When Roge woke up the next morning, he frowned at the slight chill to the air of his room. He’d ended up relaxing most of the night in his hoard, not wanting to lose out on some of the benefits of sleep. Now he was wondering if that was a mistake, the dragon kobold getting up and rushing down to the tavern portion of the inn while activating the harvesting of his hoard.

  Even with the blazing fire in the hearth, Roge still felt a slight chill, which worried him. According to Hops, he should have been all but immune to feeling cold, even slightly. The bartender even looked mildly cold, which just worried Roge even more. Looking outside didn’t give him any clues, though for some reason the sun seemed a bit dimmer than it usually was. “What’s going on…?” he asked, turning back to the shivering woman behind the counter.

  “None of the fires are working…” she whispered, the lizardkin’s golden scales looking almost frosted over. “Hey… I saw you making that magic sword yesterday…”

  “Say no more,” Roge grunted, plopping his cauldron on the counter and beginning to make some ice resistance potions. It used up mostly the same ingredients as a normal ice bombs, but using up ten times as much considering it was a tier one potion. It also required some ground up ash branches, which he happily chucked in and set to cook. “You have something I can mix it with? Like a warming tea? It’s best if we try to go with a mixture.”

  “We have some white vanilla apple tea, but the fires won’t boil any water. I tried.” The lizardkin woman shivered some more at that, though he looked curiously at the cauldron, which seemed to be working. “Guess magic fire works…”

  “On it,” Roge grunted, moving behind the counter, to the annoyance of the bartender. He grabbed one of the oversized pots, moving it over to the hearth, which didn’t seem to give off any warmth. With a flick of his [Flame] wand, he got it to spit out some actual heat that she couldn’t resist, as the lizardkin moved right up close to it. After filling the cauldron with his mist breath, he set it over the fire to boil, sending steam throughout the room that almost instantly turned to fog.

  Roge worked hard over the next few minutes to make everything he needed, even resorting to chucking his wand into the hearth to keep everything warm from a distance. He’d honestly forgotten that, since it used one of his bonded bottles, he could use the thing from anywhere, no hands required. ‘Noted.’ Once the water was boiling and the potions were ready, the bartender, Morgan was her name, set to work making a giant batch of tea, the process much faster with her higher skill level.

  Sighing at the notification, Roge decided to look at it later, though he put a note right on his main [Status] page so he wouldn’t forget again. He especially needed to look over any improvements to his buffs, though after it didn’t look like the cold would kill Morgan on the spot.

  Once the ten resistance potions were done, Roge frowned at the lack of potion bottles he had in his inventory before remembering that he now had a liquid storage he could use for the potions. Once that was done, he mixed up both healing and refreshing potions after noticing the bartender’s fatigue, suddenly feeling unsure when he had one of each potion in front of him. He knew they wouldn’t react with air, but he was unsure if mixing them together would cause any adverse effects. Deciding that he could be a test subject for it, he poured himself a cup of tea and dripped a couple drops of each potion into the cup. Blue flames coming off of the liquid seemed to be a good sign, Roge huffing as he felt some of his mana drain away.

  Ignoring the upgrade *for now*, Roge immediately brought the concoction over to Morgan, the lizardkin sighing in relief as she sipped the drink. “Thank you. That actually feels…Really good. Like a little fire is keeping my insides warm.”

  Roge shivered at that visual, knowing that the potion would be poison to him with his heat weakness. Pulling out his recipe book, he nodded at the new recipe he’d just received, it being mostly the same process but scaled up. Fortunately, the several gallons of tea only needed four bottles each, which Roge felt a bit uncomfortable by. ‘Does it make my potions… more effective when made into a drink…?’ he asked himself, thinking of the custom potion bottles and letting out a sigh at the realization. ‘It’s combining my potions with other things that resonate with it. Because the tea is a warmth tea, it amplifies the effects of the potions…’

  Once he had the sapphire warmth tea ready to go, carefully mixing in each bottle, Morgan got to work putting tea in cups for all of the guests. Fortunately, all of them were adventurers, and so each had some form of magical fire that kept them warm when they woke up freezing. At the promise of warming tea and a room that was starting to feel warm, they soon crowded the area, ironically increasing the heat retention with all of their bodies producing more. Even though Roge was starting to sweat some, he still spent time working over his cauldron, making more of the tea as an experiment. He needed only two bottles of each potion for the amount of tea he made, as his cauldron was about half the size of the inn’s. Once he made the tea to his satisfaction, he poured it out into one of his potion bottles, sighing as he saw the changed description.

  All of the tea he made looked the same, even in potion form, the black liquid glowing with an inner fire. Just being near it made anyone feel slightly warmer, though Roge was feeling like he was in a sauna at that point. He quickly bottled up the ten ‘potions’ he’d made, sighing as he realized that he could add the [Warmth] ability to his hoard too.

  “And where do you think you’re going?” a voice called out, Roge groaning as he looked back from the front door he’d been about to open. Proton led the way for all of his party members, Marge and Hops looking a bit offended while Sean just looked concerned. “You’re going to let all the warmth you made out if you open that door. Use the back.” Roge had to admit that his butler had a point, sighing as he moved towards the back of the store while flaring his aura out to share his new and improved cold resistance.

  “Wow… it just feels mildly cold… Like when it’s just above freezing…” Marge muttered, much to the annoyance of the shivering elf as he stepped outside.

