Max hardly paid attention.

His eyes had already locked onto the books in her hands.

Potion recipes.

Three of them.

The first covered healing potions, capable of treating everything from minor wounds to deeper injuries like half-inch cuts and stab wounds.

The second focused on repairing broken bones.

And the third...

Mana recovery potions.

That one immediately caught Max’s full attention.

Honestly, he hadn’t expected the government to hand over something this valuable so casually.

For a brief moment, he even wondered if fantasy governments were secretly far more generous than the ones back on Earth.

Then he looked at the ingredient list.

His excitement immediately became much more reasonable.

Mana stones.

As the primary ingredient.

Along with several other expensive materials.

Suddenly, the recipes didn’t seem nearly as generous.

Handing someone the instructions was one thing.

Actually being able to afford brewing the potion was an entirely different challenge.

Back at the hospital, Max had used mana recovery potions so casually that he’d subconsciously assumed they were fairly cheap.

Apparently...

They weren’t.

The ones he’d been drinking had each been worth around a thousand units.

Which immediately raised another question.

Why had the hospital possessed so many of them?

Then Max remembered.

Right.

They’d been running an organ-trafficking operation.

Suddenly, having an absurdly well-funded inventory made a lot more sense.

Crime, it turned out, was surprisingly profitable.

Who would’ve guessed?

Before long, they found a taxi willing to take them out of the city.

The further they drove, the fewer buildings remained. Eventually, the scenery gave way almost entirely to wilderness, though the road itself stayed in excellent condition.

Traffic was surprisingly light.

Most of the vehicles they passed weren’t ordinary cars but large buses and heavy trucks reinforced with thick armor. Some even had mounted weapons installed on them.

After several more minutes of watching an endless parade of trees roll past the window, Max officially reached his boredom limit.

There were only so many trees a person could admire before they all started looking like close relatives.

His attention drifted toward Zerena instead.

She was already absorbed in one of the recipe books.

Mana Recovery Potions.

Apparently she’d gotten a head start.

Curiosity got the better of him, and he leaned over to look at the pages.

The recipe began with the ingredients, explaining not only what each one was but also the role it played inside the potion and why it had to be added in that particular order.

Below that came several pieces of alchemical apparatus.

The book listed their names, though it hadn’t reached the section explaining how they were actually used yet.

Then Max’s eyes landed on something far more interesting.

Runes.

To anyone else, they probably looked like another page that would require careful study.

Max barely slowed down.

His eyes swept across them as casually as someone skimming ordinary text.

One glance was enough.

The meanings arranged themselves inside his head almost immediately, the runic structure unfolding with such ridiculous ease that it barely felt like learning at all.

Barely half an hour later, Max quietly closed the book.

Just over a hundred pages.

Finished.

He’d somehow managed to read the entire thing well before Zerena had even reached the halfway point of her own copy.

Eventually, she noticed.

Her eyes shifted from her book to the one resting neatly in Max’s lap.

Then back to him.

A faint look of annoyance immediately appeared.

"Did you actually understand anything," she asked, "or did you just skim through the whole thing?"

"I did."

That earned him a raised eyebrow.

It was the sort of answer that somehow managed to say almost nothing.

"I understand it," Max corrected.

Not that he was about to explain why.

Years of reading absurdly long fantasy webnovel titles had clearly been excellent training for processing ridiculous amounts of information.

Titles like:

’The Mature Beauty Who Could Destroy Armies Somehow Ended Up Babysitting the World’s Most Suspicious Prodigy.’

Honestly, after surviving those, a few pages of potion theory hardly felt intimidating.

"You... do?" Zerena asked, her voice rising enough that even the taxi driver glanced at them through the rear-view mirror.

Max simply nodded.

He’d honestly expected this sort of thing to stop surprising her by now.

Apparently not.

A small, thoroughly smug smile found its way onto his face.

"But I still need practice," he added before the smile could grow into something unbearable.

And that part was completely true.

Understanding the recipe wasn’t the same as making the potion.

He already understood the runes.

He understood why each ingredient was added.

He even understood the overall process.

Actually doing it was another matter entirely.

Extracting the essence from herbs with fire-control runes.

Purifying the mana inside mana stones.

Infusing that mana into the potion without destabilizing it.

Controlling the temperature.

Timing every step correctly.

Those weren’t things you mastered by reading a book once, no matter how unfair his cheat ability was.

They required experience.

Hopefully...

Not too much experience.

Because after glancing through the ingredient list, Max had developed a profound respect for just how expensive mistakes could become.

From the way Zerena worshipped money, he sincerely hoped he could succeed within one or two attempts.

The ingredients were expensive enough to give him a heart attack.

As for Zerena...

If he ruined even a single batch, Max wasn’t entirely sure whether she’d suffer a mental breakdown or simply decide that murdering her step grandson was the more economical option.

The sun still hung in the sky, though it wouldn’t be long before it began sinking below the horizon, handing daylight over to another part of the world.

Max now found himself walking through the streets of a small town built beside a fairly sizable military outpost.

According to Zerena, the location wasn’t chosen by accident.

The town sat on the edge of one of the region’s more magically reactive areas, a place where mana naturally gathered in unusually high concentrations.

Which explained the permanent military presence.

Officially, they were stationed here to defend the area from anything that wandered out.

Unofficially...

They also made sure curious civilians, reckless adventurers, and anyone with suspicious intentions stayed on the correct side of the checkpoints.

In other words, the soldiers spent their days protecting people from monsters—

and protecting the monsters from people who dramatically overestimated their own abilities.