Arthur hadn’t left the cottage basement for thirty hours. Right after his conversation with Iris, he’d immediately gone to the System store and bulk-bought all the ingredients he needed for strength enhancements elixirs for the lowest price he could. 500,000 credits spent later, Arthur had two thousand sets of ingredients to work with. It had taken a little haggling, but he’d managed to take the seller down from 530,000. It had been easy enough that he suspected the seller priced it as such just to get buyers to purchase at 500,000 credits and no lower and have them leave feeling like they'd accomplished something.

  He’d gone on to buy a thousand litres of ether-infused water. While he could create his own, he wasn’t willing to spend the hours it would take to spend over a million ether to do so.

  He always lost a percentage when he transferred ether and he shuddered at the thought of how terrible the conversion rate would get when he was mentally drained before even reaching the halfway point. Beyond that, however, was the fact that converting his health to ether to fuel his magic was a painful process. Not enough that he’d ever stop doing it, but forking over a hundred thousand credits to save himself from the monotonous pain and long hours of work was an easy decision to make.

  With everything ready, Arthur had retreated to the basement and started production. At first, he’d started slowly with only a single set of ingredients. Arthur followed the same set of steps he’d grown familiar with, drawing some blood and working on each ingredient individually it turned out Arthur’s exercise with tap water earlier had borne some fruit and the alchemy was far easier than before. His results too, reflected his improvements, the first elixir had produced enhancing strength by a respectable 22%. Although it was given the unique modifier, it was approaching the limits of what a Common ranked elixir could do, a limit Arthur was sure he’d soon blow past with a little more experience.

  It was only when he searched for a container that Arthur realised he’d forgotten to buy any glass vials. Thirty thousand credits later, Arthur had 3,000 empty flasks ready for filling. Arthur rubbed his temples and looked around the basement, groaning in faux pain. Even with all the rituals Iris had set up here for expanded space, the basement was feeling cramped with everything he’d bought taking up so much space. The small workbench he was sitting at was the only island of peace surrounded by all the chaos and clutter.

  The quicker I sell things, the faster this place gets cleaned up.

  With that thought bolstering his resolve, Arthur devoted the next two hours to pumping out elixirs. At first, it took him a little under seven minutes to get one ready, but by the time two hours were up, he’d gotten it down to four minutes a potion. Groaning, Arthur stretched like a cat, feeling the bones in his back pop pleasantly. All the elixirs he’d made were arranged before him, twenty-three small vials that glittered a bright red and shone like miniature lighthouses to his more magical senses. They were all incredible successes, the worst of them providing a 21% increase to strength and the greatest 24%.

  He put them all on for sale at 3,000 credits each and counted the seconds it took to sell out. Twenty-seven. Twenty-seven seconds, less than half a minute and Arthur made 44,815 credits. That was more than someone would earn working for the Agroth family defending invasion points for two weeks. It was one of the most dangerous jobs a person could do and paid an appropriately high wage: 20,000 credits a week. And I made double that by sitting on my arse for two hours.

  It wasn't the most money in the world, but it stunned Arthur just how easy it had been to make. And Arthur was only growing more efficient as time passed. He quickly did some mental maths. With his current speed of four minutes per elixir, he was projected to make a little under 90,000 credits in the next two hours. If there was any record for the fastest money made by a beginner alchemist, Arthur was sure he was on the road to beating it.

  He'd planned on taking a short break after his first batch of sales, but now that he'd seen the money coming in, it was almost impossible to stop. I'm already addicted, aren't I? Arthur settled in and started to grind out potions. He was ready for the long haul this time and decided he wouldn't get up until he'd finished fifty elixirs.

  For the first hour, he was able to maintain his top speed of four minutes an elixir, even improving a little and cutting it down by twenty seconds. Unfortunately, when the second hour started, Arthur realised he hadn't accounted for something critical; mental fatigue. As high as his stats may be, Arthur wasn't a machine and the drudgery of repeating the same set of actions over and over again meant that he started making mistakes.

  They were minor enough at first, a tiny slip-up where he failed to extract the essence of an ingredient properly, or allowed a bit of unwanted material to pollute his work, but they didn't harm his elixirs beyond dropping them by a single percentage or two, a margin he was more than comfortable working with considering he'd been consistently outputting strength enhancements at 24% for the past half an hour.

  The first major mistake was made when he applied a little too much force when handling the four-tailed watercress leaf- the exact same mistake he'd made when he'd first started experimenting with this elixir- and he cursed when he saw the torn leaf leaking energy on his fingertips.

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  That was probably the perfect time for Arthur to stop. He'd been working for ninety minutes straight and produced twenty-nine elixirs, a respectable amount, the vast majority of them of greater quality than his first batch. Arthur, however, was a stubborn man. He'd said he wouldn't get up until he made fifty and he was a man of his word. To prevent any more mistakes from happening, Arthur started to take things slowly, first moving back to five minutes per elixir and eventually returning to the six minutes it used to take him in the beginning.

