The Newt and Demon

7.16 - The Sensation of Discovery

Theo was surprised the next morning when things were still calm. He sat, eating his breakfast and sipping his moss tea, all the while expecting something to go wrong, because things normally did. But nothing happened. He sat at the table, ate the sausage and eggs, and reviewed his administrative reports. There had been no movement on the dungeon problem. Whatever had been done to stabilize the other dungeons was working, for now. Even with all the new space elves and the infirmary releasing void energy.

Xol’sa had created a power sink that absorbed the energy. Theo didn’t want to investigate it closely, realizing that anything absorbing void energy would need to be disposed of. It wouldn’t hold it forever. Instead, he stuck his head in the sand and pretended these problems didn’t exist.

Tresk waited for Fenian and the others to arrive in town so they could delve into the dungeons. She hung around with Theo after getting Alex from the stable. The marshal joined them as they headed for the Newt and Demon. Of the many storage vessels in the building, quite a few were old stills used to brew potions. They now sat disused, but today they would be given new life.

“How much booze are we making?” Tresk asked, watching as Theo pulled a still from storage.

Theo tapped his chin, thinking about the early estimates for the number of people in attendance. They would need to create quite a lot if they were going to have one long, rolling party. He knew things would get rowdy with the local half-ogres. That was one reason why he had never undertaken a large-scale brewing project. Instead, he had invested every single unit of alcohol he made back into his alchemy. When the half-ogres had a few drinks, they became unmanageable.

“I don’t actually know,” Theo said. “Doing some mental math. Half a million units, maybe. I can’t really say.”

“That’s a lot of booze,” Tresk said.

Indeed, it was a ton of booze. Starting with 10 500-unit stills, they could produce 5,000 units of zee liquor a day. There was no shortage of corn in town, so that wasn’t a limiting factor. Instead, time was their enemy. The only thing they had going for them was the simplicity of the brewing process. It required absolutely no alchemy skills and could be done multiple times a day. Unlike the alchemy system, distilling alcohol in this world was far faster than it should have been.

“Do you remember the process,” Theo asked, leading the way to his giant metal cube. The metal cube was rather ominous, and most locals disliked it, but safe experiments were a necessity here.

Alex roared behind them, letting out a small stream of fire. Every time she moved, the ground thundered beneath her feet. Theo was almost certain Tresk was still feeding her dragon bones, and he worried she would outgrow the stable soon.

“I want you to take notes, and we’ll do a test run,” Theo said, “we might actually hire some locals to do some of the brewing. But we’ll handle the first round.”

They made their way to the giant metal cube. Of course, Alex had to stay outside as they went in. He raided all ten artifice stills in the room, putting barrels underneath the condenser coils. Thanks to the size of the massive cube, he could at least double the number of stills inside. He thought in silence for some time, trying to figure out a way to automate the process even a little, but nothing came to him. The mash had to be loaded manually and then mixed with purified water, but at that point, one only needed to press the button and allow the artifice to get to work. The run would last somewhere between four and six hours, depending on whether the enchantments on the stills were functioning.

Tresk took notes with a physical piece of paper and a fountain pen, its nib a feather. But she left after the first one was started. Theo remembered they had a few more smaller stills back at the lab, and she went to fetch them. Alex poked her head through the doorway and snorted. Fortunately, she didn’t release any fire into the cube. Results would likely have been explosive.

The metal cube was soon far too stuffy. Once Theo had all the stills running, he left the door cracked to give it some air. Decent ventilation would have been helpful, but that wasn’t the building’s purpose. He didn’t want to invest resources in changing it.

Now that he had a few minutes to himself to think, Theo considered how to approach third-tier essence-making. His experiments had given him a pretty good lead on how it worked, and with some modification, he believed he could have Throk build the appropriate devices. The new form of third-tier essence crafting was similar to the old version. This new version, however, required more precision during the distillation process of second-tier essences. Liquid mana had to be injected into the still while it brewed.

This served to remove a great amount of the impurities within the essence, allowing it to achieve even greater heights. This was an infusion process, rather than a purification process, and the quality of the mana injected would influence its purity. Theo had a few ideas about how to take this process to the next level, but he was a few steps away from actually producing potions. Anything he considered still in the conceptual stage, he didn’t want to take to mass production.

Proper testing was the difference between a living and a dead alchemist.

Tresk appeared from the shadows, stepping out and placing her hands on her hips with pride. “So I’ve asked around and found some workers willing to manage the ominous cube.”

“Hopefully they come cheap,” Theo said.

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“Oh yes, they’re going to work for booze,” Tresk said, rubbing her hands together. “Amazing what you can get half-ogres to do when you offer them liquor. Actually, there were also a few elves who wanted to do it too.”

Theo organized a project with Tresk and some junior town administrators. This would be a great project for those aspiring to be full-blown administrators, offering valuable practice. Managing a small project with minimal consequences was ideal for them. So, once everything was organized, he left them to it. A team of three administrators would manage the project. They would be self-contained, coming to Theo only if they truly needed help.

“Break out that long list of projects,” Tresk said, doing a small dance on the streets of Broken Tusk. “What do we have to do next?”

