WIEDERGEBURT: Legend of the Reincarnated Warrior: Volume 2 Read online

  We had just finished training our Spiritual Power. I had waited until our training was over before asking for help.

  “It is certainly possible for my family’s auction house to auction off your alchemy pills, and it would be good advertising.” Even though she admitted this, Fay released a soft sigh. “However, my family’s auction house is currently experiencing a rough time as well. I’m not sure if you are aware of this, but our auction house makes its money by auctioning off items that have been found within the ancient ruins located in the Demon Beast Mountain Range. People come with these items, and they receive a cut of the profits made from the auction in exchange. Unfortunately, all of the ruins that can be explored have been plundered and the only ruins left are too dangerous to explore. Because nothing of value has come along, our auction house doesn’t have as much clout anymore.”

  As Fay explained how the Auction House worked and why it was no longer successful, I gently pet the snake sitting across my lap. The snake released soft hisses that made me think it was purring.

  This was indeed a problematic situation. However, I didn’t think it was unsolvable. Surely there was a way to help the Auction House return to its former glory and help me sell my alchemy pills. I refused to believe there wasn’t something that I could do to rectify the situation.

  “What sort of items does the Auction House normally sell?” I asked.

  “During our peak, we sold everything from ancient tablets that contained Spiritual Techniques to weapons and armor that were found within the surrounding ruins,” Fay answered. “We also sold artifacts that increased a person’s ability to channel Spiritual Power, or that could increase the results of a person’s cultivation. Stuff like that.”

  “Spiritual Techniques…” I mumbled, closing my eyes.

  I didn’t have any armor, weapons, or monster cores, but I knew plenty of Spiritual Techniques. Most of them were useless to me. My method of using Spiritual Power differed from a normal person’s. However, I could at the very least write them down and have them auctioned off.

  “If I can get you a powerful Spiritual Technique, will your auction house be able to auction that and my pills?” I asked.

  Fay seemed startled, but she immediately nodded. “Yes. If you know of anyone who has a Spiritual Technique that my family can auction off, we can auction that and your pills. However… the alchemy pills alone won’t be enough to gather any interest. Everyone thinks alchemy is a joke right now. We need something that has a better reputation to bring in the real customers like other noble families.”

  Nodding as my own thoughts solidified, I let the snake curl around my shoulders and stood up. I had made my choice. If the Auction House needed a Spiritual Technique to really rake in customers, then I would give them one.

  “In that case, can you meet with me tomorrow?” I asked. “I should have a Spiritual Technique and the alchemy pills ready by then.”

  Fay also stood up. She nodded at me with a smile. “I’ll stop by your place tomorrow. Should I come in the morning or the afternoon?”

  “Morning,” I said. “I close the library tomorrow, so I won’t be home during the afternoon.”

  “That sounds good,” Fay said. “I’ll see you then.”

  “Yeah…”

  Our training was over, so the two of us left the clearing, made our way into Nevaria, and went our separate ways. However, rather than heading home, I went down the path that would take me to the Alchemist Association.

  I needed to speak with Feinrea.

  Perhaps it was because of my previous conversation with Feinrea, but the redheaded young man—Feinrea’s younger brother—treated me with a lot more respect today than he had yesterday when I arrived at the Alchemist Association.

  “Eryk Veiger,” he greeted me with a polite but reserved smile. He even bowed to me as I walked up to him. “Are you here to speak with the association head again?”

  I nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Allow me to escort you.” He bowed politely once more and bade me to follow him. I would have liked to tell him that I could find my own way there, but I didn’t want to be rude, so I followed him.

  Feinrea was not pouring over notes this time. When I entered her office, I found her sitting with her back completely straight and her brows furrowed. She was staring into a beaker that had a bubbling purple liquid inside. From the scent wafting through the air, I could already tell that it was spirit essence mixed with purple grass. It had a very earthy scent.

  “Spirit essence loses its effects when boiled,” I said as I walked further into the office. “The act of boiling spirit essence is like when alcohol gets cooked out of food. The heat causes the nutrients within spirit essence to evaporate.”

  “That explains why all of my experiments have been a failure.” Feinrea sighed in disappointment before turning a smile on me. “I see that you’ve returned again. Can I take it to mean that you’ve successfully managed to get the cooperation of the Valstine Family?”

  “Not quite.” I shook my head. “It seems they are also experiencing some hardships. Currently, they don’t have anything of great value to auction off, which means…”

  “Which means that none of the nobles who normally attend the Auction House have any incentive to even show up.” Feinrea looked put out as she crossed her arms, leaned back in her chair, and sighed. “That is a problem.”

  “It’s not as big of a problem as you might think,” I said. When she looked at me, I gave her a conciliatory smile and elucidated on my meaning. “I have a few Spiritual Techniques that I can use to attract attention. They will be the bait for the nobles to attend. While they are all salivating over the idea of being able to possess a new Spiritual Technique, we will quietly slip the alchemy pills into the auction as well. It might not attract a lot of attention at first, but I believe someone will buy them out of curiosity if nothing else. Once that happens…”

  “Word will spread when they realize how effective these pills are and we can begin selling them on the market.” Feinrea nodded as a smile slowly appeared on her face. “I definitely like where you’re going with this. You’ve got an awfully good sense for business.”

