บท 59: Herb Ring
"It looks like you are only just starting as a pill refiner? "
Ivan didn't see anything wrong with the question of the middle aged man so he honestly answered him.
"Then I'm sure you don't have a Herb Ring right?", the man then followed up with another question.
"A Herb Ring?", Ivan asked clueless. He had never before heard of it.
"It's not surprising that you haven't heard of it before since it won't usually be mentioned in starter books or lessons.", the man said in a understanding tone.
"But don't worry, I'll explain the uses of a Herb Ring to you and then I'll tell you why I mentioned it to you.
A Herb Ring is a ring made from a special type of stone which can be found in a dungeon controlled by the Herbalist Guild. Inside the ring there is a independent space that can only be entered by plants and mental energy. Of course there are different grades and ranks of rings so the space is depended on the ring. For most pill refiners the cheapest and simplest ring which has only space but no good soil and energy accumulation is sufficient because they only want to use the space to store their herbs. Because only plants can enter the independent space they are much cheaper than upgrading ones inventory."
"That sure sounds useful, but I'm sure that even so they are still expensive."
"Of course. Even the worst quality rings are still worth more than ten thousand contribution points. Of course there is another way to gain them but it is strongly depended on ones luck."
Ivan nodded. It was as he expected. If there was no other way to gain them then this salesman wouldn't have mentioned the ring to him. He was very interested in this ring since even though his inventory was unusual big even the few herbs he had planned to purchase would take up quite a bit of space in it.
"That sounds interesting, but could you first tell me a bit more about the other functions of the Herb Rings besides storing plants."
"Of course.", seeing that Ivan was interested the man smiled and then continued on with his explanations.
"Of course storing herbs isn't the main function of the Herb Ring, instead it is the possibility to grow them there. Of course the possible herbs one can grow in ones ring depends on the quality of the soil and energy accumulation. The higher the grade and rank of the herb the higher the requirements. But this alone wouldn't quite justify it's price, since even though being able to carry ones herb fields with one is nice but it would still be possible to grow them on normal fields.
That is were the energy accumulation comes to play. Herbs need a certain amount of energy in their surroundings. It is hard to find places that require their requirements besides the places they can be find naturally. Sadly these spots are often dangerous and completely unsuited for systematic herb growing.
The Herb Ring on the other hand has the ability to collect energy and infuse it into the space within it. Because of that the energy in the surroundings is high enough to support herbs that would normally be hard or impossible to grow."
"Wow that sounds really impressive. But isn't it hard to care for the herbs if only mental energy can be used?"
The salesman laughs heartily.
"It sure is. And that is the reason why there are herbalists even though theoretically each pill refiner could grow their own herbs. Even though pill refiners use mental energy too they usually don't train it specifically so they don't have enough to use it to take care of a lot of herbs. We herbalists on the other hand mainly train mental energy so we are able to grow a huge amount of herbs in our ring."
"Do that is how it is. Then without enough mental energy these rings can only be used as storage."
"That's how it is. Of course there are some plants that don't need any care but can grow by themself. These can still be planted in a ring that isn't managed. But these plants are rare and often require at least a middle grade ring."
"Um, I'm a bit embarrassed to ask but what are these grades you are talking about?"
"Haha, don't be. It should be me that is sorry for not explaining it earlier.
Grades are a form to describe the quality of an item. There are generally four grades which are from lowest to highest, low grade, middle grade, high grade and peak grade. Inside these grades all items have then the ranks you surely now. The special ranks legendary, artifact and unique are outside of this system since they can't really be graded like this. We just call them special grade even though it isn't a real grade it still works as classification."
"Thank you for the explanation. Could you maybe give me an example on how a middle grade ring differs from a low grade?"
"Sure. The main difference in the quality of rings are the three factors I have mentioned before. Space, soil, and energy accumulation. The bigger the space the better as you are sure to have already guessed. The same with the energy accumulation. Here more is better too. Soil on the other hand is much more complex since different types of plants require different soils too. So while for someone who wants to grow fire attributed plants a fire attributed soil would be great for someone else it would be useless. Because of that when talking about the quality of the soil we talk about the
average grade and rank of the soil as well as the different types of soil appearing in the space.
This hard to balance so you will still have to check out if you can use the soil in the ring or if you would even use a Herb Ring of lower rank just because the soil is a better fit to your plants."
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