“Let’s go down the list. First is the dungeon. We need to get you and the team in there to clear it and see if we can destroy the dungeon core. Next is the booze, which we’re working on now, and I think I can check that off for the time being. Next are my third-tier potions. I need to get some equipment from Throk to do that, so that might be a problem. Next, we have the shard stuck in the void. That’s something I can’t do until the elves return. Bringing all the space elves back is also on my list.”

“Whoa, calm down,” Tresk said. “Sounds like we can’t do most of that stuff, and I’m definitely not going to be helpful.”

Theo rubbed his chin, trying to think of something Tresk could do. When she got bored like this, she became quite annoying, and he knew it would only get worse. The most likely scenario was that she would find a hornet’s nest to poke and then stab repeatedly until she was stung. It was best to give her direction before that happened.

“There’s actually something you can help me with, but it might be very boring,” Theo said. “I need to come up with a strategy for upgrading the town and the alliance, but I need some numbers on how much that would cost and whether I have the capital to do it.”

“Okay, what level is the town at right now? What level do you want it to reach?”n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

“The town is at level 30, but the alliance is at level 20. I’d like to get the alliance to level 30 and the town to level 40. That will be extremely expensive, so if we can’t afford it, don’t bother.”

“You know the cave dungeon is still mostly active underground,” Tresk said. “I mean, it’s at a dormant status, but we can still run it. Xol’sa said we shouldn’t run any of the dungeons, but I’m sure you won’t mind if I do. I could farm some level 45 monster corpses from there.”

Theo stopped her before she could continue. He messaged the town’s Lord Wizard, asking about the restricted dungeons. The dungeons were off-limits because the Lord Wizard didn’t trust random townspeople to manage them. However, Tresk wouldn’t tamper with the dungeon core after clearing it, and she was the perfect person to reach the high-level areas at the end quickly.

This only shattered part of Theo’s plan. He wanted Tresca to handle the upgrading of the town, but it would take her, at least the rest of the day, to farm an appreciable amount of the cores he needed to upgrade the town to level 40. He would need at least 40 cores, depending on how needy it felt. The nation would require far more cores—almost 50 per level. Fortunately, level 20 cores were fairly abundant, and he was confident he could secure them.

“This might actually be the last round of upgrades we do for the town,” Theo said, feeling a pang of sadness spread through his chest. “Unless we figure out a way to get more cores for the nation, we’ll be bound to its maximum level. I believe the town can be 20 levels higher than the nation, but I guess we’d have to test that.”

“Hey, I’m on it, boss,” Tresk said, saluting. “Come on, Alex. We’ve got a dungeon to run.”

“Oh, I do love running dungeons,” Alex said, stomping excitedly. “Let’s go.”

Theo watched them leave, thinking about upgrading the town. He couldn’t help smiling to himself—upgrading, operating a nation. They had to inject it with coins, basically. That’s how most people worked, anyway. But Throk had created a system to make counterfeit coins instead. The funny part about the coin press they used was that it became their method for absorbing void energy. They had to create a system where the mint produced batches of pure coins and those tainted with void corruption.

The alchemist shivered, thinking of the damaging effects of the void energy. He diverted his attention by heading to his lab and greeting Salire. As always, she had a temporary worker on the first floor and concerned herself with the things happening on the third floor.

“I love the smell of restoration potions in the morning,” Theo said, smiling to himself as he went to the third-tier essence equipment. It hadn’t seen much use, but he was eager to do a bit more testing today.

“We are basically all set with healing potions, as well as disease-curing potions,” Salire said, “I’m actually doing a run of attribute enhancement potions right now.”

“Really? And how is business going?” Theo asked.

“With so many people passing through town, we can’t effectively hold onto stock. Since our production capacity is severely limited, the store downstairs is always sold out. Don’t worry. We’re holding about half of the potions I make for the town, and those are going into collective storage.”

Theo nodded along as she went over the financials. He split his attention between messing with the mana infusion artifice Throk had made and listening to her talk about money. The design of the mana infusion artifice was interesting. It effectively took a big tank of essence and a tank of liquid mana and mixed them together in a chamber, heating it until it became a vapor. The result was an extremely pure form of essence that condensed in a standard pressurized tube and then dripped into a flask or liquid storage of the building.

Something about the way the mana was injected into the process had Theo’s brain tingling. There was something more he could do, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. Even his Wisdom of the Soul pop-up told him as much, although it didn’t provide useful information. It just reiterated what he felt through his alchemical instincts.

“What are you thinking about?” Salire asked, hovering over Theo’s shoulder. Of course, only a half-ogre could hover over his shoulder. Every dronon he had met was at least a head taller than this world’s humans.

“Feels like the still is talking to me,” Theo said, gesturing to the device. “Like I can do more with this thing, or maybe that it wants something from me. I don’t know. This is a weird sensation I haven’t felt in a while.”

“Oh, that’s the sensation of discovery!” she said, clapping her hands with excitement. “What do you think it is?”

No matter how much he stared at the device, he couldn’t figure out what he wanted. He cleaned the equipment and prepared it for a small run. As long as Tresk was busy in the dungeon, he had some free time. And it seemed like a worthwhile investment. “Let’s find out,” he said.