Ideas for inventions and things to present at the fair began pouring out of me. Once I had finished all the major blacksmithing work, I had to find a new place to craft. Valda found out that the adventurers' guild rented out rooms to adventuring parties. I figured that would be the perfect environment for me to continue tinkering and inventing.

  It would also give me a place to work on brewing more potions, since I was running low. I began with creating a larger alchemy set up. I flipped the table on its side and leaned it against the wall, and pushed all the chairs into a corner to give myself more room to work with.

  I bought more crafting supplies from the adventurers' guild, especially wood, copper, iron, steel, fabric, and thread.

  I used copper to make vats for brewing potions. I set three up to brew rare health, mana, and stamina potions respectively, then I set another one up for dark sight potions and another for an anti-toxin potion I had been working on.

  The idea was that it removed toxins from the body, including poison and venom, in case you were exposed to something lethal. The good news was that it worked, at least according to my Advanced Testing ability, but the bad news is it made you smell really bad.

  The way it worked was by neutralizing the toxins and then expelling them through your pores in the form of really foul smelling sweat. Unless you didn't have any toxins in your body, in which case, you would just sweat profusely for a few minutes.

  Now with master (6) level proficiency in alchemy and effectively two additional levels of proficiency when it came to inventing things—using the Brilliant Inventor perk—I had a lot of potions and elixirs I could make.

  The downside was I only had so much time and working space, and I was more interested in what I could do with combining disciplines than rather pure alchemical pursuits. Like the much sought after ability to turn things into gold.

  I wasn't sure I was able to do that yet, if it was possible at all, and I didn't particularly care to invent that process. As soon as someone found out, they'd immediately murder me and keep the invention to themselves, becoming immensely wealthy in the process.

  Instead, I purchased a lot of the potions that Valda and I might need while adventuring, rather than trying to brew them all. There were simply too many potentially useful potions and not enough time or resources—in some cases—to brew them.

  Going to the finest alchemy shop in town, Big Al's Alchemy Shop, I picked up several rare quality potions. Some of the epic quality potions weren't even useful for us yet. Like epic health potions. They could heal you 500 hp, but neither of us had more than 250 hp maximum.

  Epic quality resistance potions on the other hand could help a decent amount, but they were far too expensive to be worth it at this point, and I couldn't brew epic quality potions yet. They gave 40% damage reduction to whatever type of damage they were for. And they cost 100 gold each.

  There were a lot of different types of damage, but some common ones were fire, cold, poison, and lightning. Legendary resistance potions gave 50% damage reduction.

  I picked up rare resistance potions for fire, cold, poison, and lightning. It was 50 gold each, and I got four of each, so I ended up spending 800 gold, but that was the cost of the convenience of not having to brew your own potions.

  While Al—whose full name was Allister—rang me up, I pulled out a rare stamina potion and drank it. I had been using them in place of caffeine, and they worked for a while. The longer I stayed awake, the faster my stamina drained, but these potions always brought me back up to full.

  "Hey! That's not a Big Al's Alchemy potion. Where'd you get that?"

  "Oh, sorry. Is it rude to drink non Al's potions in the store? I'm exhausted. I just needed a pick me up."

  "No, it's not rude. I just want to know where you got it."

  "Oh, it's mine. I made it myself."

  "You did?" Al's eyebrows shot up. He leaned in and whispered. "Would you mind selling some to me?"

  "Why?" I was a little taken aback. Didn't this guy make potions, too? Why would he want to buy mine?

  "I'll let you in on a little secret. I don't make potions. I just sell 'em. And ever since my business blew up, my supplier has been slowly raising his prices on me to match. I can barely afford not to raise my own prices at this point, but I would never do that to my customers. Anything you can sell me at a fair price, I'll take so I can stop bleeding gold."

  "Oh. Uh, sure, I guess. I have 500 rare health, mana, stamina, dark sight, and anti-toxin potions on me. The anti-toxin is my own invention, though, so you probably don't want that. I'll sell you 300 of each type that you want. I like to keep a large personal stock for emergencies."

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  "I'll take it! Even the toxin thingy. I'm always up for trying out new merchandise. You'll be saving my ass here, kid. My supplier has been charging me 90% of sale price! I barely make 5 gold a potion after expenses."

  "That's brutal. How does 40% of sale price sound?"

  "That sounds like I'll be able to stay in business for another week. Please come back and sell me more potions. Do you make other quality potions, too?"

  "I can make up to rare right now. Technically, I can make epic potions, but I don't have the ingredients yet. There's a dungeon I have to visit first."

  "Ok, well, you visit that dungeon and come back! Also, bring me some common and uncommon potions too. Whatever you make I'll buy at 40% of my price. If you can replace my supplier up to epic potions, you'll save my business and my life. I'll be forever indebted to you. I'll kiss all your children's foreheads or something."

