The smell of cooking meat, cheap perfume, and body odour, dominated Sven’s senses as he waded through the bustling city market on the prowl for a very… unique ingredient.

  There had been no shortage of guild jobs of late as almost all of the other guild members diverted their focus onto creating potions for only a single customer, i.e., the guild itself.

  Sven remained skeptical that there was any benefit in them doing so, but he was more than happy to cover for their absence as it had meant a lot more pay for him due to the increased work.

  So much more pay that Sven was finally close to being able to buy himself full citizenship.

  Sven found the idea of being able to purchase citizenship, for a city no less, rather odd, but he was not going to complain too much as the other way to gain city citizenship was far more intense.

  Which is to say, you had to marry a person who was already a city citizen.

  Other than that, and simply purchasing it outright, city citizenship was inherited for the most part, as had also been the case for most countries’ citizens back on Earth.

  Lost in his thoughts about the fact that he’d soon be legally able to own land in the city, he almost missed the very thing he’d been looking for displayed on a rotten looking wooden board.

  After he noticed it, all other thoughts disappeared as he turned his head and looked downward as the vendor who was selling the item he needed seemed to lack a big stall of her own.

  Not being one to judge though, Sven spoke over the loud ambient noise of people all around him, “Hail, vendor, I am interested in purchasing that desert root vein. How much do you want for it?”

  The veiled woman, whose ragged clothes spoke volumes about her current situation, looked up at him and shrugged, before replying, “It has a number of uses. How much are you willing to pay for it?”

  Sven gave the proposition some thought before he replied, “I’ll take it for about 20 bronze coins.”

  Even though her facial features were somewhat obscured by the veil she wore, Sven could tell he’d surprised the young woman with his offer.

  Which, in turn, surprised him. As, while it wasn’t the lowest price he could’ve reasonably given her, the root’s true value, at least according to the guild, was nearer to 30-40 bronze coins today.

  Hence why he had come to the market for ingredients in the first place as he thought it was insane to pay that much money for a very simple ingredient.

  “S-sold!” The woman then hurriedly said as she frantically scrambled up onto her knees to receive her payment into her blister-covered hands.

  In that moment Sven felt some amount of guilt for ripping the struggling woman off so he handed her 25 bronze coins instead, hastily picked up the root, and walked away.

  The woman didn’t call after him or anything which allowed him Sven to smile as he took a turn to the left and exited the busy market square and walked back onto one of the main city streets.

  For thanks to his decision to try and source his ingredients elsewhere, he now had everything that he needed to finally, after months and months of failure, for sure become a tier 2 alchemist.

  Winona’s heart thundered in her chest as she squirreled the small fortune away into her very own rag sack, picked up her old reliable wooden plank, and legged it out of the market district.

  For it would be fair to say that the heavens had not been kind to her ever since she’d been kicked out of her sect those many months ago.

  Partly it was her own fault as she had spent all of the time she could’ve used productively sulking in an abandoned adobe hut that she’d squatted in for the first few weeks.

  Thus, by the time she gotten herself together somewhat, the word had already been spread by her former sect of who and what she was and what kind of treatment she deserved.

  As a result, no guild, who were never particularly disposed to women in their ranks anyway, had an iron-clad reason to turn her away.

  She had already had her talents tested and had been deemed a failure, and the guilds would not tolerate failures among their highly esteemed membership.

  Therefore, without any guild that would accept her, not even the mortal guilds, Winona had nearly starved to death in the first two months of her exile.

  While others in her situation may have turned to crime, she knew that would be a horrible mistake on her part.

  While the city guards were predominantly mortals, in the case where they suspected a cultivator was involved, they could call upon the sects to investigate for them.

  And, if her involvement in any crime was discovered, Winona had no doubts in her mind that her former Sect Master would hunt her down and eliminate her himself.

  For no sect would endure their good name being tainted. Even if only by association with a former disciple, as that was just how sect people thought.

  Due to this, Winona had felt helpless and trapped. Unable to do anything but die the sort of slow, agonizing deaths that would compel others to throw themselves into the jaws of a spirit beast.

  But, she had survived. By doing something she knew to be totally foolish.

  Her mind ravaged by hunger, and her body ravaged by pain, Winona had walked out of the city’s limits, and instead of throwing herself into a beast’s jaw, she threw a punch into one’s face.

  Luckily said beast had only been a tier 1 spirit beast, so she could take it, but that hardly meant it was easy as even if technically the same, the realms of spirit beasts worked way differently.

  A protracted battle of fist and claw, skill and instinct, human and beast followed. Until, bloodied in the extreme, her lower body raked with gashes, Winona had emerged victorious.

  And, as a result, the Heavens had granted her loot in the form of various spirit herbs.

  Were she any other seller, Winona would’ve gotten more than enough bronze to last her months from those spiritual hers. But, of course, things could never be that easy for her.

