goods in this city might not be as lucrative, but I was certain that they could sell food here at a high enough margin that they would turn a decent profit, and the ability to travel would let them get to the Farin and allied country counties on the other side of his territory where the real profit was. The only taxes he asked for in return was one ton of food or ten gold per carriage. That was pretty expensive as far as trade tariffs went, but a ton of cheap food only cost four to five gold in Starshine, so they could get through at half the cost if they brought food.
Now that I had permission to open my business and a guaranteed customer, I went to the healer’s union to hire some employees. There were only two available that met my needs, a seventy year old male human apothecary that had retired, but was now working part time to help feed his grandchildren and their children, and a thirty year old female alchemist that got caught making illegal intoxicants and selling them in the slums. She currently had seventeen months left on hrer sentence, so I could buy out her contract for four gold and have her work for me. I ended up getting both of them, putting me down to five gold, as I paid the old man two weeks in advance to manage the place for me. I planned on staying until the first batch of potions were finished, selling the Governor his requested amount, and taking the rest with me along with all the gabos my wagon could fit to the town where the caravan people were.
I picked up my herbs from the adventurer’s guild and introduced my new manager, as he would be putting in the requests later, and brought them back to the brewery. There the alchemist and I modified the production method to work with a still the brewery had sitting in the back and extracted all of the Essence of Nutrition from them. The next day I ordered another ten tons of gabo leaves from the bulk vendor as well as three gold worth of gabo, as that was all the gold I had left.
When the leaves came in we extracted all of the nutrients we could, making sure to add the poison neutralizing herb, and were able to make just over eleven hundred liters of potion. We still had a large amount of gabo extract sitting in one of the storage casks, and enough Essence of Nutrition for another three hundred liters, but lacked the protein extract to use it. I delivered the potion to the Governor’s business, and was paid, then used that money to buy ten gold worth of protein/carb extract and had my manager pay the guild another fifteen to gather more herbs. Ideally we would buy a small farm and have someone grow those magical plants there, but for now there were enough wild plants around to fulfill the need. One of them was essentially a magical weed, after all, so it was unlikely that our operation would use up the local supply and if it started to do so someone would start farming them just to sell to us.
With everything set up properly, the next day I loaded up the hundred liters of potion we made in the first batch and went by the bulk vendor to get my three gold worth of gabo. With that finished, I told my manager that I would try to return in a week or so, but he would be in charge of selling any excess production to the people or merchants who wanted to export it. That would be the money he could use to cover expenses. Though I would prefer if he donated at least one hundred liters per week to the people in town, he didn’t need to if it cut into the profit margins by too much.
While the process of making nutrient potions didn’t produce any secondary Essences to sell, when I got back we could get started on the more complicated job of making infertility and aphrodisiac potions, which could be sold to the governor’s company for a profit and make many others which could open up other secondary products in town. Even as a noble of Farin, no one would care if I did business here as long as it didn’t help them in the war, which those potions didn’t. Technically the nutrient potions did help them, as it relieved the need for food which was limiting their efforts, but no one would complain too loudly about an agent of the church doing things that mildly harmed the military’s efforts.