-Ding!

{Recipes & Items Purchased.

Healing Potion Grade 9 (Recipe)

Healing Potion Grade 8 (Recipe)

Bitterfern Extract (Recipe)

Refined Silverleaf Concentrate (Recipe)

Sunblossom Petal Extract (Recipe)

Bitterfern Distillate (Recipe)

Silverleaf Herb (Item - Spirit Herb) ×1

Redstem (Item - Spirit Herb) ×1

Bitterfern (Item - Spirit Herb) ×1

Sunblossom (Item - Spirit Herb) ×1

Credits Deducted: 45,600

Recipes available in the Crafting Menu.

Items are stored in the Inventory.}

Forty-five thousand, six hundred credits.

I looked at that number, and only I knew that kind of bulshitery I would have to do to earn that much by myself.

But the breakdown made it slightly more bearable.

The recipes themselves had cost 38,500, which was the non-negotiable part.

The processing recipes, the ones that turned raw herbs into refined concentrates and distillates and extracts, had added another 7,000 on top, because the ingredients listed in the potion recipes were all processed forms, and buying the potion recipe without the processing license meant I could see the ingredients on a list and not do a single thing with them, which honestly felt like those invisible taxes everyone hates.

Though herbs themselves had cost 100.

A 100 credits, for four herbs, and those four herbs were the entire point, because I did not need the herbs as ingredients.

I needed them as subjects for Trace.

One of each, just enough for the skill to map and burn the complete structural blueprint into permanent memory.

After that, I could produce them through Nature Manifestation indefinitely, at the same rate and the same zero cost that I do with gold.

A Grade 9 potion sold for 350 credits and cost roughly 50 credits in raw ingredients to produce through the System’s crafting menu.

A Grade 8 sold for 3,500 will cost around 100 in ingredients once processed and crafted. 50 credits for the same ingredients used in Grade 9, and 50 more for Sunblossom.

After Trace, the ingredient cost dropped to zero.

So the 45,600 credits I had just poffed were a one-time investment.

After this, every potion I produced would cost me exactly nothing except mana, and mana was not something I had a shortage of.

The math was obvious, and so was the headache.

"The pain’s gonna be biblical..." I muttered, wincing just thinking about it.

Tracing the gold nugget had nearly split my skull, and I had gone into that with a reasonable working knowledge of what gold was made of at a structural level, but even that had not helped as much as I had hoped.

With the herbs, I had no such head start.

I was going to be mapping four completely unknown biological structures down to the subatomic level and having them burned into my long-term memory one after the other.

[Oh well,] I thought, draining the last of my cold coffee. [No pain, no gain, I guess...]

I set the empty cup on the center table, reached into my inventory, and pulled out the first herb.

The Silverleaf was small and beautiful with roots still attached and slightly damp from, and the leaves were exactly what the name implied: a soft, pale silver-green that caught the room’s warm light and gave it back with a faint shimmer, each leaf perfectly formed, the edges smooth, the surface with a faint texture that was not quite waxy and not quite soft.

I looked at it sitting in my palm for a moment before taking a deep breath and sending 60 MP/s of Ice Reinforcement straight into my brain.

The effect was immediate and complete, the way jumping into cold water is immediate and complete.

My thoughts sharpened in the space of a single breath; the hesitation and the edge of dread about what I was about to do cooled and flattened. Even the anticipation went quiet and all that was left was clarity.

Ice Reinforcement to the brain did to me psychologically what went beyond enhanced processing speed.

It made the emotional register go serene... not numb or detached, just coldly calm and clear about what was happening and what needed to be done about it.

The intensity of it was not immense; my heart was still doing jumping jacks, but I was now a little calmer about it than I had been.

And so I went into the next stage.

Focusing on the Silverleaf in my palm, I activated Trace, and felt my mana drain and regenerate in the same instant as the skill moved into the herb.

It took less than a second to map.

And the moment it finished, the tsunami of information arrived.

Every structural layer of the Silverleaf, from its surface geometry down through the cellular architecture, the chemical composition of each compound it contained, the precise arrangement of every molecule in each of those compounds, the atomic and subatomic relationships beneath them... and deeper still, into the interactions that defined how those structures held together at their most fundamental level.

