I didn’t make use of kappa parts alone. I had my trusty ginger, licorice root, and several other herbs, along with useful minerals like zinc and magnesium. I still had plenty of echinacea from that fever medicine I’d made a long while back.

  And that was just my personal stock. Thinking further afield, I found myself suspecting that the horribly acidic fruit Alys used to make juice contained more than a few helpful vitamins.

  My only concern with using the fruit would be whether or not Nelaeryn could survive the taste. I almost didn’t, the first time I encountered it!

  I smiled in fond remembrance at the way Alys had casually served me the juice and then laughed at my expression. It was funny now, of course. It hadn’t been during those first several moments when I could barely feel my mouth.

  Then again, I had noticed lately that I was getting used to the juice. It was probably my poison resistance, finally kicking in and evolving.

  In the spirit of experimentation, I decided to fetch one of the fruits. I hesitated to leave my tent and possessions unsupervised, but I would be quick. Besides, there wasn’t anyone around to be tempted by a bunch of alchemy materials. Alys’ crew had moved their tents days ago to be closer to the bridge, and Nasha had gone with them.

  “Alys?” I called as I approached the house, spying a spray of dirt getting added to the pile she’d already excavated.

  “What?”

  “Can I have one of the fruits you make the torture juice out of?”

  I heard her snickering, but it didn’t take her long to respond. “Sure! You know where to find them.”

  “Thanks!”

  Trooping into her house, I opened the leftmost kitchen cabinet to reveal a rather odd-looking plant indeed. The stem and leaves were all bright purple in color, shot through with barely visible veins of glowing red. The large fruits hanging off the branches were reddish and yellow-flecked, just like the juice they produced.

  The plant was richly magical. Alys had been able to bring the small tree with her and continue raising it only because it fed on heat and mana, both of which she could provide in abundance.

  To my frustration, I had no clue what the plant was or what it was actually called. Alys only knew it as ‘the juice tree.’ Her family had many growing inside the lair they called home.

  Knowing what I did now, I guessed that her grandmother’s presence had caused a tree near the lair to mutate. Perhaps even on purpose, since these trees were meant to be grown in dark, overwhelmingly hot places. Such as a massive cave system housing a powerful dragoness, for example.

  I plucked a single fruit, so big that it barely fit into my palm. I knew from experience that one fruit somehow produced enough juice to fill a whole pitcher on its own. Then I returned to my tent quickly, handling the biological weapon with care.

  Once there, I paused for a moment, considering how best to handle the fruit.

  Best to keep things simple, I decided.

  I carefully removed the fruit’s rind, my fingers tingling from the acidity. Done with that, I juiced the fruit and squeezed the pulp for all it was worth.

  At that point, I needed to take a break and wash my hands. The juice was starting to dry, making my hands both unpleasantly sticky and unpleasantly tingly.

  Clearly, I had been mistaken about ‘getting used to’ the juice. My poison resistance wasn’t able to handle this fruit’s effects just yet. I’d known Alys was watering it down for me a little, but I had underestimated the percentage of water to juice in my cup.

  I shook my head as I washed my hands, my lips twitching into another fond smile.

  Dragons are odd, I reflected. And so are their snacks.

  Back inside my tent, I set the juice and pulp to one side. I would be returning to them later in the process. For the moment, I needed to choose what form this project should take.

  My first impulse was to make a potion of some kind. Potions were, as a rule, more potent than any other alchemical product. Yet potions could be tricky to store in large amounts, and their potency could decline if they were mishandled.

  Furthermore, Nelaeryn was going to be taking this supplement for quite a while. Even if it did have some permanent effects, and I was going to push hard to make those a reality, the temporary boost to her immune system would always be more potent.

  The alternative was to deliver a potion to the couple daily. Yet that wasn’t really a viable option. Perhaps it was lazy of me, but I didn’t want to set aside a portion of my day for months just to make deliveries.

  Dismissing the idea of potions, I turned to my second option, which was some kind of paste. It had worked for my last project, had it not? But then my mind flashed to my recent acquisitions, and I made my decision.

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  I would be making a powder!

  True, it would be rendered down from a paste. But if I did things right, and if my suspicions were correct, then I could make it almost as potent as a potion.

  I took a deep breath and finally pulled my newly acquired beetle out of my storage bag.

  I felt a little guilty about that, actually. Storage bags weren’t meant to hold living things. Though not deadly, the experience was supposed to be rather traumatic for most creatures.

  Funnily enough, insects were known to be rather resilient. As long as the bag was opened regularly to allow air inside, they wouldn’t suffer any ill effects to their psyche. Even so, I had essentially put this beetle into a jail cell and given him nothing to interact with.

  I resolved to treat the little guy better from that point on.

  As I examined the beetle, who had stirred and was now knocking his little horns on the glass in my direction, I couldn’t help but be distracted by the quality of the container. While the beetle was undoubtedly valuable, the jar was just as much of a steal, if not more.

