“Hello Master. Please sit down,” the butler requested, with Roge feeling a little wary as he did so. “We have a few things we’d like to recommend to streamline some of your… resources.”

  Hops nodded at that, looking through a rather large list he had written in his journal. “It’s mainly giving you ideas and hints on where to focus your attention. Nothing too major.”

  “First are the improvements you can do with the harvesting and hoarding of your plants,” the butler said, referencing his own list.

  “Am I… doing something wrong?”

  “Not wrong. Just more… incomplete. We recommend that you not get any more plants. You’re actually getting a bit over saturated with them at your current level.” Roge sighed at that, looking to Alton with a put-upon look.

  “But I need to be able-“

  “Nope! No more plants! You’re full on them right now!” The kobold butler looked concerned instead of angry, like Roge expected, causing the dragon to come up short. “We need to focus on increasing your current power, not adding more where there is no room. It’s why you hurt yourself a few days ago.”

  “But doesn’t upgrading buffs cause a similar issue?” Roge asked.

  “From what I can feel from your skills, you could upgrade all of your plants today and not have any side effects.” Roge blinked *hard* at that, looking to Hops for confirmation.

  “Yeah, I did some research too. Not much out there on hoards, but it’s always recommended to reach your cap on something before moving to something else. It’s apparently only a small power increase that’s already accounted for within the skill. Sorry, Roge.” Hops looked very contrite at that, to which Roge just smiled.

  “It’s fine. Now we know and can account for it.” He then pulled up his hoards, frowning as he tried to add more things to them and failed. “Hey Alton…”

  “On it,” the white minotaur grunted, pulling up the same hoard screen. “So just things he has buffs for?” The kobold butler nodded. “Gotcha.”

  Roge watched as Alton added and bonded things to his hoard, starting with the coins, one category at a time.

  He stopped when he got to [Healing], most likely from the lack of ash that was needed to continue. Alton looked at the butler kobold, who gave both him a Roge a smile. “Now, the simplest way to fix that problem is by having a lot of coins in reserve for something in your inventory.”

  “I was… actually going to do that for something else,” Roge muttered.

  “Go on.”

  “I was going to have a stack of coins I could swap out for my bonded wand in my inventory. That would give us a lot of ash to use to bind the rest of the coins. I was also thinking of taking each rank one coin and putting them into one of the other coins, that way I have one coin at the max rank per ability that I just swap out.”

  “Trying to cheat the swapper slots that your tool control skill gave you?” the butler asked, to which Roge just shrugged.

  “The slot swapping takes up less time than using swap with my inventory. Less focus too. So the former is still something I want. I’m just making a lesser version of it.” Roge then turned to Alton, who looked a little confused. “Nothing to worry about. Basically, just get rank eight coins for the basic elements first.” Roge coached Alton through the process of making the coins, not wanting to deprive the minotaur of his outside time more than he already had. Once he was done, they had a pile of coins in one of his inventory slots, that when focused on, gave them a list of the abilities he could swap into his wand.

  Roge blinked at the various options he now had for his wand, having not realized he could make wind and earth wands. “What do those wands do,” Roge asked, pointing them out.

  “They both will allow manipulation of wind and earth. While normally that wouldn’t allow you to do much more than move some rock and make gusts of wind, your buffs and effects change what you can do dramatically.” The kobold butler pulled up Roge’s buff list, the dragon liking where the conversation was going. “For instance, the thunder buff could allow you to make a sharp gust of wind or explode some stone. The sleeping magic buff could be added to the air around you, making your enemies get tired within your mana manipulation range. Or you could even solidify and move earth to make a wall to block attacks.”

  “Suffice to say, there’s going to be a lot of training so you and I can use these new effects efficiently,” Hops interjected, giving Roge a wide smile.

  Roge suddenly shivered as he realized Alton had finished with the [Screen Hoard], Roge looking over the rest of the list and giving it a nod of approval.

  “Can we at least get more plants for-“

  “Nope!” the kobold butler interjected once again, giving Roge a grin. “You want some of those irreplaceable ones to be farmed? Get some other animals. You should be fine grabbing some that don’t have abilities. From what Hops has told me, animals who don’t have any abilities never gain them from [Druidic Touch].”

  After getting the nod from Hops, Roge groaned and tried to slam his head against the table. Unfortunately, he just fazed right through it, making everyone except the kobold laugh. “Fine. Next is upgrading the plants, then? And do you have any insight on the variations? I mainly made the tobacco variations for smoke products but I’m not sure how well they’re giving me the buffs.”

  “Variations don’t give more buffs, unless they’re radically different. Like your flowers. So you having all of these… random abilities on the tobacco is not helping.” The kobold thought on that for a moment before clicking his claws in his version of a snap. “We can make some pigment flowers to replace the tobacco ones. Then you just add in the color to the finished product and you should get the same result. With the right intent.” At Roge’s confused look, the kobold sighed. “Make some colored tulips. Then make normal cigarettes and add in the [Pigment] and [Color] ability later if you want colored products.”

  “Oh!” Roge exclaimed, thinking it over before nodding. “That’s actually smart. So I assume we swap out the [Pigment] abilities with the ones in the seeds?”

  “Yes. But first, we are fixing the ranking issue I immediately noticed.” The kobold sighed at Roge’s confusion, giving him a hard look. “All of your plants need to be at rank nine. Once there, the products you get from them will have the rank five version of the ability as well.”

  “I assume because the products will be packed full of the magic?” Roge grumbled, the dragon feeling stupid for not trying that out before.

