I was on the sofa, slumped like a sack, my head tilted back against the cushion, and my body on the verge of sliding onto the floor, staring at the ceiling above me with a glossed blank gaze

My nose had bled at some point during the third or the fourth herb.

I had not noticed when it started.

Noticed it when it dripped onto my shirt and then stopped noticing it again because the headache was occupying all available attention, having firmly established itself as the top priority in whatever survival instincts I had.

The table in front of me had eight small plants on it. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

Four of them were the original spirit herbs I had bought from the System: the Silverleaf, the Redstem, the Bitterfern, and the Sunblossom, each one different in color and shape and leaf structure, each one now permanently mapped in my long-term memory at every level of its existence simultaneously.

The other four were copies I had manifested through Nature Manifestation after each Trace session.

I slowly drifted my gaze from the ceiling and looked at the eight plants on the table, confirming, with the minimal cognitive output the confirmation required, that I now owned the structural entirety of four distinct spirit herbs, not as learned knowledge that would fade, but as permanent architectural knowledge that I could recall and replicate at the speed of thought for the rest of my life, provided I didn’t lose practice.

Then I reached over, picked up all eight plants, and sent them to inventory, because looking at them was making my head throb in more ways than one, and I had work to do.

So I opened the crafting menu.

It appeared before my vision in a clean display in translucent blue with three tabs running along the top: Recipes, Ingredients, Enchantments.

I moved to Ingredients and the list populated immediately. I could see every recipe for the process ingredients I had purchased sitting in a neat row.

I selected Bitterfern Extract.

The recipe expanded into a display showing the required ingredients and their quantities, and next to the ingredient name was an icon representing the item.

The Bitterfern icon was lit, glowing a soft green to indicate I had it in my inventory. Beside it, an icon for a small empty glass vial was dark, which meant I did not have one.

I mentally hovered over the darkened vial icon.

A small window appeared: Empty Vial (5mL). Price: 1 Credit. Purchase?

One credit. For a glass vial.

I purchased it without a second thought, and the icon immediately lit green, and I hit Craft.

-Ding!

{Bitterfern Extract crafted successfully.

5mL Bitterfern Extract stored in Inventory.}

And that was the entire crafting process.

No bench. No fantasy chemistry equipment. No measuring anything into anything else.

The Bitterfern went in, the extract came out, perfectly pure, measured, and stored.

I sat with that for a moment.

After all, every alchemist in this world had spent years learning how to do this.

They had apprenticed under masters, had burned things, produced batches with too much residue and stuff... and tried again and again until the process was in their hands as reflex.

This is what the Alchemist Guild was built around. There were licensing systems. There were supply chains for the herbs, the equipment, and the vials.

And I had just done it by pressing a button.

[Huh... this is just the beginning though~] I cackled because I had something else in mind that’d put even this to shame if my theory is correct.

I moved through the remaining processing recipes in quick succession.

And within a minute, I was sitting with all the processed components done, and I moved to the potions themselves.

Grade 9 came first. The recipe display showed all four ingredient icons lit green. The container icon for a corked 200mL glass bottle and 200 mL distilled water was dark.

So I hovered over them, purchased them both for two credits, and hit Craft.

-Ding!

{Healing Potion Grade 9 crafted successfully.

150mL stored in Inventory.}

Repeated the same process for the Grade 8 potion as well before pulling both bottles out of inventory and setting them on the center table

The Grade 9 was a deep, saturated green with a slight opacity to it, catching the room’s warm light and scattering it into the liquid in a way that made it look thick and swirling.

The Grade 8 was lighter, much cleaner even.

The green was softer, and the suspension was visibly more uniform, and when I held it up against the room’s light, the liquid was almost clear in the thinner parts of the bottle with a faint shimmer running through it that the Grade 9 did not have.

I uncorked the Grade 8, because that was the one currently relevant to the state of my head, and took a long swig.

And the effect hit my skull within two seconds, spreading outward from the center in a slow, even wave that went through the ache the way sunlight goes through thin curtains.

My thoughts sharpened, and the cognitive sluggishness from four consecutive Trace sessions began lifting, the muddied processing clearing as the potion moved through.

[Tastes like green tea,..] I thought. [Would taste better cold.]

