Chapter 103: Fragrant Medicine
"So... have your archives gathered any rumors regarding his recent movements from within the inner circles of the Perfumer Guild?" Lucia asked, his voice steady.
"Let me consult my memory," Tolisha mused, her brow furrowing as she turned over the files. Suddenly, she clapped her hands, her eyes brightening with a sharp realization. "I command the data!"
"We Perfumers frequently execute barter trades, exchanging our specialized aromatic medicines or surplus botanical materials to balance our stocks. Right at the opening of this moon, I coordinated a trade with a junior trainee named Rosa. Her mood was exceptionally dark at the time, so my tongue issued a handful of queries to audit the source of her stress. She claimed her master had been expelled from the academy grounds without a single drop of legal cause, and her own academic future had been thrown into a terminal crisis. If my registry is accurate, her master, Lord Noster, was one of the few direct disciples trained under the wing of Master Rolo."
Lucia exchanged a rapid, weighted look with Radahn and Kristoff, before turning back to the girl. "Tolisha, could your office coordinate an un-monitored meeting with this Rosa across the coming watches? You may disclose our current mercenary aliases—Tarn, Chris, and Lucifer."
"Nominal," Tolisha agreed instantly. "Her interest has long been locked onto my private aromatic formulas. If the tides are favorable, I can arrange for your vanguard to intersect her path by tomorrow afternoon."
"Understood. My house leaves the coordination in your hands."
The following afternoon, Lucia and his companions met the trainee Perfumer named Rosa within the Osiris District—a sector anchoring the border of the Pedri slums.
Tolisha stepped forward to initiate the introductions, her tone professional. "These three represent the mercenary knights my voice cited yesterday. Their interests are locked onto the acquisition of Ironclad Aromatics, and they concurrently desire to establish a communication link with Master Rolo through your lineage."
Lucia, Radahn, and Kristoff took turns executing polite, brief handshakes with the female perfumer across the small table. Although she occupied the rank of a mere "intern" within the guild registries, she out-registered Tolisha's age by at least four or five winters.
In truth, a prodigy of Tolisha's tier—who had mastered the absolute majority of the Court Perfumer traditions by her fourteenth summer and possessed the clinical maturity to command her own practice—was an exceptionally rare anomaly within the capital's medical schools.
Rosa was dressed in a full-body protective suit on this watch, her facial symmetry completely hidden behind a heavy black veil. She scrutinized the three ordinary-looking mercenary helms standing before her with emerald green eyes. Following a long watch of silence, she offered a slow, stiff nod. "The Ironclad Aromatic is priced at fifty gold runes per vial. My inventory commands twenty bottles in stock. If your purse can absorb that price, my hand will deliver the goods to Tolisha's clinic by the dawn watch."
"The price is fair," Lucia said, extracting a small leather pouch from his belt to place it firmly on the table. "This pouch encloses five hundred runes—our opening deposit. The terminal balance will be hand-delivered to your station through Tolisha once our eyes audit the quality of the vials."
Rosa secured the pouch, counting the weight of the runes with practiced fingers before tucking it into her satchel. Her posture then stiffened. "As for the matter concerning Master Rolo... pray, forgive my station, but I possess zero capacity to assist your inquiry."
"And by what logic do you refuse?" Radahn asked, leaning forward and dialing up his "reckless mercenary" persona, his voice dropping into a rough, eager growl. "If your hand is willing to guide our boots, our house can authorize a specialized consultation fee—a volume of gold that will undeniably satisfy your heart!"
"The bottleneck does not emerge from the gold," Rosa sighed, her shoulders slumping. "Since your vanguard shares a campfire with Tolisha, helping your cause would normally score as a minor endeavor. Our guild is small; we are always conformed to trade favors to maintain the balance."
"But since your boots have tracked a path to my door, your intellects should already comprehend that my master, Lord Noster, was a direct, favored disciple of Master Rolo. Yet, just a handful of weeks past, his name was ruthlessly purged from Rolo's tutelage," she spoke, a deep, distressed breath escaping her veil. "Consequently, I can only state that my hand is unable to fulfill your requirements."
Tolisha spoke up at the opportune watch. "Rosa, I remember your tongue cited this friction across our last commercial trade. I heard that Master Rolo had always been fanatically devoted to the development of his disciples. Why would his will suddenly expel a master of Noster's caliber from the lineage? Does the archive not record a misunderstanding?"