  I got out my organized test tube bags I'd recently made. They formed a grid pattern with holes at the right size to hold the test tube sized potions. I handed him several bags of test tubes. He handed me 30 bags of 1,000 gold each. He gave me 30,000 gold! Holy hell! That was a lot of gold! With that much gold, Valda, Brent, Delia, and I could just live out of the inn.

  "It was a pleasure doing business with you." He smiled and his teeth sparkled. It stuck in my mind.

  When I got back to the adventurers' guild, 29,200 gold richer, I finished the music box. Now all I needed were songs. I wasn't a musician, so I couldn't put anything in, but I had built a recording feature into the box.

  I went down to the artists' section of downtown and visited every place I heard music coming out of. I paid them all 100 gold each to play me their favorite pieces. I also gave them each a 5 gold per box licensing deal. I didn't make that part optional. Missing out on that opportunity would be devastating to any one of them. Afterwards, I played the music back to them through the box, much to their delight.

  They asked where they could get one of these boxes, and I said at the fair in half a week's time, and I would get them each a free box. Damn. I didn't realize I wouldn't be able to just invent these things. I would have to actually produce them. I had them each sign a brief statement saying that they consented to my use of their music in the box and agreeing to the licensing deal.

  While I was writing another one of the documents, it occurred to me that it would be much easier if I had a self writing quill. And that was my next invention idea. After gathering 50 pieces of music, vocal and nonvocal—which cost me 5,000 gold upfront—I went back to my room at the guild and added a few features to the enchantments on the box.

  I added voice commands to it, buttons, glowing numbers and words that told you which song was playing and what number in the order it was. I added a play list and repeat function.

  I disabled the record function. I didn't need people recording over the music. I also added a durability enchantment to it, because knowing humans, I knew people would drop them or knock them off surfaces.

  I put all the enchantment on the inside of the box so it wasn't the ugliest thing you'd ever seen. I placed a small chunk of mana stone in each enchantment circle using glue I had made through alchemy. I estimated that should last five years of constant use.

  It wouldn't break over time technically, either. The enchantments would just run out of mana eventually and someone, probably me, would have to recharge the mana stones.

  Speaking of, I needed to go back to that wizard to upgrade his bag, so it wouldn't run out of mana and stop working. When I first made the bags, I thought they had infinite energy, but I almost died from that mistake and I almost took Valda with me.

  I woke up one morning to several of the bags emptying out their contents onto the floor. Within ten seconds, it was up to the side of the bed. I figured out what was happening by then, but the bags were buried, so I couldn't fix them. Luckily, I had one on the nightstand.

  I recharged that one and gave it the vacuum quality like I had in the spider cave. I vacuumed up all the contents without accidentally vacuuming another bag and potentially causing disastrous results. After that I recharged all the bags and added mana stone pieces to all the enchantments. Now that I had the money, I could buy more mana stones to charge the bags to last for 100 years, rather than just a few.

  I would have dabbled more in the enhancement side of artifice, but I found out, much like with tinkering, I didn't have everything I needed. The enhancement side of artifice required rare ingredients that we're used to enhance armor and weapons to an incredible degree.

  Far more than could be achieved through mere mana based enchantment alone. Not that enchantment wasn't just as strong of a discipline. It was. Just in different ways. Enchantment was more about altering or changing the function of something, whereas artifice was primarily about enhancing weapons and armor.

  Golem creation was also a part of artifice, but for specific reasons, there weren't a million golems running around everywhere. To create a golem, you had to transfer a small piece of your soul into it.

  That soul fragment regenerated, but it took time. The larger the golem, the larger the fragment. The more of your soul you gave up, the more it affected your personality. There was a safe amount of soul you could give up per year without it affecting you, but it wasn't a lot. If you got up 10% or more, you were likely to have significant side effects.

  Even 5% was pushing it, but it could be done. The true safe zone was 1% to 2%. There was a way to avoid side effects, but it was ethically questionable, depending on the circumstances.

  You could use portions of someone else's soul. That said, unless they gave it up willingly, that was highly unethical. And even if they did give it up willingly, taking more than 5% was still considered morally gray.

  Most golems didn't talk or have a personality, which made me wonder how much soul did Glogmore have? It had to be at least 10%. Maybe that was why the necromancer felt so much endearment to Glogmore and why he felt so betrayed by Glogmore when he turned on him.

  As I was working on the self-writing quill, I kept bumping up against the question of how you would communicate what you wanted to write to it. You couldn't do telepathic communication because you would need to attune to the item and that was a long process that most people probably wouldn't want to go through.

  And then it hit me, dictation. You could tell it what to write. Once I had completed the enchantments and embedded mana stones into the quill, I went back to the inn and finally got some well-needed rest.