  The Alchemists Guild, knowing full well the weakness of her position, tried to effectively rob her by offering absurdly low prices for spiritual herbs that they knew full well were worth way more.

  Not standing for this, she had initially stormed out of the guild building and tried to sell to each of the guild’s members individually but they had soon caught on to her and issued a memorandum.

  With no other buyer interested in what she had to offer, Winona had been cowed into going back to the guild, desperate, and was forced to sell for even more insanely low prices.

  And that is how she had just barely kept herself alive for months. Then, the guild had tried to push her too far.

  A single copper coin.

  That is all they offered her when she presented them with an [Iron] rank root that she knew from her time in the sect was a necessary ingredient in the creation of a basic health potion. One of the guild’s most in demand products.

  It had been an outrageous offer, meant as one last humiliation of her before they refused business with her entirely - probably due to sect pressure.

  However, though her pride had been beaten low, and her desperation was great, she had stormed out of that disgusting house of scumbags and told em what part of damnation they could go to.

  Yet, still, what had been true the last time she’d done so remained true.

  Or, at least, she’d thought so for the last two weeks. Until, that foreign looking old man had come walking by her one board shop.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Usually she hated the looks of pity that strangers gave her, but the look in his eyes wasn’t the kind of pity whereby the person looked down upon another.

  It was a much rarer kind of pity, a kind she’d never quite experienced, empathy.

  And, if that wasn’t weird enough, the man had proffered an astonishingly reasonable price before then actually paying it. Something that couldn’t be said about all of her former customers.

  Winona’s mind had thus become a bit of jumbled mess as the man had then just walked away.

  Had she been the Winona of the past, she’d have probably sat there all confused at the stranger’s kindness for many minutes.

  But she’d learned the hard way that people like her were the favorite targets of capricious guards, as due to her situation, she couldn’t come under any suspicion of committing a crime.

  Or else, her life would become forfeit.

  A brutal fact that the more sadistic and manipulative guards liked to dangle over her head so as to extort her out of any money that they had seen her make.

  To always be on the move whenever possible had thus become a motto she lived by and so once her goods were all gone, she had high tailed it out of the market back to her squatting place.

  The place where tonight, for the first time in a very long time, she’d treat herself to a meal worthy of a person rather than a beast.

  With his cauldron placed firmly on a new stone pedestal that Sven had used earth magic to erect in his workshop, Sven was finally ready to begin the process of making his first tier 2 potion.

  It seemed the system was also confident in his success as it gave him a new system prompt.

  —

  Quest Gained!

  Quest Name: Tough as Iron!

  Rank: [Mortal]

  Objectives: [Create a single Iron rank potion (0/1)

  Reward: ???

  —

  It had been quite a few months since he’d last received a new system prompt, so suddenly getting one made him remember that he hadn’t checked in on his progress for a while.

  So, delaying his potion making by a few good seconds, he muttered, “Status.”, and a blue panel visualized in front of him that summarized all of his progress over the last few months.

  Which, just looking at it didn’t seem like a lot, even though it was.

  —

  STATUS:

  Name: Sven Mikhailov

  Titles: N/A

  Realm: [10th Layer of the Apprentice]

  Classes:

  [(Novice) Alchemist (Early)]

  Traits:

  [(???) Fruit of the Soil], [(Mortal) Mark of Gaia]

  Skills:

  [(Mortal) Analysis (Mid)], [(Mortal) Alchemical Instincts (Mid)

  Boons:

  [Golden Elder]

  —

  Once Sven had taken an appropriate few seconds to appreciate how far he had come, he let out a sigh and then dismissed all of the prompts.

  ‘There is no use in delaying it any longer.’ Sven resolved internally as he began pouring the water into the cauldron to serve as the liquid base of his potion.

  With the easiest step done, Sven performed a small stretch, then dropped the root he’d bought in the market earlier today into the already bubbling liquid.

  Golden light illuminated the entirety of his workshop as Sven worked his magic into everything all around him before he then mustered his willpower and muttered, “Merge.”

  The stuff inside the cauldron in front of him began to sizzle then pop as he imposed his will via his use of sacred words onto the root’s very essence.

  It was at this point that an ill-prepared alchemist would find their cauldron exploding. For merge’s reputation as the most volatile of the early sacred words was not for nothing.

  For compared to the other two, concoct and settle, merge was insanely difficult to control. As two things didn’t easily become one thing, no matter how powerful you were.

  But, this was not Sven’s first rodeo, and he knew full well what he needed to do.

  Unleashing most of his controls on his mana flow, Sven began to feel a little bit dizzy as half of his total mana pool surged into his cauldron, the sheer weight and pressure of it causing the merger.

  A feat that was only possible due to his realm as well as the relatively low quality of his ingredients meaning that he could easily overpower the inherent restrictions each material had.

  The water in his cauldron had thus taken on a much more earthen tone by the time the cracking in the pot died down as the merger finalized.

  Happy he had now completed the hardest part of the whole affair, Sven moved onto what he was hoping would be the only moderately difficult part.

