We completed our first large order. Other than a few hitches I managed to avoid wanting to Punch martin by avoiding him entirely. I managed to get a better sword; we started growing plants at Mr Cedar’s house.

Compared to everything else the completion of that order felt so small. Another one came right in and bashed our reserves. We were now scraping by for resources which was far more important.

Today I was walking around town in my brown cloak as one of the ways to fix our resource problem.

The plethora of children that ran up to me with the plants made me wonder how we didn’t do this sooner. We educated the children how to extract the plants we needed and told the adults certain areas where they were aplenty.

This plan had many flaws like the fact we had to manually go back into a forest and replant them. there was also the wonderful child or two that ripped out plants from people’s gardens, but that was mostly the parents’ problem. Unless we saw them doing it, we didn’t care.

I had a basket that I would fill, and that was all I was going to buy. The children could stockpile the plants, but we didn’t buy the ones that looked too sad. This helped with preventing the children from ripping out every single plant they could and ruining it for literally everyone or hoarding them and doing the same.

I just had to be careful not to let my pouch get pinched by the little demons. I didn’t carry anything more than I needed to pay for the plants because mark had already been robbed twice, but I was still worried.

My worry didn’t last long however as the basket filled, my pouch emptied, and I was left back at the door of the apothecary.

I found the little business to be the pinnacle of hilarity. A tiny shop filled with very scary people sitting on chairs patiently making medicine. I had not intended for things to end up like this, not one bit.

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I went inside and dumbed off the plants onto the assembly line. They were immediately sorted and the ones that needed extensive prep were added to a pile. I then took these and based off of what we needed I put them into piles. Some needed to be dried for several months in open air while others needed three baths in different liquids or stuff like that.

For things that would take months to prepare we had to import. We were not big enough to create a steady supply by drying them in increments. According to Martin magic was not a viable solution because it would introduce mana that could interfere with the plants natural mana and affect its properties. The way he spoke about magic was far more in depth than both Mr Cedar and Mark combined.

I was not going to stroke his ego however by asking him what magic actually was and/or did. Thankfully he wasn’t here though, it felt like he could hear people thinking about him.

I set the ones to be dried on a drying rack and avoided the ones more complicated than that. Eventually I would have to get around to preparing them, but not now. The ones that required truly intensive preparation were best left for last, if not then none of the other ones would get prepped.

I thought I was doing rather well, but as I was bludgeoning a blue spotted tree stalk to death I looked up. When my eyes left the floor, they met with May’s.

The girl took the stalk from my hands and those arms went. Within seconds she finished off what was taking me minutes. No matter, I started that one, it was easy for her… or not. There were three other stalks in the pile and within the same motion she freed all the stubborn seeds.

The only negative was that the seeds went everywhere, but that was already happening when I was doing it. together we picked up the remains before May informed me that my shift was over, night was approaching.

None of us had any idea why she had suddenly called the apothecary her home, but we weren’t complaining since she was there everyday and helped out even on her days off. She seemed oddly dedicated to learning how to make medicine.

At least I wasn’t the only one living alone. My room happened to be an abandoned annex, but that didn’t really matter… until it does, then the fact it’s an abandoned annex really matters.

I had a day off tomorrow so I decided that then I would explore the annex then take a mission. It was probably worth it to know about more than just my room if I was going to keep staying there alone.