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Chapter 324

Grivy picked up the sleeping Serqet and scampered off somewhere.

Saying something like, “Good kids deserve a reward,” she got all excited, and Sur stamped its feet even harder.

“Is Meryl Dyne’s corpse intact?”

“Except for the soul, it’s basically fine. Of course, since she’s dead, if we leave it alone the body will rot quickly.”

“They said they’ll prevent that on their side.”

“Does that mean anything?”

Luna frowned slightly as she asked.

Her look said the dead ought to be let go.

Of course, I felt the same.

Once someone is dead, they should be sent on.

But.

“If we find Meryl’s soul, that’s a different story.”

“Find it? How?”

“There’s something called a soul-division ritual. Anyway, it’s a slightly complicated ritual magic. Meryl Dyne had learned it. Looks like she miraculously managed to split her consciousness right before dying. Muyeong is holding it for now.”

In any case, resurrection would only be possible after her soul naturally healed, so I didn’t bother bringing that up.

When I glanced over, Sur was bravely gnawing on a hunk of meat.

In those little eyes was a feeling like he’d made up his mind about something.

I just hope he doesn’t cause any unnecessary trouble.

“Now that I’m back. Aren’t you giving me my reward?”

At my question, Luna, who had been staring straight at me from across the way, looked puzzled.

“Reward?”

“Yeah. You said I’d get one if I came back.”

At that, as if she recalled the kiss before I left for the Berner territory, she flinched.

Remembering it made her shy, and she drove her fist right into my solar plexus.

Wham!!

I’m gonna die, seriously.

“Control your strength a little.”

“Leon.”

Then she half-opened her eyes and looked at me.

“I’m trusting you weren’t out there pointlessly flirting with women.”

“When did I ever go around flirting with people?”

The princess flashed through my mind for a moment, but I erased that memory.

“Feels like you did.”

“Uh……”

“If you tell me now, I’ll spare that wench’s life.”

“No. Even so, she’s the Empire’s princess.”

“Princess Eilena!”

She sprang to her feet and trembled all over.

“Before that thieving pigeon, there was another thieving brat. Why did I forget that….”

“Honestly, you and I both thought she wasn’t doing it out of a crush—it was just her misunderstanding.”

“No way….”

“Yeah. She’s a bit stubborn. She ran off saying ‘just you wait and see.’ It just felt like she was putting on a cutesy act.”

“Hm… Compared to the thieving pigeon she’s admittedly cute… but I had a bad feeling.”

“So. When are you giving me the reward?”

When I urged her with a faint expectation, she deliberately turned her reddened face away to avoid my eyes.

“L… later….”

Oh… dopamine.

Maybe she didn’t like my expression, because Luna stuck her lips out in a pout, but it didn’t last long.

* * *

It felt like we finally had a bit of breathing room.

According to the information from the head of the Watchers, we’d have to wait at least a month to make contact with either the cultists or Nyarlathotep.

Nyarlathotep had wrapped itself up as if sealing itself with some unknown extradimensional power and gone into hiding, and as for the cultists, the times they appeared in the areas we’d identified were about that far apart.

Since that raid that day, they’d gone into deep hiding as if they’d given up on recovering the Void Enchanter.

I figure the reason the Watchers found their hidden traces at all is because they have a prophet.

Sometimes I wonder, “Are they really prophets?” but judging by what they do, there are too many things you can’t explain unless they are.

A lot is happening in Cascadia.

The twin siblings of the Four Heavens Clans who crossed over from the Eastern Continent and settled in Cascadia have been busy lately looking for new interests.

Of the two, the younger sister, Hwa Ryeong, had an unexpected talent.

She loved adventure, grasped exactly the merits of the Paradise Artifact, and realized various kinds of games and scenic wonders created through her ascension.

Of course, the process didn’t move quickly.

And in that process, I added an update function to the Paradise Artifact.

There’s nothing we can do about hardware issues, but for software issues, if you just update it, there’s no need to change devices.

Of course, we do charge a set amount for updates.

The artifact’s on track, orichalcum mining is proceeding smoothly.

On top of that—

This insane dungeon-master cheat-map is spouting crude oil despite not even being a desert.

The time has finally come.

“Everyone, focus. From now on we begin Melissa’s Sword Master Project.”

“Y-you’re really doing that?”

“Yeah. The Heavenly Demon Divine Sword is a martial art where an elixir rush works. And you’ve got exams soon, but you keep skipping practice because you’re busy with estate work, right?”

“I’m already top of the class as it is! And if you stuff yourself with that many elixirs and still feel fine, it’s gotta be insanely painful, right?!”

“Mm… it’ll hurt a bit, taste bad… be miserable. But is that what matters?”

Sensing a grim future, Melissa shouted in a panic, but the train had already left the station.

“I clearly said I don’t want to.”

“Nope. I can’t stand to see my little sister getting beaten up anywhere.”

“I told you, if anything I did the beating; I’ve never gone around getting beaten!”

She pleaded desperately, but I only tried to calm her.

“Calm down, Melissa. I’m only trying to help you.”

“Don’t talk nonsense! I’m literally asking you to help by stopping right now!”

I forcibly sent her out despite her screams, layered defensive magic on the door so she couldn’t break it down as she pounded on it, and started the work.

“Leon!! Leon!! Brother! Are you listening to me?! Stop! You bastard! I said stop!”

The shouting from outside gradually faded.

Now that it was quiet, I could finally breathe.

“What materials do we need?”

“First, this poison core is the most important.”

Essentially the alpha and omega—the poison cores Serqet had been coughing up like hairballs.

We need those.

Of course, the ingredients were ready.

We had two intact poison cores Serqet had spat out.

Excluding the ones spat up midway for experiments, those two were all we had.