  I shook my head. I knew nothing about business. All I was doing was paraphrasing Kari. She was the one who taught me everything I knew.

  “I do need a few things, however,” I began again. “Which is why I came here before trying to convince the Valstine Family to agree to my proposal.”

  “What do you need?” asked Feinrea.

  “I need a blank goatskin scroll, ink, a quill, and the following ingredients.” Feinrea got out a sheet of parchment the moment I said I needed ingredients. I waited until she had dipped her quill into a bottle of ink, and then listed everything off. “I need three woodchip shells, three bayleaf hearts, 500 grams of purple grass, 500 grams of red spirit grass, 100 grams of corewood from a fire spirit fern, twenty-two sakura leaves, eight nirnroots, six D-rank monster cores with a water elemental affinity, six D-rank monster cores with a fire affinity, and four liters of spirit essence.”

  As I listed off these ingredients, Feinrea’s expression became more and more shocked, to the point where her eyes looked like they might roll out of their sockets. She stared at the list for several long seconds. Then she looked at me. There was a smile on her face, but it was a combination of resigned and agitated.

  “You are quite shameless to demand so many ingredients,” she said at last. “You realize how rare a good few of these ingredients are, right? Giving these to you is going to set my Alchemist Association back even more financially.”

  I shrugged. “These ingredients are all going to be made into the alchemy pills I plan on selling at the Auction House. I would buy them myself, but I do not have any valis to buy them with. Also, in exchange for lending me these ingredients, I will not only let you watch me refine these pills, but I will teach you how to refine them yourself.”

  My words were like a panacea for the woman, whose ey
es sparkled as she realized I would be allowing her to witness how alchemy pills were refined. By the time I was finished talking, she was wearing a large smile, no longer the least bit bothered by how much her Alchemist Association would be set back financially by giving me these ingredients for free.

  “It seems the two of us will be benefiting a lot from this partnership,” she said at last. “Luckily, we have most of these ingredients. I can send someone to an apothecary to get the rest of them. How soon do you need them?”

  “Now, if possible.” I frowned. “I plan on refining all the pills today. The sooner we can get these pills refined, the less stress I’ll have to deal with before I go to meet the Valstine Family.”

  “In that case, why don’t we take out the current ingredients you need that I have in stock?” Feinrea suggested after giving me a slow nod. “I’ll send my brother to get the remaining ingredients.”

  Feinrea wrote down another list of all the ingredients she did not have, and then gave it, along with a bag of valis, to her brother and told him to buy those from an apothecary. The young man nodded before he left the Alchemist Association.

  While her brother was getting the ingredients, Feinrea led me to their storehouse. It wasn’t located in the main building. The building she led me to was a square-shaped structure behind the Refining Hall. It wasn’t very large, but it was bigger than some of the houses I’d seen on the way here. Feinrea used a key to unlock the large padlock on the door, and then she slid it open.

  As the door opened with a squeal, she and I walked inside, and I took a good look around, studying the many shelves that lined the walls. There were also a number of tables with various plants sitting on them. Small sunroofs were located above these plants, through which sunlight filtered in and allowed the plants to obtain nourishment.

  None of them had any runes on them, which caused me to frown. I should have guessed this would be the case.

  “How often do you have to restock?” I asked as I walked further in.

  “Quite often,” Feinrea admitted as she followed me. “My grandfather told me that we used to have cabinets that contained runes to keep our ingredients in stasis, but those were all burned down during the fire over one hundred years ago. Since then, we have been forced to constantly restock as the ingredients we have go bad.”

  I nodded as I stopped before a wooden table with several potted plants. Only the leaves were sticking out. However, the leaves were large and shaped like a heart. They were bayleaves, a type of alchemy ingredient. The bayleaf was often used as a healing salve. However, the bayleaf heart was something that could be refined and used in numerous alchemy pills. Each of the leaves were purple, meaning they had reached maturity and could be used to refine pills.

  “Let’s get the ingredients and bring them all to your office,” I said.

  “Yes,” Feinrea agreed.

  Among the ingredients that were located within the warehouse, the ones that I was able to find were the bayleaf hearts, the purple grass, four of the eight nirnroots, the monster cores with a water element, the sakura leaves, and two liters of spirit essence. Feinrea and I gathered the ingredients together and took them to her office. Along the way, the alchemists who were part of the association watched the two of us with blatant curiosity.

  “Who is that?”

  “Hmm… she looks familiar. Have I seen her before?”

  “I wonder what that girl is doing with Feinrea.”

  I twitched several times as I listened to the conversations of alchemists we passed, trying my best not to respond with anger, but I was pretty positive my face had turned red. Feinrea giggled beside me. This caused me to cast her an irritated glare.

  “Don’t say a word,” I growled.

  “I won’t.” Feinrea smiled at me, but that only made the amusement in her eyes all the more apparent.

  I barely managed to resist groaning. It really sucked to look so much like a woman.

  “How many alchemists does the association have?” I asked after we returned to her office.

