Chapter 49 - 48: The Price of a Potion

Chapter 49: Chapter 48: The Price of a Potion

Chapter 48: The Price of a Potion

While Noah thought about it, the shop owner put a special liquide on the table.

"This is a mana condensation potion. It’s usually seventy-two magic stones. If less efficient, maybe fifty or sixty, while a better kind reaches a hundred."

Noah said,

"The final mana content isn’t more than inside four crystals."

"You’re right, but..."

The man looked at Noah the way you’d look at a fool, but given his talent and his potential as a VIP customer he decided to set his understanding aside and go on.

He pointed at the bottle.

"The real cost in materials for this potion can pass fifty magic crystals at least. Add to that the alchemist’s profit."

Noah looked at him, taken aback.

"Fifty crystals?"

"That’s just a rough estimate, counting the failure rate. From one alchemist to another the cost can be higher."

The manager took a small wooden box from under the counter and opened it. Inside were several dry stalks, a grey tending to blue.

"What you see in this box is mana-purifying herb, used to make this potion."

He lifted one of them between his fingers.

"The mana inside the stone is raw. You can pump it into the blood if you want to ruin your training, but if you want to bring it in a form the body can accept, the impurities have to be removed first."

Noah knew this point from the library books, but he let the man finish.

"The herb absorbs the mana from the stones, keeps the most stable part, and pushes out the rest during processing. The main flaw of this method is that eighty or ninety percent of the mana is lost, scattered into the air."

He put the herb back in the box.

Now Noah understood the numbers.

Thirty or forty stones go into the process, then most of what’s in them vanishes before it reaches the next steps. After grinding, transferring, mixing, and stabilizing, all that’s left in the end is a small amount of stable mana.

Three or four stones inside a bottle no longer looked strange.

But the price grew more striking, not less.

The manager took out two smaller flasks and went on with the explanation.

"Pure mana alone doesn’t make a potion. You need a medium that can carry it and bring it into the blood slowly. In this recipe we use frozen castor oil and rock-mountain olive oil, along with other materials that differ from one alchemist to another, which improves the potion’s quality, its shelf life, and how long the mana stays stable in the solution."

"Add to that, the alchemist needs to use mana in a stable way to fix the mana and blend the materials for a perfect result, and that in itself needs perfect mana control, which keeps most mages from taking up the profession."

Noah looked at the two liquids.

So the recipe wasn’t just purified mana inside water. But by the alchemist’s explanation, Noah started to see real hope in walking the path of alchemy.

The manager went on explaining some of the differences between poor potions and good ones, but Noah no longer heard every word the same way.

The mana-purifying herb absorbs the raw mana.

Pushes out the impurities.

Then keeps a small part of the usable mana.

This function was very familiar.

It reminded him of the Magic Marrow.

When he’d brought the first stone into his body, the blood rejected the raw mana outright. But the moment he pushed it into the Magic Marrow, most of the resistance vanished, and after refining he could return the mana to the blood without any disturbance.

The herb did nothing different in terms of the result.

The difference was in efficiency.

The purifying herb wasted seven or eight parts out of every ten.

His marrow, though...

Three stones a day went into it, and he lost almost nothing in proportion.

Noah stood, looking at the potion.he remembered an older experiment.

Before he’d fully understood the gates, he’d found he could push raw mana out of his body without turning it to ice or fire. It had no real combat use. It was weak and wasteful compared to turning it into an element.

But he wasn’t thinking about combat now.

What if the mana he pushed out wasn’t raw?

The stone goes into his body.

Passes through the Magic Marrow.

The impurities are pushed out.

Then, instead of returning it all to the blood for training, he drives the purified mana through the vessels and out of his body, straight into the potion’s medium.

The herb that purifies mana was doing a job that his body could already do.

He looked at the frozen castor oil, then at the rock-mountain olive oil.

The problem was that it wasn’t purifying the mana anymore.

It was what came after.

How does he stabilize it inside the oil?

What is the most amount of water that the medium can hold before it separates?

Does the mana change after it leaves his body?

Can he mix it without adding any of his blood or energy to it?

He didn’t know.

But the most expensive part of the process was now clear in front of him.

If he could replace it...

He looked again at the potion selling for seventy-two stones.

He hadn’t seen a training bottle in the shop since he’d first entered it.

He saw a huge profit margin. Maybe, with some luck, he could start building his forces far sooner than he’d expected.

The manager noticed the change in his look, but he thought Noah was starting to change his view of the overpriced potions.

"Starting to understand the price?"

Noah answered:

"Of course. Yes."

He went back to asking about the herbs, while the idea that had surfaced in his mind stayed right where it was.

Before he made a single potion, he had to know where he could sell it, and the source of that information was standing in front of him.