"Zero misunderstanding exists!" Rosa's tone suddenly became agitated, her hands trembling.
"Master Rolo has been acting with an absolute, terrifying strangeness of late—not strictly targeting my master, but systematically kicking every direct disciple and junior apprentice out of his manor gates. Last week, my master escorted me to visit his chambers to petition for a reason, but the man refused to so much as open the door. He simply roared through the wood, telling us to 'get out' with a cold, un-yielding fury!"
"Is that not an entirely inhuman output of behavior?" Kristoff interjected, his voice low. He slammed his gauntlet against the table, adding a calculated layer of knightly indignation to the fire.
"The layout is precisely text-perfect!" Radahn exclaimed, shaking his head. "Though my own martial master was un-bendingly strict, his mouth always pointed out the specific mechanical errors before his hand punished the students. There manifest zero reasons to purge a disciple from the ledger without cause."
"It did not initiate without cause... the source code behind the collapse was that specific bottle of medicine—" Rosa's voice broke with a heavy layer of trauma. "It all initiated when their research team began tracking that rare aromatic formula. That was the exact watch Master Rolo began to mutate completely!"
Tolisha's expression suffered a sharp, clinical shift. "Your lips suggest... a failure occurred during the synthesis of a new pharmacological formula?"
"My eyes cannot verify the math for certain, but my intuition points to a corruption within the aromatic medicine—and that is the exact conclusion my master archives as well."
"Since the dawning of September, Master Rolo has been obsessed with researching a specific aromatic that our guild has never cataloged across the history of the art. Every watch I followed my master into the side laboratories to study the baseline distillations, we could hear the sounds of terrifying, muffled explosions emanating from the master's research vault... and occasionally, a sequence of very strange, sickly medicinal odors would waft through the halls."
"From that watch forward, Master Rolo's presence across the grounds began to steadily evaporate. Historically, he would permanently anchor the morning lessons to guide the disciples and apprentices through the forge, patiently directing our low-level studies. But since September, our eyes have not tracked his frame in a single classroom. Occasionally, when our vanguard intersected his path in the gardens, he was permanently in a frantic hurry, looking exactly as if his eyes lacked the capacity to even register our existence."
"Identify his physical presentation across those watches," Tolisha asked with deep professional concern. "If a failure occurs during the synthesis of a defiled aromatic, even without direct consumption, mere environmental exposure to those chaotic medicinal currents would violently affect a person's biological stability."
"His presentation?"
Rosa fell into a long moment of internal audit, before her features wove into a look of alarm. "Your query has awakened the data... Master Rolo's physical appearance was indeed distorted. Across the initial stages, his face was permanently mapped with an unusually deep, vibrant rosy flush. At the time, the masters and junior brothers joked that his vitality was experiencing a second youth as he matured."
"But down the timeline, his spirit and his temper suffered a catastrophic decay. He appeared to have aged a decade in a single moon. Our minds simply simulated that his research was hitting a series of frustrating gridlocks, so we desisted from tracking the underlying rot. By the way... during that same watch, the raw spiritual pressure radiating from Master Rolo's chassis was vastly more aggressive than his baseline. Several of the junior apprentices who had just cleared their entry exams didn't even possess the stomach to clear his manor gates for their lessons."
"Tracking back through the files now... if it was truly a defiled aromatic that had infected his marrow and his mind... the impact had already achieved a critical density back then."
After absorbing the report, Tolisha hesitated for a brief watch before speaking. "Rosa... in my clinical experience, this configuration is undeniably the result of a severe toxic reaction triggered by a defiled aromatic. There is a high probability that the entity inhabiting that mansion is no longer the Master Rolo your heart archives."
"Regardless of the intent, for the safety of your own line, do not attempt to intersect his path again anytime soon. Master Rolo commands a martial proficiency that out-scales the heroes of the realm; if his mind has suffered a terminal fracture, the fallout would be unimaginable."
Rosa lowered her veiled head, remaining silent for a long watch before forcing a small, weary smile. "My registry records the warning. Thank you."
Tolisha stood straight, extending her arms to execute a gentle, sisterly hug for the girl. "Our vanguard will clear the area now. If your house requires assistance down the line, my clinic is always open."
Lucia and his companions briefly verified the delivery parameters for the Ironclad Aromatics before bidding their farewells to Rosa and clearing the district.