Chapter 48: B+ Miracle
She filled two more bottles from what remained in the cauldron.
Max sealed each one as she handed it over, engraving the preservation runes onto the glass. The runes expelled the remaining air before beginning their work, slowing deterioration while helping the potion retain its medicinal properties.
Once all eight bottles had been sealed, the two of them carried them over to a rune array set into one corner of the laboratory.
It was one of the pieces of equipment Zerena had asked Annalisa to deliver from the city the day before.
Unlike the cauldron, this wasn’t purely magical.
It combined modern technology with rune arrays.
As each bottle was placed onto the formation, the array began measuring the mana naturally gathering around the potion. It calculated how much mana the potion attracted, how efficiently it absorbed it, how much leaked away, and dozens of other tiny fluctuations invisible to the naked eye.
Those readings were sent directly into the attached device, which compared them against the recipe stored in its memory before calculating the potion’s overall quality.
An experienced potion maker could usually judge those things without relying on a machine.
Zerena could as well.
Still...
She wanted certainty.
After all, she’d never actually expected Max to succeed on his very first attempt.
Never mind finishing nearly four hours faster than most beginner potion makers.
Several long minutes passed in silence.
The array wasn’t instantaneous.
It needed time to observe the potions, measuring the flow of mana into each bottle before comparing the results against the recipe stored inside the device.
Max waited patiently.
Zerena...
Not so much.
She paced back and forth, glancing at the screen every few seconds as though glaring at it hard enough might make it finish sooner.
Finally—
The device chimed.
Letters appeared across the screen.
Quality Assessment: B+
"B-plus?" Zerena blurted out, her eyes flying open.
She stared at the screen.
Then at the bottles.
Then back at the screen again, just to make sure it hadn’t suddenly decided to lie.
"...That’s a miracle."
Max couldn’t help looking a little smug.
A miracle?
Not even close.
A miracle would’ve been casually refining some legendary immortal elixir that gained consciousness halfway through the brewing process and tried to escape like in those cultivation novels he’d wasted an unhealthy number of nights reading.
This?
It was just a B-plus Minor Healing Potion.
Good.
Very good, even.
But nowhere near the sort of thing worthy of being called miraculous.
Still...
Seeing Zerena look this shocked was surprisingly satisfying.
Still looking dazed, Zerena hurriedly pulled out her phone.
Her fingers flew across the calculator.
"The most common ones on the market are C-grade or C-plus," she muttered, almost talking to herself. "Those usually sell for around three hundred eighty... maybe four hundred units."
She glanced at the screen again.
"But B-plus..."
Her fingers resumed tapping.
"They can easily sell for around five hundred fifty."
Another tap.
"The ingredients cost us roughly twelve hundred units..."
She kept calculating, her lips moving silently as the numbers came together.
Then she stopped.
"...Four thousand four hundred units."
The words came out almost as a whisper.
For a moment, she simply stared at the number on her screen.
That...
Was from a single day’s work.
Max blinked as well.
Even he hadn’t expected the profit margin to be that ridiculous.
They hadn’t even made four times their investment...
They’d come dangerously close.
Slowly, Zerena lowered the phone.
Then she looked at Max.
There had always been greed in her eyes whenever she looked at him.
Now...
It had somehow gotten worse.
The only difference was...
Zerena wasn’t the one turning things into money.
Max was.
Which, fortunately for her, meant she didn’t have to worry about accidentally turning tonight’s dinner into gold instead.
A broad smile spread across her face.
"We still have enough herbs for another batch, right?"
Max already knew where this was going.
He nodded.
"We do."
Then he immediately shook his head.
"But I can’t make another one today."
Zerena frowned.
"Why not?"
"I’ve already spent all the System Points needed to make this batch," Max explained. "Without more points, I can’t compensate for the parts I haven’t mastered yet."
That answer wasn’t entirely false.
It simply wasn’t the whole truth.
Max had already decided he needed to be careful.
If he suddenly claimed he could produce several batches a day, Zerena would naturally expect him to keep doing it.
Which would create a rather awkward problem.
His System Points were fictional.
The work...
Very much wasn’t.
If he let her believe he had a mountain of points saved up, sooner or later she’d expect him to spend them.
Then he’d be stuck brewing potions for days without completing any new system tasks just to maintain the lie.
Though...
Max wouldn’t exactly complain if the tasks turned out to be as good as the last one.
The one about making Zerena masturbate and helping her.
Hearing his explanation, Zerena couldn’t have looked more disappointed.
"Then I’ll go sell these," she said with a sigh. "We’ll complete tomorrow’s tasks after that."
There wasn’t even the slightest hesitation left in her voice.
At some point, those ridiculous, perverted system tasks had quietly stopped being something she argued about and started becoming just another part of her daily schedule.
Then another thought occurred to her.
"Try getting some new tasks too."
Max nodded enthusiastically.
"We might have to do the tasks a little longer," he said. "They probably won’t give any more points once the daily requirement is finished... but the extra time might trigger new tasks."
Zerena narrowed her eyes slightly.
She still wasn’t entirely convinced by the way his system supposedly worked.
Some of his explanations sounded suspiciously convenient.
Still...
After seeing how much money he’d earned in a single day, she found it surprisingly difficult to argue.
If indulging his strange tendencies for a little longer meant another batch of potions like today’s...
It was a compromise she could live with.