  Feinrea sighed as though disappointed when she answered me. “Including myself and my brother, we only have ten.”

  “Just ten, huh?”

  The wince she gave at my disheartened tone told me what she thought of their predicament. “I have been told that at the height of our association, we had over two hundred alchemists. However, with the loss of our formulas, we were unable to maintain our standing and slowly declined. Each year less and less people join us. The last person who joined the Alchemy Association did so three years ago.”

  For some reason, I could not help but frown as I listened to her. “Were there no alchemists who could recreate the formulas?”

  “I think there were a few,” Feinrea admitted softly, biting her lower lip. “However…”

  “However?” I prodded when she trailed off.

  “Many of our more prominent alchemists died during the fire. The ones who didn’t die were later found dead in their homes. I do not know what happened since it was over one hundred years ago, but my grandfather, who’d been just an apprentice at the time, believed that someone had assassinated them, though we do not know why or for what purpose.”

  I didn’t say anything, but the idea of someone murdering a bunch of alchemists made me suspicious—not of Feinrea, of course. I believed her. In fact, the idea of someone murdering them off for unknown reasons was highly likely. Even though very few people wanted to become alchemists themselves, alchemy was a cherished and respected art. There was an Alchemist Association in Midgard as well, and they held one of the highest positions within the Northern Plains. Alchemy was an art that couldn’t be underestimated.

  That said, I could not help but wonder who would kill off a bunch of alchemists and for what purpose. By killing off alchemists and ensuring that no one could refine pills properly, it weakened Nevaria as a whole. I couldn’t help but think that maybe someone had done this by design. Maybe there was someone out there who wanted to see Nevaria weakened. As this thought crossed my mind, I remembered the Demon Beast Invasion and Nevaria’s destruction.

  The thought I had in that moment sent a chill down my spine.

  Feinrea cleared her desk of all the notes she’d made and brought out her alchemy set. It was far more advanced than my own basic set. There were four 150 mL beakers, four 250 mL beakers, one 500 mL beaker, a 1,000 mL beaker, six 100 mL flasks, four 250 mL flasks, two 500 mL flasks, a 1,000 mL flask, three 500 mL clear reagent bottles, a 500 mL amber reagent bottle, two 500 mL measuring cylinders, two evaporating dishes, two stir rods, two wash bottles, a 50 mL transfer pipette, a graduated pipette, a 500 mL separatory funnel, and a boss head. Of course, the mortar and pestle that she possessed was also much more advanced than the small one in my possession.

  On top of her alchemy set just having way more equipment than my own, everything had its own stand, which kept it suspended above the desk’s surface. Feinrea’s set also had burners. They were tiny disc-shaped objects that could be used to emit heat, mimicking a fire without having to actually light a fire. They were made from the elemental core of a C-Rank Demon Beast with a fire element. To activate them, all a person needed to do was infuse the burner with their Spiritual Power.

  As I began preparing the ingredients needed to make a Tender Healing Pill, I taught Feinrea what I knew about alchemy.

  “You already know the basics, so I won’t get into that,” I began as I boiled water in a 500 mL beaker. “What I want to talk about are how the ingredients meld together during the process, and why some ingredients cannot be mixed.”

  I took 250 grams of the purple grass, placed it in the mortar, and used the pestle to grind it into a paste. Feinrea watched me with fascinated eyes. I tried to ignore her gaze as I continued talking.

  “Generally, when mixing ingredients at first, we use water,” I said. “The hot water acts as a dissolvent that helps the many ingredients merge together. You’d think using spirit essence would be better, but you
can’t boil spirit essence because it loses its effects as a catalyst. The spirit essence is what we use during the actual refinement of the pill itself.”

  “That makes a lot of sense.” Feinrea began slowly jotting these notes down on a leather-bound book. Her feather quill scratched the surface, creating a light noise that made me pause only for a moment. “I always thought spirit essence was used as the base. Water doesn’t have any special properties, so I didn’t think it could be used to create pills.”

  “That’s a common misconception.” I dumped the paste into the boiling water and stirred, watching as the grass paste mixed with the liquid. The water turned from clear to a light purple. “It is specifically because water has no special properties that we use it as a base.”

  Feinrea nodded as she watched me clean the pestle and mortar, then reach out and grab one of the monster cores. It was a light blue monster core. That showed me that it belonged to a D-Rank Demon Beast. The darker and more vibrant the color, the higher the rank of the core—at least, in regards to cores with a water element. Lightning would have been a pale blue or even yellow, and the paler the color the higher the rank.

  I began crushing the core into a fine powder as I explained more about the refining process to Feinrea. “When refining basic healing pills like the Tender Healing Pill, we normally use water as the base, grass paste as the solvent, nirnroot for its healing properties, and a monster core to enhance it. I’m using a monster core with a water element because water has healing properties, which gives an additional boost to the nirnroot’s own healing effects.”

  When I glanced over at Feinrea, it was to find her writing notes in that leather-bound book of hers. It seemed she was intent on learning everything she could about the pill refining process. That was good. If she absorbed all the knowledge I was offering, it meant she’d be able to teach the other alchemists. Given my busy training schedule, I wouldn’t have time to do that myself.