章 26: Potionmaking 1

Appearing in Cario City, Draco first headed for the local Tradeskill Association headquarters. This was the place where he could utilize the best crafting stations and rooms for his purposes.

Even the stuff at the cave he was at before wouldn't be as good. This was due to the quality of materials that were present in such a location. Of course, the quality of what you could use depended on the money you had on hand.

Draco entered the biggest Tradeskill Association branch with his Battle Maniac title equipped.

Inside, he noticed that the furnishings were not as lavish as the Merchant's association, but higher than the Lands Commission. Here, Draco was received by an aide who was, surprisingly, a male.

"Hello my Lord, do you need any help?"

His voice was reasonably respectful, but not as awed or subservient as other servers who were faced with his title in other organizations. This fact surprised Draco, but meant little to him after thinking about it.

Maybe because it was a combat oriented title? After all, Tradeskill crafters had no need to be subservient to a 'muscle head' as they tended to put it. Thinking along those lines, Draco shifted to his Inventor title.

"I would like to rent your best alchemy room for a full day."

Draco requested with a loose smile. However, his simple request made the aide pale suddenly.

This fact surprised Draco. Was there something going on today that made accessing those rooms a problem?

"M-My Lord… that w-would b-be… my p-pleasure…"

His voice was shaky and showed that he was thrown into the pits of fear. Draco literally felt the gaze of the aide before him shift to one of total obeisance.

Paying no mind to the theatrics, Draco let the aide handle the procedures. What frustrated Draco was that everyone else they approached to handle the processing also reacted the same way, wasting his precious time.

When Draco made his opinion known, it was as if he had slapped a nest of bees as everyone fell over themselves to get him nice of comfy. Majority of the subsequent process were skipped over when he had shifted his title over.

Draco guessed that his Inventor title was most likely the cause, rather than his wish to spend money. Normally, renting the best alchemy room would come to 300 gold per hour, which was an abhorrent amount.

Then again, what right did poor people have to request for the best services in a service oriented establishment? Clearly, this pricing was meant to filter out a large majority of people, leaving only the true masters.

However, as a side effect of his title, all fees were waived.

This was a pleasant surprise to him. Not counting his recent windfall of over 50,000 gold, just the remainder of the 3,000 he had would be enough for a few hours of intense work.

Another benefit that came with the crafting room was delivery services of materials. Sort of like room service. You placed a request for materials and paid a reasonably lower cost for them to have them delivered to your crafting room.

Naturally, the quality of your room decided which tier of materials you could access as well as which ones would be free due to your patronage.

At the highest room, everything minus legendary materials were available for Draco to use and abuse as long as he had money. Epic materials were up for sale, meaning that Draco could craft epic and legendary equipment or potions as long as he had the funds.

Which was his plan.

After being led to his crafting room on the top floor of the large establishment, Draco was admitted into a room that seemed like a whole new world.

Before him was an endless expanse of plains with fresh low-cut grass and bright, warm sunlight dripping from the beautifully blue sky. It was at a perfect room temperature that made one feel like they were wrapped in a warm blanket during a slightly cold night.

Draco wasn't too surprised by this, after all, he had crafted his mana sword in a similar room. There was no visible workstation in this picturesque world and a beautiful female aide walked up to him to offer an explanation on how to use the room.

Draco waved her away saying that he knew what to do, much to the aide's regret. She was damn tired of standing like a statue while serving old geezers with her 'respectable' pay. Seeing such a handsome young guy who was immensely successful and promising, she felt her heart beating faster.

However, the moment she tried to score some brownie points, she was brushed off. She sighed internally and cursed fate for making fun of her like this.

Draco waved his hand while willing a cauldron and a worktable to appear before him. Immediately, the ambient energy in the room surged into the shapes of a common looking cauldron and a simplistic table with an alchemy set on top of it.

This was how one operated this room. Unlike typical rooms where physical equipment was used, one used the energy of a whole world here to coalesce their tools.

Another fact was that alchemy required worldly energy to create better potions or poisons. Same went for Blacksmithing and/or Enchanting. When using common rooms, one would have to share the basic worldly energy that permeated the Boundless continent with every other living being.

It was the difference between having a 4.5G router with 32 people connected and a 4G router with only one person on it. While the ambient worldly energy in the room wasn't able to match the real world, it was still a thousand times more potent than using the dregs of the energy in the Boundless world!

Worldly energy was not useful at the lower levels. That was why Draco was unbothered when making his sets out in the wild. Draco knew that if his Dragon Soul had the chance to imbue the same set equipment in this small world, they'd probably come out as Semi-Legendary!

That was the same tier as his old Mana Sword, which had been hailed as the most powerful player made weapon out of all the creations that 7 billion players could make.

Since his old abode was nuked and he was now under the scrutiny of all the hidden powers, Draco decided not to hold back and astound them again. Well, that was only a remote reason. The real reason was so he could get another hefty reward from the system.