  “Yes. And we’re going to fix that in multiple ways. First, you need to get your existing plants up to that benchmark. That’s going to take a week or more to do, and you need to keep on it every day. Your trees are going to be especially hard, because each ability needs to be upgraded one at a time, and we can’t just swap things out.” Roge groaned, feeling very overwhelmed with the task. “Thankfully, I can manage that portion for you.”

  Roge and Alton looked at the butler with skepticism. “Didn’t you just have Alton do it? It sounded like you couldn’t…” the dragon commented.

  “The plants are more within my wheelhouse, so to say. I can take the coins from your inventory, and distribute them to the kobolds in the hoard. It’s one of my minor abilities that will help things speed along.”

  “Oh…” Roge muttered, thinking about the gaggle of kobolds. “That makes sense. You can have them use my abilities then?”

  “Temporarily. And when they’re doing it, you can’t use the ability. Fortunately, they can do it while you sleep. I just need you to set aside different coins for them to use.” The butler then waved his claw, clearly asking Alton to do just that. “And we can sidestep that issue in the future by being smarter. Any time you want to plant a seed for a flower, you can add in ranks into it to increase the plant’s overall rank. It’s why a good chunk of your flowers have differing ranks.”

  Roge rubbed his head as he realized his mistake, feeling a bit of anger blossom in his stomach. “Why the skills don’t just *say* that…”

  “It’s because normal dragons would do it by instinct,” the butler said, Roge giving him a glare in response. “It’s true. They would get the best materials for their hoard, rather than just shoving everything in they can get their hands on. So I can be here where your instincts would normally be.”

  “Fine…” Roge grumbled.

  “Also, we are getting rid of your healing plants. The rank one versions will take too long to upgrade. If you could handle that, Alton?” Roge just let the rest of the flower butchering happen in the background, feeling a bit put out with his hoard being rearranged. He didn’t stop them, though, knowing it would be better for him in the long run, even if it did hurt a little bit to lose bonded plants.

  “Now, we fix the tobacco plants. We’re only keeping the ones without pigment, so destroy the rest. Doesn’t matter which abilities you grab, as long as you get rid of them.” That one stung a bit more, Roge and Alton gasping at the pain. “We’ll get the buffs back later, don’t worry. Now. Hops has told me about your issues with only being able to add ranks up to nineteen, with more rank one skills making that divide into smaller chunks. We’re going to sidestep that issue by swapping some things out.”

  It was something Roge hadn’t thought of, but was actually perfect. They always wanted to keep the [Purify] ability, but the focused ones were being held back by the other properties. So the [De-Stress] plants would have no [Stimulant] and vice versa. While they couldn’t swap in a coin with a higher rank, they could swap out the rank one ability that they didn’t want, with the rank one ability that they did.

  Once those were enhanced as well, the kobold moved on to his trees, asking for only one ability to be upgraded. Those were going to take a significant amount of time to get all abilities to rank nine, though Roge didn’t mind it too much if it was mostly automated.

  “For right now, there’s going to be a limit on how much we can push certain plants. Like, the tobacco and trees won’t be different until *all* of their abilities reach rank nine. So for the tobacco, that’s when we have your [Screen Hoard] ability up at twenty, and for the trees, forty or fifty. But getting started on them now will save time in the future, and will give you upgrades sooner.” The kobold looked a bit tired after all of that, Roge glancing around before interrupting.

  “Can someone order him some coffee or something? He needs more energy,” Roge stated, causing the others to look at him in confusion before realizing his ghostly state made it hard to order drinks. Once the butler had his coffee, he thankfully perked up some, giving Roge a grateful nod.

  “Now, handling the amount you have of each. We don’t have to worry about seeds having different ranks, as they’ll soak up what’s around them. Basically, no matter what rank seed you put in the ground, if it’s less than the surrounding plants, it’ll upgrade to their level.”

  “So anything we’re planting anew, we have to upgrade?” Roge asked, looking over Alton’s shoulder at the screens. “That’s going to be a bugbear.”

  “But it will only be that once.” It was a huge time sink, though after getting into the rhythm, they soon finished with the increasing of all of the plants Roge was bound to. And the next day, all of the tobacco and flowers would sprout, giving him back all of his buffs. The trees were going to take longer, and Roge had to activate a plain orange harvest for each of the orange trees to get their ‘seeds’. But Roge was hopeful that, in the long run, he’d be stronger and have a better foundation.

  “Now that that is done, we go to the next portion of the itinerary. Giving me a name,” the butler announced, Roge and Alton freezing in place in surprise.

  “Oh. Um… I guess Alfred isn’t allowed,” Roge mumbled, much to the confusion of everyone else. “Is Proton okay?” The name randomly popped up in his head, Roge liking the feel of it.

  Clearly the kobold liked it too, as they nodded their head up and down. “Proton it is.” It was at that moment that Marge and Sean came down from the rooms, Roge frowning at the time.

  “It’s been at least an hour or two since you should have been up. What took you so long?” he asked while chairs were getting moved around.

  “Just decided to take more of a break. No big deal,” Sean said, smiling as a waitress walked up to their table. “I hear you have really good hot chocolate.”

  “We do sir. Would you like a round for everyone?” The words of affirmation from Roge’s party faded for the dragon as he sat in thought, the drink sparking an idea in his head that wouldn’t let go.

  “Hey Hops?” he called out, getting the elf’s attention. “Are drinks… potions?”