Chương 85: “The Lab Pup Fell Asleep”

Potions were still useful. They had always been a part of this world's medicine, and they remained so. But they were not what most people go for when they were injured. A potion, in practice, was more like a tonic, a liquid treatment that required hours of application, usually through soaking, before it produced any visible effect. Depending on the potion, when applied to a shallow cut, it might close the wound in four to six hours. The process was slow and the cost was high.

Even the most expensive potions on the market, those capable of healing in minutes rather than hours, were priced beyond what most people would see in a lifetime of saving. For adventurers whose livelihood had revolved around hunting monsters, and for the soldiers and mercenaries who made their living by the sword, a decade of regular savings would not have even been enough to buy one. So potions, for most people, were not a realistic option. This was especially true inside the Tower.

Climbers did not carry potions with them as the cost alone made it impractical, and the slow effect made it useless. Instead, they relied on guild-stationed healers posted at the checkpoints outside the Tower's exits, even when they had a healer in their party. When a party emerged battered from a floor trial, they would line up, wait their turn, and receive what healing the stationed healer could provide. If a healer was unavailable, the churches offered an alternative, though with a steep price.

This was how things worked for the past few years, after the Adventurer's Guild created this system. Until recently. For some reason, the guild-stationed healers had begun spending their mana on a new clientele: slaves. The details of why were unclear to most adventurers, and frankly, most of them did not care about the reason. What they cared about was that by the time their party limped out of the Tower with broken ribs and open gashes, the healer at the checkpoint was already drained.

There was only so much mana a single healer could use before they had to recuperate. It was even more annoying once they moved to the next closest checkpoint, the healer was decked out from mana exhaustion. Dissatisfaction had started to build. After all, why were slaves, property in the eyes of the law, receive the same treatment as proper adventurers? This had caused some parties to start going straight to the churches instead, but in the long-run, costs started to add up as a whole.

And then, before the tension could reach its peak, an alchemical company suddenly appeared. It had no prior reputation, not even an established name in the trade. Its storefronts were small, clean, and staffed by teenagers. The shelves behind the counter held rows of identical red bottles. The sign above the storefront read: Purple Alchemical Cross Association. The potions they sold were cheap, absurdly so. The low-tier variety cost less than a decent meal at a tavern. And that was exactly why nobody bought them.

The logic was simple; potions had always been expensive. And nobody wanted to try such a suspicious product out. Adventurers walked past the storefronts, glanced at the stores briefly, and kept walking. So the bottles sat on the shelves, and the young shopkeepers waited. A few days later, the situation changed. At the Tower checkpoints, the guild-stationed healers could now be seen pulling small red bottles and using them on adventurers.

The liquid was applied directly to the wound, and it would seal itself shut before the adventurer had finished wincing at the pain. Several fights nearly broke out. More than one adventurer grabbed the healer by the collar and demanded to know what they thought they were doing, thinking it was a new type of scam where these healers would demand they pay the price of the potion. The healer, unfazed, held up the empty bottle.

"It's from the Purple Alchemical Cross Association," they would say, "Available at their shops. Affordable, too." It almost sounded rehearsed. When other healers at other checkpoints were asked the same question, the answer was identical.

"Potions from the Purple Alchemical Cross Association." Almost as if they were advertising it. Word spread fast. Within hours, emergency meetings were being called inside guilds. Party leaders huddled over tavern tables. What they should do next was obvious: buy cheap in Summit and resell at a markup. Or so they thought. As it turned out, the shelf life of the low-tier potion was five days. After that, the efficacy dropped to not even a fraction of what it was capable of.

"Five days," the teenage shopkeeper said, for what was probably the thirtieth time that afternoon, to a man who had arrived with a rented cart.

"What if I keep them cold?"

"Still five days." The man left with five bottles instead of 200. But for adventurers who used them on the spot, the potions delivered. The low-tier ones could close open wounds, set bones back into place, and fully heal scratches, bruises, and minor burns. For most minor injuries, a single bottle was enough. The middle-tier was ten times the price, but still within reach of a working adventurer's budget. Its shelf life was seven days, and its capabilities went further.

In the event of a disembowelment or a large chunk of flesh being gouged away, the middle-tier could restore the damage entirely. According to the shopkeepers, when used alongside a healer, it was even capable of reattaching recently severed fingers or limbs with no lasting side effects. Injuries that would have otherwise ended a career were treatable at a very affordable price now. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The appearance of these potions changed the landscape of Tower climbing. Solo adventurers who had previously been forced to exit after accumulating plentiful minor injuries could now treat themselves on the spot and keep going. Parties that once spent half their recuperating on floors, waiting for their healer to recover their mana, could now push themselves further for up to the better half of a week, limited only by the potion's shelf life.

Parties that had been stuck on the same floors for weeks on end were suddenly pushing through.

"Hic… Hic…" Anna was wiping her face with the back of her sleeve. Her glasses were fogged, her nose was running, and her cheeks were blotchy red. She had been crying for the better part of five minutes and showed no signs of stopping.