  “Speak for yourself. I still need my enchantment…” he muttered, the heat coming off his jacket making the air practically warp. “Now, where are we going exactly?”

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  “I… wasn’t going to go anywhere. It just got way too hot in there,” Roge muttered, looking around at the deadly quiet road. “Are people going to be okay…”

  “Oh the inn Is just really badly insulated,” Sean said, looking around at the lights in the houses. “Plus magic fires are provided for every home, just in case something like this happens. Only reason why the inn doesn’t is because every adventurer is given a heat object anyone can use, as long as they don’t have a high heat weakness like you.”

  “I… guess that makes sense…” Roge muttered, thinking back to the ice storms that crippled the south every few years.

  “How did you make that potion by the way?” Hops asked, the dragon kobold sighing as he pulled out one of the tea bags Morgan the bartender had given him.

  “Apparently, using existing drinks with my potions supercharges the effects,” Roge grouched, feeling put out with no way of adding the tea to his hoard. “Can’t I just add some unbound tea-“

  “Nope! No more plants!” Proton interrupted, causing the dragon kobold to sigh.

  “Well, maybe I could make orange juice? Or a nut bar?”

  “You know you can just buy the ingredients for the drinks,” Marge said, the deer woman giving Roge a grin.

  “But then I’d have to buy it all the time…”

  “You can’t always be self sustaining,” Sean stated gently, giving a soft smile as Roge slumped. “We’ll look at some teas later. For now, we should probably head to the Adventurer’s League. This kind of weather isn’t natural, and so we’re probably going to be needed for the quest they’re going to assign.”

  “You mean I’m going to be needed,” Roge grumbled, trotting off towards the large building a couple blocks down from them as the rest of his party laughed.

  ~~~

  As they walked, Roge added in his upgrades to his plants for the day, noting that his attribute enhancing plants had all reached rank nine. ‘Should have harvested them later…’ he thought to himself, sighing as he finished up the process right when they reached the building.

  Seeing that notification made Roge sigh, flipping through his screens to find the upgrades he’d ignored all morning.

  Roge sighed at the added effect description, feeling like he was stacking up more and more overpowered things. “Hey Hops? Do you know anything about an effect granting skill ranks of that skill to another skill.” He then grimaced at the awkward sentence, though no one seemed to notice as all eyes were on the screens he had up.

  “I have… never seen this…” Hops muttered, the dragon kobold letting out a long groan at that. “But it makes sense. It was probably doing something like that in the background when you were making potions, and since that’s the only thing you used [Cooking] for…

  “Oh. Right. Usually people get cooking when they make food,” Hops said, grinning as he read the description. “Now that I think about it, getting it from potion crafting is not something I’ve heard of.”

  “Great…” Roge groused, flickering through his screens as he actively ignored the other effect he’d gained to his [Inspect] skill. He was glad they were still outside the guild building, this one being more of an office building, because his choked off cry would have attracted attention if they were.

  Looking through his plants, all of the flowers that reached rank nine gave him twice the effect. Which were all of his attribute flowers, leading to his regeneration in each being boosted even more.

  “That’s… that’s going to get out of hand fast,” Sean muttered, looking over everything that time. “Especially if you end up unlocking any of the others. I mean… your wisdom is already considered to be thirty five when it’s only twenty three for your mana regen. That’s an extra hundred and twenty mana per hour without having to spend any points on it.”

  “That’s about… six mana every minute.” Hop’s statement gave Roge a mini heart attack, though he soon calmed down as he crunched the numbers.

  “But my new potions and wands cost a hundred mana per craft. So it’s not… that much in the long run. Plus my teleports do at least ten as well.”

  “So not too bad,” Sean sighed, giving Roge a small smile. “If only you could give more than one to us…”

  “Well, I should be able to soon,” Roge muttered, smiling as he looked deeper into his [Status]. “My protection of the world tree buff might go up once all my trees are grown.”

  “What are you all standing out here for?!” Everyone jumped at the sudden voice from the front doors of the league building. A short man with tan hair and a clean shaven face glared at them, Roge feeling a bit confused until he remembered the current cold weather.

  “We uh… had some screens to go through,” Sean replied, Roge quickly making all of his screens disappear.

  “And how are you not…” the man trailed off as he noticed the blue embers drifting in the air, his gaze zeroing in on Roge. “Are you making a heating buff?”

  “Ice resistance,” Roge corrected. “We were coming here to see if we could be of any help?”

  “Well you’ve come to the right place. Name’s Bert. I’m the Master of the League here.” With that statement, Marge, Sean, and Hops all straightened up, leaving Proton and Roge to look at them confused. “Can you extend the effect to more people?”

  Roge nodded as he extended it to the League Master, feeling a heavy weight push on him as he did so.

  “Sixty resistance? We’re definitely going to need you here! Come in. Now!” The group obediently walked in with Bert, Roge feeling his scales warm at the gazes that met them when they did. Many tough looking adventurers with expensive-looking magic armors gave the low level group dirty looks, though thankfully the majority gave them looks of appreciation. “We’ve asked all of the Golden rank adventurers to join us, but I guess we can let a Crimson team in if they’re useful,” Bert continued, Roge cringing at a good number of the looks worsening. Golden adventurers had all of their classes to at least six, though Roge didn’t understand why they classified it like that. Before he could bring up the question, however, one of the fancier adventurers loudly snorted.

  “You really think they’re going to survive out there? They’re going to get killed.”