All of it arrived simultaneously, searing itself permanently into my brain.

My hand immediately clamped around my skull, and my knees instinctively pulled to my chest in a fetal position before I had consciously decided to move them.

Vision went white and stayed white, and in that white was an agony worse than Mage’s Folly.

My brain prickled like thousands of things biting simultaneously from inside the skull, finding every surface available and pressing in without stopping.

I could not think. There was no room for thought; every cognitive resource I had was overwhelmed with pure information arriving at a rate that left no space for the brain to do anything except receive and burn and receive and burn... until it was done.

I did not know when I fell sideways on the sofa. Nor did I know how much time had passed because time required thought to track, and I no longer had any capacity for it.

What I was aware of was my lungs stopping from the totality of the demand on every system that required thought, while I still could not form a single word in my head to tell my body to do anything about it.

But for some accursed reason, the parts that registered and processed pain were working just fine.

I could even feel my head heating up.

Those 60 MP/s of Ice Reinforcement were still flowing directly into my brain on instinct alone, but the temperature was still climbing, and I could feel my brain being pushed far past its operating limits,

But I knew, Ice reinforcement was the only reason Trace hadn’t rendered in a vegetative state.

And just as what felt like an eternity had passed, the tsunami stopped.

The information finished burning, and the flood cut off, and the white receded, and the darkness at the edges pulled back, while what remained was an ache so deep and so comprehensive that calling it a headache was as accurate as calling the Night of the Red Moon just another night with a red moon in the night sky.

I lay on the sofa, twitching, and breathed... just breathed, gasping in shuddering, starving breaths.

Took more than a few minutes before the breathing became automatic again rather than deliberate.

Several even more before my fingers unclenched from my skull.

The drool on my cheek registered somewhere in my awareness, but I could not do anything about it yet.

My thoughts were... let’s say, muddy.

I mean, I had thoughts, technically, yes, they were in there, I could feel the machinery of cognition working again, but slowly and with effort, and producing output not even a quarter of the rate it normally ran at.

The mental fatigue felt like I had done several years of learning in under a minute and was now being presented with the bill.

With a trembling hand, I wiped my chin.

[System...] I thought, and forming even that took longer than it should have. [Grade 8... Healing... Potion...]

-Ding!

{Purchased and stored.}

My hand found the inventory by instinct, saw at the edges of my vision the shimmer of blue coming and going as I felt the vial in my palm.

Somehow, I really didn’t know how, but I got it open and drank half of it in a single pull before pouring the rest over the top of my head.

And the warmth spread immediately, finding my brain and moving through it in a slow, clean tide that did not erase the ache but reduced it from a roar to a persistent throb that I could think around.

As my thoughts began clearing, I sat up, pressing my palm against my left eye socket, which throbbed with a different and, frankly, disgusting kind of pain while I waited for my head to stabilize.

"This..." I said, to nobody, "... is some bullshit."

I sat there for another minute, breathing carefully and letting my brain reassemble itself before I did the thing I had been waiting to do.

I opened my palm and activated Nature Manifestation, sending the full 60 MP/s bandwidth into it, while I reached for the blueprint of the Silverleaf that I now knew better than the back of my own hand.

And within a second, a sapling pushed up from the center of my palm.

Two leaves first, then four, then the stem thickened, followed by the roots extending outward from the base and slowly winding around my fingers.

The silver-green leaves were exactly the same as the spirit herb The System had given me, down to the shimmer of the surface, to the texture, growing with a speed that had nothing natural in it.

Under three seconds, a Silverleaf Herb sat in my open hand, roots still trailing and growing out of my palm and fingers.

I looked at it for more than just a second as I sighed, letting my shoulders finally slump.

"Okay..." I said slowly. "Okay, that worked..."

I gently pinched the stem with my index finger and thumb before plucking it out of my palm, feeling the roots snap from the skin like peeling tape off of it.

[This will never stop giving me the heebie-jeebies... Okay, one down, three more to go...]

Sighing, I pulled out the Redstem from the inventory, and, like a proper masochist, I went for round two.