50,000 gold coins was no joke at this stage of the game. That was 500 platinum ah! Hellscape had at most 5,000 platinum as liquid funds and 100,000 platinum over all.

While that couldn't measure up with a flimsy 500 platinum, the difference was that one belonged to a guild that functioned like a company while the other belonged to an individual. Those who understood how the world worked would understand this statement.

If he could reach 1,000 platinum, Draco could buy out more lands and opportunities to expand into other kingdoms and empires, something he rarely did in his past life.

It all depended on his performance now. While destroying Zaine's outpost would gift him immense rewards, that was for a whole other purpose that he had already pre-planned.

Draco pulled out three epic ingredients directly: Hydra Egg, Flood Dragon's blood and a reverse scale of a Two-winged Noble Wyrm. These ingredients were naturally related to his namesake once again.

Draco was naturally hoping to luck out and have the Dragon Soul imbibe the potion he planned to make due to its relation to it. Still, he wasn't too hopeful of that as he could see that the fellow was quite exhausted after the previous effort.

Still, there was a lot of mayhem he could cause with these three ingredients as the main. Naturally a potion couldn't be made with such small materials. He had to add a bit more of facilitate a fusion between these items.

The process of alchemy was similar to blacksmithing, in that there were three stages with the same three terminologies; preparation, action and completion.

The preparation stage here referred to the grinding, mixing and filtration of the ingredients. This focused on prepping your stuff to be properly concocted inside the cauldron. To get the best out of the ingredients before the event, a good alchemical set was needed.

The action stage was simply chucking in everything at timed intervals and stirring the pot carefully in a set pattern. Here, anything could go wrong, whether mistiming of ingredient addition, bad mixing capabilities, presence of impurities or not enough control over worldly energy.

The completion stage wasn't a pop up menu this time, but an actual action that one needed to manually perform. This was extraction. One might think 'nonsense, why must collecting the potion or poison require a new stage? Is it not simply grabbing the cauldron and pouring its contents into a basin?'

The answer would be no. Unfortunately, the collection stage was a bit complex. One needed to utilize worldly energy to coax out the finished potion into whatever container you planned to house it.

The quality level of the potion depended on how well you could handle the completion stage. For example, Draco could use these epic ingredients and go full Harry Potter during the first two stages, but if he messed up the last stage, the best he'd get would be a rare potion, instead of an epic or higher.

Similarly, Draco could use uncommon ingredients and end up with a rare potion depending on how well he handled the final stage. Hence, alchemical ingredients never depreciated in price, but rather appreciated. Because there would only be more Alchemists appearing and getting better at their craft, but resources were finite. Since every alchemy ingredient would be useful to even a grandmaster, naturally the prices would reflect as such.

It was easier to nurture a Tradeskill player in Blacksmithing or Engineering rather than Alchemy.

Draco began the preparation stage by filtering all his ingredients over and over again. Naturally, the quality of filtration boiled down to his level in Alchemy. With his amateur rank, he could barely cleanse the basic ingredients, much less the Epic ones. Hence, he had to do it over and over again and progress slowly with it.

Naturally, his alchemy level rose slowly every time he performed this act. However, this hardly affected his level as Draco was now level 14. Even though he had received 5000% experience due to the Dragorugio Semi-Epic set design, he had put it on hold.

Honestly speaking, there was no such option in Boundless to 'postpone' rewards. However, Draco had long guessed that with his acts since launch of this game, the AI would be paying extreme attention to him. After all, it wasn't monotonous machine, but an entity with extreme intelligence and the ability to grow.

If the AI theoretically had two eyes, the right one would be permanently locked onto Draco while the other would be watching the rest of the Boundless world.

Draco was proven right when his request to have his experience reward postponed was answered. Frankly, it wasn't anything like VIP treatment, but the AI was just immensely fascinated with Draco that acceding to a small request like this wasn't much of a problem.

After filtering the items until he reached Alchemy level 7, 45%, Draco began working on the three main ingredients first, by grinding them into useable paste. This sounded easy on paper, but it was easy to mess up here by losing effectiveness of the material by grinding away a good part.

Draco treated each ingredient carefully as if he was handling a piece of priceless jewelry. His method was slow but sure, his sense focused on the process throughout.

Naturally, for alchemy, Draco had his own technique here too. He called this one 'Refined Star Technique'. The name was born due to his usage of Control to both monitor and assimilate with the concoction as well as how he handled it.

In the preparation stage, this technique was out in relative force as he grinded and mixed the ingredients that needed to go together. After all, some ingredients couldn't mesh until entering the cauldron.

Once Draco was done with this stage, he first put in the Flood Dragon's Blood as that was the most volatile ingredient. The whole time, he had to be careful when filtering this material and dared not mix it in anyway.

After throwing it into the cauldron, Draco immediately threw in half of his basic ingredients, all of which had a calming effect, into the cauldron and saturated it with as much worldly energy as he could muster.