"I was shooo woooried!" Paimon, standing to the side of Celestia's desk with a napkin in hand, looked at Celestia. Paimon offered it to Anna. Anna took it, blew her nose loudly, and then kept crying. The office was otherwise quiet. The desk between them was covered in papers: stacks of them, some with official seals. Anna hadn't known about the papers when she walked in. What she had thought, walking down the hallway after Paimon came to fetch her, was that she was finished.

That was what her sleep-deprived brain had thought. After all, Celestia had invested an enormous amount into the potion project—the laboratory, the materials, the storefronts, the staff—and Anna had produced a product that nobody wanted. For the past few days, the shelves had stayed full and nobody wanted to buy them. Anna had even heard a few of them call the potions fake, while others said it was a scam. On the second day of the potion-unveiling, Anna kept watching people walk past one of the shops.

This had majorly dispirited her. Even though Anna had perfected the mass-production recipe, where she had worked out the manufacturing method for the low-tier potions down to the gram… it turns out nobody wanted it. She had gone to Celestia the day before, barely holding herself together, and told her that the potions weren't selling and she didn't know what to do. Celestia had given her a simple response of: "It is not your place to worry. Keep doing what you are doing."

But how could Anna keep doing what she was doing? She had gone back to the laboratory and stared at her masterpiece, potions still filling up by themselves right now, and felt nothing but dread. She hadn't slept at all. Two nights of lying on her makeshift bed in the back of the laboratory, staring at the ceiling, running the numbers over and over. She hadn't even that her appetite had disappeared.

And with Liana in the Tower for her Floor 10 trial, and Sir Ozy assigned to the slaves as a sort of emotional support animal, a role he had taken to with dread. She had no one to talk to, causing her to stew alone with her thoughts. So when Paimon appeared at the laboratory door and said, "Lady Celestia wants to see you in her office," Anna's stomach dropped. This was it.

She was going to be told that the project was over and she needed to pay it back—every coin and every hour of labor that had gone into the storefronts and the supply chain. Though she knew somewhere underneath the panic that Celestia would never do that to her. Her sleep-deprived brain couldn't help but overclock itself with hypothetical scenarios. She walked into the office with her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes on the floor.

She sat down in the chair across from Celestia's desk, and when she looked up, she saw a desk covered in papers. Celestia tapped on the ones in front of her, saying, "These are purchase orders from guilds and merchants. They want exclusive supply contracts for your potions." Anna stared at the papers, then at Celestia, then back at the papers.

"... What?"

"You heard me." Anna's lip trembled and her eyes filled. And then she put both hands flat on the desk, dropped her head between her arms, and sobbed. That had been five minutes ago, and yet, she was still crying. Paimon offered a second napkin and Anna took it without looking up. When she finally stopped, or rather, when the sobs tapered into hiccups, several minutes had passed. Her face was swollen, her nose was red, and she pushed her glasses up her forehead as she rubbed her eyes with the heel of her palm.

Celestia waited, and she instructed Paimon to get Anna a glass of water. Once Anna had fully calmed down, she drank it in one go. They now proceeded with the next order of business. Celestia slid a piece of paper across the desk. On it was a figure: the number of low-tier potions needed per week to fulfill the incoming orders, not counting the regular stock required for the Purple Alchemical Cross Association shops. Anna looked at the number.

"Are you able to fulfill this number on top of your current ones?" Celestia asked. Anna nudged her glasses back down onto her nose. She studied the figure again, lips moving as she ran the math. After several seconds…

"Yeah," she said.

"I'll need two…" She paused, recalculating.

"No, make that three assistants. And a bigger space to manufacture everything. The current laboratory can handle the existing volume, but if we're scaling to this… no, maybe a bit higher in case the numbers grow bigger…" Her voice was getting lower and lower. Celestia, already reading through another stack of papers, responded without looking up.

"Martha will handle the recruitment and interviews. The manufacturing area will be just behind your current—" Thud. Anna's forehead hit the desk. Paimon flinched at the sudden sound. She moved toward Anna to check if she was okay, but Celestia raised one hand.

"Shh." Anna was asleep. Her head was resting on the desk, her arms still spread across the papers. The poor girl must have been so stressed out. Celestia stood up. She walked to one of the cabinets along the far wall, opened it, and pulled out a folded blanket. She carried it back to the desk and draped it over Anna's shoulders, tucking the edge around her arms so it wouldn't slide off. Anna mumbled something into the papers. Her voice was muffled, but the words were clear enough.

"... I couldn't have done it without you…" Celestia looked down at her for a moment.

"You deserve the success that has always been in your grasp." She turned back to her desk, moved the papers out from under Anna's arms without waking her, and continued working in silence. Paimon stood by the wall, watching. Her mistress had gone back to work as if nothing had happened. The pen was already in her hand, and the continuous scratch of it on paper was the only sound in the room.