I looked at the bottle in my hand.

I directed 30 MP/s of Ice Reinforcement into the palm holding it, letting the cold move from my hand into the bottle, and the liquid inside.

The frost crept across the surface of the bottle in a slow spread with condensation forming immediately on the outside and dripping onto my knee, while the liquid inside cooled from room temperature to something that was the right side of cold within about fifteen seconds.

"Yeah," I sighed after another swig. "That hit the spot."

[Maybe... I should replace my morning coffee with this.]

And I immediately burst into a cackle the moment the thought finished.

If any normal person in this city overheard it, they’d probably have a mental breakdown.

The Grade 8 Healing Potion sold on the open market for one gold and two hundred silver, and here I was, seriously considering replacing coffee with it.

To give some perspective, the luxury room I was sitting in costs 9000 silver per night,

Wiping the dried blood from under my nose with my sleeve with a chuckle, I opened the Party Module’s conference interface and dialled a video call.

Nom-Nom’s feed came up first, her face filling the frame from slightly too close as it always did when she was the one managing the camera angle, and Peko was visible beside her, which confirmed they were together.

[Classic girl talk,] I thought.

And before I could even open my mouth to speak, Peko beat me to it.

"Young Master," Peko said, her brows furrowed in concern, yet her voice controlled and clear. "Are you okay? You look like death warmed over."

"Well, I just crammed the complete structural blueprint of four spirit herbs into my brain sequentially so..."

"Your nose," Nom-Nom said, pointing at her own.

"Look, I’m fine... " I chuckled, holding up both bottles toward the ’camera’. "The point is, we now have an unlimited supply of Grade 8 and Grade 9 Healing Potions... a Grade 9 is in my inventory. Pull it out and tell me if it’s just like the ones sold in the market."

Nom-Nom’s arm moved, and a moment later, she had the Grade 9 in her hand and was passing it to Peko.

Peko took it, uncorked it, and spent a genuine amount of time on the examination.

She sniffed it, rotated the bottle slowly, holding it up to the light in her room, tilting it to watch how the liquid moved inside, tipping it slightly to observe the consistency at the edges.

"It is extremely high quality..." she finally said, and the slight pause before she continued told me she was still processing what she was looking at. "I see no impurities...no particulate residue. Every Grade 9 potion I have encountered in the market had some degree of residue floating in it. This has none."

"The System crafted it," I tilted my head. "So, of course it came out clean."

"Indeed..." Peko nodded, still looking at the bottle in deep concentration. "But that is precisely the point... It is indistinguishable from a market Grade 9 except that it is better than every market Grade 9 Healing Potion I have personally seen,"

She recorked it carefully before looking straight at me. "We will need to think about the implications of this."

"Huh... I’ll handle it later," I nodded before grinning at them. "Try drinking some first. It tastes genuinely good. Make sure you chill it a bit with Ice magic first."

Nom-Nom’s eyes went wide and immediately fixed on the bottle in Peko’s hand.

While Peko looked at me through the call, absolutely speechless.

"Only you..." she spoke slowly, "would say something like that."

But still, she uncorked the bottle, held her hand around it, and let a thin channel of Ice magic run through her palm and into the glass for several seconds until the surface of the bottle fogged lightly with condensation.

Then she produced a small glass from somewhere off-frame, poured a measure for Nom-Nom, and poured a smaller one for herself.

Nom-Nom drank hers immediately in one motion and set the glass down with the expression she always had after tasting something new that she was going to add to her list of daily snacks.

"It is tasty!" she said, with complete conviction.

Peko took a small, careful sip from her own glass and held it.

"It is very calming," she said, fully aware they are drinking a healing elixir as though it is tea, but has decided to be adult about it.

"See? What’d I tell you~" I chuckled, settling back into the sofa.

It was then that Nom-Nom looked at the camera with her expression shifting into one of rare solemnity.

"Master..." she said, edging closer and looking straight at me. "Peko and I have been... talking. There is something we would like to discuss with you."

I looked at both of them through the call, and Peko’s expression confirmed it; she, too, was watching me with the same directness and the same settled seriousness.

"Alright..." I straightened on the sofa, while a thousand different predictions crossed my mind, none of which were comforting. "So, what is it?"