For the whole 5 minutes he stood over the cauldron, he sweated quite heavily as he had to pour in unholy amounts of worldly energy into the mixture to keep it stable. If he had been in his cave, this would've required three hundred times more effort than now.

Draco had never heard of someone crafting an epic or higher potion in the outside world. Anyone who could do so was either a True God or an unparalleled prodigy.

When he ascertained that the mixture was stable enough, he threw in the reverse scale of the Two-Winged Noble Wyrm. This ingredient had the highest power of the lot, but was far less volatile as the Flood Dragon's Blood.

Draco threw in the remaining basic ingredients and entered a state of total focus as he poured in more worldly energy into the concoction. After approximately 3 minutes, he had stabilized the concoction and brought everything into perfect equilibrium.

'Now comes the problematic part.'

Draco frowned as he took out the Hydra Egg which was, surprisingly, the main ingredient of this potion this time around. Instead of cracking the egg during the preparation stage, Draco had only let the purest worldly energy he could control pass through the egg and filter it.

Thanks to his ability of Control, it didn't need to be mentioned about his adeptness at handling worldly energy. Among both players and NPCs, if Draco said he was number two, no one would dare to say they were number one.

Even other Control masters would pale at Draco ability at Control. After all, he came from an era where usage of Control had been developed upon to a high limit. In this timeline, Control was so new that its official name had been granted less than 5 months ago.

How could one compare a mobile game player to a PC player??? This was a similar situation to that.

Draco carefully placed the egg into the mixture in its whole form. The mixture didn't react explosively like before, but just surrounded it and began breaking down the egg from its outer layer.

But how could the egg of a fully grown Hydra be dissolved by this concoction so easily?

If it could speak, it would say 'Haha! What dog thing is this? Wanting to break this handsome Uncle down? Keep dreaming!'

Also, while the other two volatile ingredients were a tier stronger, they had been diluted by calming agents, making them less potent.

However, the sole reason Draco even added the two epic volatile ingredients was just to save time as the egg got dissolved. To speed up the process, Draco focused and used his Void of Perfection as best as he could to move all the worldly energy into the concoction to dissolve the egg.

This created a horrendous cyclone in the small world, with a blueish-green miasmic entity rushing towards the cauldron before Draco. The Aide who had been awed by Draco so far and swore on her ancestors to win his heart over was now dumbfounded.

T-This…

Not even those old farts could so this!!

What… what…. Who is this fellow?

'Fuck! I must win his heart by any means! Any woman who dares to challenge me will be This Queen's enemy for life!!'

While she began hatching plans in her own fantasies, Draco had begun sweating heavily. While he wasn't limited to a few seconds of use with his Control abilities like in the real world, he still could use Control for too long in this life.

After all, his power of Control wasn't as perfect as his past life. In his past life, he had trained his body and mind to perfection before grasping Control. Here, his body was malnourished and his mind had been feeble as well as weak.

Draco's situation was analogous to someone who had been a pro sports car racer who was forced to use a car with questionable roadworthiness to do the same type of race with the same lap time.

Yeah, he could do it, but it wouldn't be as smooth as it was with the sports car. His skills allowed him to race it in time, but he would have to use much more energy.

However, after continuous usage, this body would adapt so he wasn't worried for the long term. Right now though, he cursed his past self over and over till it became mantra.

It took over four hours of effort, with a healthy amount of breaks, to finish the action stage. When he was done, he took a good long break to recover his stamina.

Thanks to Guinevere's Necklace, Draco's stamina recovery was excellent. In a matter of minutes, he was back to top form. Now that he was done with the action stage, Draco moved onto the completion stage.

Before that, he decided to check on his heraldry items from Richmond to make sure he was remembering the stats correctly.

｢Heralds badge – Unique Item

A herald's badge is a special identification token that grants various powers to the individual wearing depending on the ranking and status of their master. Minimum rank requirement to grant a heralds badge is Rank 3.

Effects (scale with tier):

Total Diplomatic immunity

Free selection at all rank 1 and 2 shops.

Granted Minor Duke rank in all kingdoms with neutral reputation towards master

Granted passage to legendary and divine Adventurer's Guild controlled dungeons

No teleportation fees to any town or city｣

｢Heralds cloak – Unique item

A herald's cloak is a special identification garb that grants various powers to the individual wearing depending on the ranking and status of their master. Minimum rank requirement to grant a heralds cloak is Rank 3.

Effects (scale with tier):

Appearance deception: 9 forms

Movement speed out of combat: 5,000%

Blink: 500,000 feet, cooldown 30 seconds

Total Invisibility: 1 hour, cooldown 3 seconds｣

Nodding his head, Draco was satisfied. For this section, he would be relying on his insane movement speed as well as his ability to take any freebies from any rank 1 and 2 shop.

Draco turned to his aide who was still lost in her fantasies and commanded, "Go to the nearest Rank 2 shop and take all their stamina and mana potions."

The Aide was startled out of her reverie but complied gracefully after seeing Draco's Herald's badge.