Epic Of The Demonic Sage

About four days had passed since the first shipment of the wine had been sent out and the first ever profit had reached the Inanis family.

Lucius, Count Gabriel, Lita, Kiana, Alessa, and John were all sitting together in the main hall of the Inanis mansion. All of them had gathered together to discuss the latest report and the profits that had just arrived.

On the table in the middle, a few pouches were kept that looked to be heavy and completely filled. 

"Have they been counted?" Gabriel questioned.

"Yes, my lord. The stewards have counted and tallied all of the coins. The report in front of you contains the exact numbers." John answered.

"Hmm… let's see." Gabriel said before picking up the report.

The hall went silent for about two minutes, during which Gabriel read the report in detail. Lucius also watched on in interest, wondering how much profit did they really make. He knew that even if he had made an estimate earlier, it would not be exact.

The real figures would almost always vary from the theoretical ones. 

"What's the number?" Lucius questioned Gabriel.

Gabriel looked up from the report with a serious expression on his face.

"After calculating all the sales and advanced payments that we got, the brewery has made 12,356 gold coins of profit in the last week!" by the end of his sentence, a smile had appeared on Gabriel's face.

"HAHAHA!" John and Alessa couldn't help but laugh upon hearing the number.

"Excellent! I knew something made by my son would be worth a lot." Lita praised.

"Now, now, we can't get ahead of ourselves." Lucius said, calming everyone down a bit.

"Our first goal should be to obtain the costs of making the brewery back. We've made over twelve thousand gold coins, which is enough for the payment of the raw materials and the workers' salary for this month and also one third of the cost of setting up the brewery.

We need to keep this up for at least two more weeks to gain back all of the costs and then the week after that would be our true profit." Lucius explained.

"While you are right Asher, we still need to celebrate this!" Gabriel said out loud.

~thud~

~thud~

"SERVANTS! BRING THE WINE!" Gabriel shouted while slamming the table.

Lucius looked at it and couldn't help but smile helplessly. He wanted to get back to work for the day, but now it seemed like it would be spent here in celebration. Once the wine was brought, everyone started drinking and celebrating.

Hours passed like this before they finally stopped. Lucius still felt a bit floaty from the alcohol and went to his bedroom directly. He changed into some conformable clothes and sat on the bed cross legged.

"May as well mediate and try to increase the hell energy instead," Lucius muttered to himself.

Once he closed his eyes, his vision went dark and calmness descended. About ten minutes later, the buzz of the alcohol faded away as well and Lucius could focus far better than before.

He sensed the hell imprint on his soul and invoked it.

~humm~

The hell imprint that had been silent all this while awakened and started to glow. Slowly, hell energy started to come out of it and floated around his soul. After more time passed, the hell energy spun around his soul, slowly increasing in density.

This was one of the methods of increasing one's Hell energy and was something nearly everyone in the Barrom clan knew of, right from the slaves and servants all the way to the true blood members.

The only difference was that if they needed to do this or not. Those that were true blood had natural talent and also had higher stores of hell energy and thus didn't need to practice using this method.

The true bloods could increase their hell energy capacity automatically while using them in spells or while strengthening their bodies. Though True Bloods didn't really use Hell energy as much once they learned to use Demonic mana.

Those who weren't true bloods though could not do the same and thus did not have the luxury. Because of that, they usually stuck to practicing hell energy as much as they could and increase their capacity and control over it.

The hell energy kept on swirling around Lucius before he finally thought it was enough. He absorbed it all back into the hell imprint and felt his overall capacity increase slightly.

"Hmm… it is not much but it's an improvement…" Lucius muttered to himself.

Unknown to himself though, a small black spot had appeared on his back for a few seconds, after which it disappointed without leaving a trace. 

This wasn't the only practice that Lucius was doing these days. He was also trying to increase heir Aether capacity by using Nexus as much as he could. He had already used Aether on nearly everyone in the mansion at least once. 

Soon he would run out of people to use it on, though thankfully he could still use extra aether to gain the information about the upgrades of the gifts. This had also allowed him to learn a lot about the different gifts that the people around him had.

He had also found a few gifts that were rather interesting even if they were low ranked, such as those at the common and uncommon rank. While these gifts didn't seem to have as much power as those of the Rare rank, they still had their own unique uses.

The servants that worked in the mansion mostly had gifts that were at the common and uncommon ranked. In total, there were only two servants in the entire mansion that actually had gifts that were of the rare rank.

The first was none other than Kiana, with her previous gift Stone shooter, while the second one was actually a new servant that was still under training. Lucius had only met the teenage boy by chance when he was being guided around the mansion by a few senior servants.