  Whoever had enchanted it possessed masterful skill in the art. They had made the glass vessel entirely immune to the heat generated by the beetle, which was considerably high. They had enabled the jar to seal that heat inside of itself flawlessly. And they had devised a system for slowly unsealing the heat and allowing the jar’s holder to make use of it.

  I admit that I had missed all of this during the moment of purchase. I’d been so distracted by my shiny new beetle that I hadn’t paid much attention to the jar. Morty must have made a similar mistake, actually. Considering the enchanted item that had to accompany the purchase, the vampiric shopkeeper had almost certainly underpriced the beetle.

  Chuckling internally at the memory, I reached into my storage bag again and pulled out a couple bundles of blue moss. It grew in the local woods, and its flowers made our healing honey possible. Gently unscrewing the jar’s lid, I slipped the moss inside.

  The beetle happily pounced on it. His flames instantly surged, reducing the magical moss to ashes. Then he feasted, wiggling his wings in a strangely adorable way.

  That was another marvelous point in the jar’s favor. I could open it, and the enchantments still kept the heat contained, so long as I didn’t stick my fingers inside. Truly, the more I considered the enchanted item, the more impressed I was.

  “Now then, little buddy. Almost time for you to contribute,” I whispered at the beetle.

  Setting him aside for a moment, I took out my everflame and got to work.

  First, I turned some of the ginger into a fine paste. Then I used my everflame to render it into a powder-like substance. Thanks to the local forest, I had an abundant supply of ginger, and it had always served me well.

  Even if it was, for whatever reason, blue.

  It probably has something to do with the moss, I mused as I worked. Now that I think about it, all of the oddly colored plants I’ve found do lean towards the moss’s color spectrum. And the moss affected the bees enough to mutate them into larger and much deadlier variants….

  I paused again, reflecting on this incredible plant that had found its way into so many of my recipes already.

  Perhaps I should do a proper, thorough study of it.

  I knew the moss wasn’t harmful. My diagnostic spells had assured me that the blue moss and its flowers shouldn’t have any long-term negative effects on someone’s health or appearance. At least, not once the plant was processed properly to eliminate the toxins from the flowers.

  Still, the forest contained too many interesting plants and creatures for the moss’s presence to be wholly a coincidence.

  Shaking off my thoughts, I carefully examined the newly powdered ginger. Its potency was decent. Nothing to revolutionize the potion-making field, but enough to be rather useful for all sorts of recipes.

  I extinguished my everflame and began experimenting with the beetle jar.

  I was exceedingly careful to lift the sealing enchantment in painstakingly small increments, so I managed to avoid burning myself. My tent did get uncomfortably warm, though. I soon felt like I was standing next to a furnace, and the beetle was only about thirty percent unsealed.

  Morty had been right: we could have used the beetle to warm our bath.

  I was yet again impressed by the jar’s maker. The top of the jar contained very small holes to allow the beetle to breathe, obviously. But the jar’s creator had incorporated the holes into the seal as well. So, while the sides of the jar (not the bottom, thankfully) radiated heat in all directions, the top produced heat much more intensely.

  I was starting to suspect that the person who had first caught the beetle was either an alchemist or a smith. The jar was far too useful for both professions for that not to be the case. I did wonder why they had ended up selling the beetle, but some mysteries were destined to remain just that.

  After carefully testing the potency of the heat emanating from the top of the jar, and adjusting it to the level I needed, I proceeded with a second round of ginger paste rendering.

  The effect of the beetle’s flame was fascinating.

  I watched as little bits of the paste flaked off and burned away into ash, which drifted off immediately. The whole portion of paste was reduced by two-thirds in size before it fully dried out. Yet once I ground the solidified paste into powder, I discovered that its potency had at least doubled.

  So much medicinal mana packed into such a small amount of powder was astounding. The sheer potential of the process made me almost dizzy with excitement.

  Until I considered the downside, of course.

  The loss of volume meant I had much less ginger powder to work with. For a decisively ‘common’ ingredient, that wasn’t a bad thing. I would throw my whole stock of ginger through the rendering process if it meant getting a much more potent ingredient. I could resupply in one trip to the forest, after all.

  For rarer materials, however, this was a problem. I had barely enough kappa parts even to start experimenting, and I would burn through my supply of echinacea at a blistering pace.

  I could solve the latter. The forest did contain a reasonably steady supply of echinacea. Kappa parts, though…

  I gnawed on my lip. For the first time, I found myself wishing that we’d been attacked by more of the ugly water spirits. I knew some lived upriver, but I couldn’t exactly spend my days trying to hunt the creatures down.

  I was trained in assassination, alchemy, and combat. Not in hunting! True, there was some overlap, but I doubted my skills would serve me in this case. Even traditional hunters would be hard-pressed to stalk creatures hidden underwater.

  More importantly, I didn’t want to leave Alys to traipse through the wilderness. And the elders were likely to protest as well…

  At the thought of the elders, my eyes lit up. They were the ones who had told me to ask for ingredients instead of venturing into the forest myself. Hadn’t they said that all the materials I needed would be provided for me?

  Now it was time for them to prove that claim.