  Using a pair of wonky tongs, Sven lifted up a blazing hot crucible full of molten iron and poured it into the cauldron to a very strange optical result.

  Instead of acting like one from Earth would expect, the hot fluid metal began to swirl around in a vortex within the cauldron, emitting a low hum.

  Knowing what he had to do, Sven began to stir counter to the vortex’s swirl, which turned the hum into a hissing sound as the metal tried to fight back.

  Sven wouldn’t allow it, however. But it took a long 10 minutes of constant unrelenting mental and magical warfare with the damn inanimate fluid to get it to surrender.

  And then, once it had, he had to suppress it more thoroughly as he muttered, “Settle.”

  Like a bird of prey diving and catching its prey in its claws, he thereby seized full control over all of his graying mixture before pushing more of his mana into making the liquid as hot as can be.

  Just as he had when making his first potion, he had to keep the mixture from evaporating. Even as every atom within the material desperately wanted to scatter to the winds.

  Sven, however, drawing upon another chunk of his mana reserve and mental strength, forced the liquid to stay as such as he then added his final 3 ingredients.

  A strange blue plum looking fruit/vegetable that was called an “oasis surprise” which would add to the mixture a lot of positive water energy as it apparently was harvested from the oasis’ depths.

  Then there was the oddly discolored black and purple egg-plant looking monstrosity that lay flat across almost the entire width of his workstation, known colloquially as a sand snake apple.

  Sven had no idea why the locals called it that, but it was far better than it’s system-assigned name which Sven wasn’t even going to try and pronounce.

  Due to the vegetable/fruit’s incredible size, however, the process of adding it to the mixture took a lot longer than any of the other steps as the mixture could also absorb so much at one time.

  Try to push it to absorb too much all at once and well, your concoction would explode. Which was never a good time.

  So, Sven showed the quality he had been most well known for back on Earth besides dedication, a heck of a lot of patience.

  Until, eventually, he was able to add in the final ingredient. A jug full of mead.

  This time, the process of absorption was over very quickly and so Sven was thus rapidly thrust into the final stage of the potion making process.

  With all his will and remaining mana, he gathered the mixture into one great big ball, and then, in a voice that echoed throughout his workshop, he ordered his potion to, “CONCOCT!”

  The room suddenly flashed with golden light before everything went dark for just a brief moment, before the workshop’s magical lighting flickered back on.

  His face still dry and clean of any alchemical goop, Sven couldn’t help but smile as he gazed down at his completed mixture before he hastily moved to bottle it all.

  Once he had, he figured out he had made enough for three separate potions. When he had them all corked, only then did Sven allow himself to analyze his greatest achievement yet.

  His very first tier 2 potion.

  —

  [Basic Potion of Health] - Rank: [Iron] - Quality: [E] - Drink to restore some of your vitality. Upon consumption will heal some cuts and bruises, but due to this potion’s low quality may leave scars behind.

  —

  Once again, Sven cared little for the negative feedback as he once more stood baffled by his very unusual ability to instantly make [E] grade potions on his first attempt.

  Moreover, who cared if his magic healing potion left behind scars, it was a damn tier 2 potion! As such, he soon received another system prompt to further lighten his mood.

  —

  Quest Completed!

  Quest Name: Tough as Iron!

  Rank: [Mortal]

  Objectives:

  [Create a single Iron rank potion (1/1)

  Reward:

  Class Advancement: [(Novice) Alchemist (Early-> Mid)]

  [(Iron) Compendium of Alchemical Recipes] - A book chock full of potion recipes for an alchemist who has taken his or her first step into the realm of real alchemy.

  [(Mortal) Inspector’s Monocle] - Through this looking glass, you can glimpse a few of the imperfections within any low tier creation, including your own.

  Claim items?

  YES / NO

  —

  Sven’s smile grew as he finished reading over the prompt. He had almost instinctively selected yes to claiming his items right away, but he decided to wait until he got back home before he did so.

  That way, he wouldn’t even have to carry them back home with him.

  A benefit that was especially pronounced as he vaguely remembered promising Jackson that on a big occasion like this, he’d finally agree to go out drinking with him.

  Just the thought of drinking alcohol, however, made Sven sigh as he recalled his not so productive youth of partying until stupid o’clock at night, only to spend the next morning throwing up.

  Regardless of his less than ideal memories of his past, though, a promise was a promise. And Sven had never been one to go back on his word.

  Thus, after cleaning up his workshop and informing the guild receptionist that he had managed to create his first tier two potion, he walked back down to his fellow elder’s workshop and told him.

  The man had been truly ecstatic for him and, recalling Sven’s earlier promise exactly, he then took Sven to a very ornate looking establishment that couldn’t possibly be a-

  It was at that moment that a truly divine scent registered in Sven’s mind and his earlier sigh had its warrant fully retracted as a single desire consumed him.

  The desire to drink all of the tea that this place had to offer.