“With one, I can make ten doses. If we use about fifteen on Melissa… the remaining five will find their use.”

“What’s the second ingredient?”

“Mithril.”

But in this process, we obtained something greater than mithril.

“Mithril?”

“Yeah. Mithril is good to use, but honestly, we’ve got something even better.”

The Duchy of Cascadia has one of the only orichalcum mines on the continent.

We haven’t publicly announced orichalcum’s existence yet, but it’s impossible to completely dam up information, so other nations have already been quietly tossing inquiries to Bata.

If you can naturally mine orichalcum, there are countless things you can do.

Anyway, for what I’m about to do, orichalcum can draw out a bigger reaction.

And the last thing we need—

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“This.”

I rapped on a large metal drum—smack!

Inside was crude oil imbued with mana, drawn from the oil deposit.

We can’t really split it into heavy oil and diesel like in my past life, but by processing mana-laden crude itself, we can use it in various ways.

“But this—if a person ingests it, there’s no way it ends well.”

“Right. It’s not for drinking.”

This was for catalysis.

And for chemical reactions.

“Science is the same. You know how many highly toxic substances go into making a single medicine?”

They just don’t end up directly in the medicine.

I put on a white coat like a surgeon and raised my hands slightly.

“Luna. Peridot.”

At my words, Luna rummaged through subspace and handed me a beautiful green gem.

A mineral also known as olivine.

I put it into a large glass bottle and layered dozens of defensive spells on the bottle.

Then I poured in the exact amount of a reagent I’d had the Mage Association acquire for me, and stoppered it to block any additional air ingress.

“Draw in!!”

Whooo!!!

Then, holding it in one hand, I applied tremendous heat and pressure in an instant.

It wasn’t just pressure on the peridot itself; by exposing it together with the reagent to a moment of high temperature and high pressure, the greenish metal-like substance instantly melted into liquid.

It softened into a sticky, molten-glass-like fluid.

I took it out, floated it in the air, and shaped it.

The shape was a peculiar glass tube.

Only, unlike ordinary olivine glass that’s greenish-yellow or brown, this became astonishingly transparent.

“Platinum.”

This time, platinum.

With a chuk!

Luna produced a silvery metal, and I forcibly reshaped it into something like a coil.

Then I placed it inside the green, peculiar bottle I’d cooled into a glass-tube shape, fixed it in place, and set the opening to face downward.

“What is this?”

“A device for catalytic chemical reactions.”

Explaining calmly, I picked up a copper ingot and reshaped it into a coil to wrap around the olivine glass tube.

“The basic prep is done.”

“What effect does this have?”

“That olivine glass tube we just made has the property of capturing special substances from the air. And with the platinum coil inside and the copper coil outside creating a mana wave field, it’ll modify the chemical formula of the gas inside into a special form.”

I added more glass tubing to collect the altered gas separately, drew some mana-laden crude oil into a bottle, and reacted it with the pre-made gas.

Then bubbles began to rise on the surface of the black crude, and in an instant it started to boil.

And then—

Before long, its color flashed into a red hue as if it were holding light.

“Oh. It’s starting to glow.”

“Don’t touch it. Like radiation, contact with that is bad for your body.”

“Mm… got it. Need anything else?”

“For now there’s nothing more we can do.”

I divided the resulting liquid into several bottles, sealed them tight, and set them where they’d get plenty of sun.

“In two hours, when we compress that, it’ll become a jewel-like catalyst. When it meets a particular mana wavelength, it triggers a strange mana phenomenon. That’s the most important part.”

With that complicated explanation, I finished the additional prep.

Then I prepared the extra orichalcum, thin gold leaf, and the poison cores.

On top of that, I used dozens of medicinal herbs and even part of the spirit-grass Aurora had gifted me long ago.

I took out the poisonous herbs, sorted them one by one, and refined those that needed purification.

“Ugh! The smell!”

Before long, the workshop filled with a musty stench, and Grivy—who had snuck in out of curiosity to see what I was doing—clutched her nose, shrieked, and bolted.

I think I heard Melissa shriek in horror from outside, too.

Didn’t matter.

After several days like that—

When the nonstop work was done, I was looking at twenty large vials of elixir in a big case.

Normally, elixirs take at least dozens to hundreds of days; at the longest, they’re made over tens or even hundreds of years.

But in just a few days, forty elixirs had been made.

That was nearly double what I’d originally planned.

The main reason was the reaction with orichalcum, and the mana-laden crude we used turned out to be higher grade than expected, which helped too.

Even big organizations usually only have one or two at most; even when a nation manages them, it’s fewer than ten. And here we had roughly forty elixirs.

This is the terrifying part of mass-producing elixirs.

On the Eastern Continent and everywhere else, elixirs are expensive and precious.

Churning out twenty top-tier elixirs in just a few days—there’s no other word for it but mass production.

Of course, no matter how much crude oil or orichalcum we had, without the poison cores made from the Venom of the Hydra, this result would’ve been impossible.

The toxicity was gone; in its place, an immense amount of mana was captured and condensed into liquid.

For a mass-produced elixir made quickly with not many ingredients, it possessed overwhelming performance.

“With these fifteen, and the energy pills I got before, and a few other things… she should just about clear the wall.”

“You might make it to top-tier, but… the Sword Master wall isn’t something you break just by having lots of aura…”

At that concerned remark, I tossed an elixir into my mouth.

And—

“Urk!”

Thinking something was wrong, Luna jumped in alarm and rushed toward me.

But when Leon picked up an energy pill and handed it to Grivy—who was holding her nose and making a crying face—the situation flipped.

“Ew! Smelly! Gross! That’s gross! Not for eating!”

And Melissa, who had been peeking in with just her head, face stiff with tension, went pale as a sheet.

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