  Even then, he had to scrap a failed elixir that only produced a thirteen percent enhancement, but finally, after an additional two hours, Arthur was done. He had a throbbing headache, his eyes were swimming, and his entire body was throbbing with a dull ache, the cost of fueling his alchemy with his health for the last few hours. When he saw the fifty elixirs arrayed before him, though, he couldn't care less about how shit he felt.

  That was 150,000 credits on the table, enough money to buy some decent rare-ranked equipment. Not that such gear interested him, or would prove remotely useful, but people saved up for months, even years to make what he had in less than a quarter of a day. He let that sink in for a second, dumbfounded before he started to laugh uncontrollably. He remembered all the terrible jobs he'd done as a teenager before the System arrived.

  The foster care in the US had been terrible, something he'd learned immediately after his parent's deaths. Moving from place to place, school to school, never settling anywhere long enough to set down any roots. It had been much harder on Rize than him, becoming an orphan at seven years of age and then finding out you had a defective liver nine months later.

  The government had provided little aid in covering the costs of medical treatment, and Arthur had realised very early on, that if he wanted his sister to get better he'd have to pay for it himself. What followed was years of work in questionable places. People never paid children a fair wage and those that hired them tended to be shady in the first place.

  He'd worked in kitchens peeling vegetables, delivered newspapers, washed cars and eventually found himself doing less than legal work for some extra cash. They paid the best and more importantly, they always paid. Arthur had been burned too many times, working hours on end, only to be turned away without receiving a single dollar.

  Once again, he looked at all the elixirs arranged on the table before him. This time, his smile was a little more subdued. Arthur had always had an unhealthy relationship with money, and knowing he'd never struggle for cash again healed something inside him he didn't even know was broken. There was no logic to it- he'd been doing perfectly fine before he knew credits were a thing- but emotions didn't run on logic. Arthur sighed wearily and put the elixirs up for sale. This time, they were sold in less than ten seconds. It looked like his product was gaining a little reputation.

  He'd already received three messages asking him for his recipe, one of them filled with threats of what they'd do to him if he didn't stop selling. Arthur reported the account and blocked them. He politely declined the other two before closing the System store.

  194,655 credits.

  Not bad for five hours of work. Arthur stood up and stretched, trying and failing to hold back a yawn. It was the first one since he'd gained a class and Arthur took it as an indicator that he really should call it a day.

  At the speed he was going, he'd be able to hit his goal of five million credits before the week was out. That estimate was dependent on him taking little to no rest, but he was sure he could handle it with a day or two of practice. He made himself a simple sandwich before jumping into bed. Arthur was out the second he closed his eyes.

  ~~~

  Unbeknownst to Arthur, his elixirs were making waves in the wider universe among the different schools of alchemy. Already people are reselling them for ten times the buying price, In a tier-3 world that had long since ended the threats of their invasion planets, an old man held the elixir in his hands. He was a halfling, which meant he looked exactly the same as a human male, only he was a third the size.

  He unstoppered the vial and took a sip of the red liquid. Oaklean Renevon had been using his Mythical skill Golden Palate for centuries to deduce the specific makeup of powerful potions. It was how he'd risen to his position, becoming the youngest halfling ever to join the council of alchemists and earning the title of Lord. He grimaced and spat on the side as if trying to get rid of an unpleasant taste.

  "You were right," he said to his disciple, handing the elixir back to her.

  Anyone watching would have found the scene comical, a halfling talking down to a half-giant seven times his size.

  "The secret ingredient is a perfect catalyst. It completely merges with whatever it's added to, impossible to separate and figure out. Whoever made this elixir is an amateur, though. They fought to add any flavourings. I can taste the cheap watercress they used."

  "So, master, did you figure out where it's from," Solana, the half-giant asked. Her voice was surprisingly high-pitched for someone so large. Not for the first time, Oaklean cursed the System store protection laws of anonymity. They'd been installed two thousand years ago to prevent unscrupulous customers from tracking down sellers and taking their treasures by force. The old halfling knew why the rules had been put in place- he'd benefited from the protection greatly himself- but it made his job infinitely harder when he was trying to track someone down.

  Thankfully, the same applied to all the other bastards who would want this new alchemist for themselves. Fortunately, he had a bit of a cheat code to help him out. His mythical palate never forgot a taste, and he'd been around for thousands of years at this point.

  The System store protections had one tiny flaw. Whenever you searched for raw ingredients suppliers on the System store, unless you specifically requested against it, it would show you results from places closest to you. As amateurish as this new alchemist was, Oaklean doubted they'd done so much to cover their tracks.

  "The watercress leaves are from Chrollo Empire. I can taste the shitty pesticide they use on it. The red mango pulp is from there too."

  "The Chrollo Empire," Solana repeated, "Isn't that-"

  "Where the new Originator was found," Oaklean finished for her.

  "If the two are connected, or dare I say it, if this new alchemist is our runaway Originator, perhaps it's time for the Council of Alchemists to look into things."

  "It'd be a shame if some barbarian savage kills him before we teach him some proper alchemy."

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