Chapter 81: Something New
Tyler lay in the bed he had dragged into the living room, his right arm folded beneath his head, turning the small blue enhancement crystal slowly between his fingers in the dark. He could feel something coming off it, not heat exactly, but something adjacent to it, a faint energy that pressed softly against his fingertips the longer he held it, like the crystal was quietly breathing. *So if I use this on anything, it doubles its properties.*
He sat up. His eyes moved to the hole where the kitchen wall used to be, open to the night air, and the crystal caught a faint shimmer against his palm before dissolving into his inventory. He had moved the bed out here deliberately, sleeping in the back room meant anyone who came through that hole would be gone before he ever heard them.
"I wish I had more of them. I feel like I should use it on that blade, but... that blade is already powerful enough." He paused, then shook his head. "No. In a world like this, nothing is ever powerful enough. I'll keep running into stronger monsters the higher I go."
He pushed himself up and moved toward the kitchen. *He the herbs were in here. Did Lisa take them with her? I wonder if they're still usable.*
He crouched in front of the double drawers beneath the counter and pulled them open. Inside the left one sat a small zinc bucket filled with what looked like gray mushrooms, and beside it another bucket had been repurposed as a makeshift pot, a small plant standing upright in packed soil, its green leaves curving gently inward at the tips where they pressed against the cardboard beside it. The system panel materialized silently above both of them, [Cloud Mushrooms] floating to his left, [Emerald Tree] to his right.
"They're still here," he said, and a grin spread across his face before he could stop it.
He reached into the mushroom bucket and lifted a few out, feeling the way they gave softly under his fingers, neither warm nor cold, with a texture that reminded him of cotton pulled straight from the bag. He brought them up to his nose. The smell hit him immediately, sharp and synthetic, the way a rubber eraser smelled when you dragged it hard across paper, that strange chemical cleanness that had no business belonging to something that grew in the ground.
He straightened up. *If I'm remembering right, these are one of the ingredients for the sleeping pill. I wonder what they taste like.*
His stomach answered before he could finish the thought, a low growl rolling through him that he ignored as he opened his free palm and let a small piece of bread materialize from his inventory, biting into it as he turned back to the drawers and scanned the rest of the contents, pulling open the remaining doors one by one. More system panels bloomed into existence above small buckets tucked inside, sloth leaves, brunish leaves, and he leaned in closer to look at them.
The sloth leaves were strange. They were long and impossibly thin, nearly as longl as the banana leaves he remembered from his old world but compressed down to something almost rope-like, and they had dried out to a pale, brittle texture that made him pause. *They're so dry. Will they still work?*
He gathered what he needed, eight mushrooms, twenty sloth leaves, ten emerald leaves that were an almost aggressive shade of green, far more vivid than the brunish ones beside them and one by one they dissolved into his inventory with a faint shimmer.
*System. Craft two sleeping pills.*
The panel appeared in front of him, the circular loading bar sweeping around its edge at a steady pace with [Mixing Components] printed across the center, and Tyler folded his arms and watched it with narrowed eyes until it filled completely and the panel shifted to [Crafting Success].
He opened his palm. A faint light gathered in the center of it, shimmering briefly before it settled and dimmed, leaving a small white orb sitting against his skin. He picked it up with his other hand and held it between his fingers, turning it slowly. *Huh. So this is it.* It had a rough, powdery texture, the surface uneven in a way that made it feel more like something compressed by hand than manufactured. *I thought it would look more like the pills I was used to back home. Though it's not that far off.*
He tilted his head. He had seen water and a hexhorn's horn listed among the ingredients. He had expected something considerably larger.
*Sometimes it feels like the system is cheating me.*
He considered taking it, his sleep had been shallow half the time, and he had woken up feeling like he hadn't really rested, but something told him he didn't need it tonight. A tiredness was already sitting behind his eyes that felt like it might actually pull him under on its own. He let the pill dissolve back into his inventory. *I'll use it tomorrow. I want to see how effective it actually is.*
The system panel reappeared and he scrolled through to the next recipe.
*Craft two mana potions.*
The loading bar swept around again: [Mixing Components], then [Crafting] and Tyler watched it, already thinking about the ingredients.
Three things: emerald leaves, brunish leaves, water. He had expected something more involved, something closer to the complexity of the recipe he had gotten from the last quest reward. The fact that something capable of refilling his mana came down to three common ingredients sat strangely with him.
He was still turning that over when the panel shifted to [Crafting Successful] and a vial materialized across his open palm.
The glass was cool against his skin, filled with a liquid that sat somewhere between thick and fluid, a deep blue light shimmered so faintly it barely reached the edges of his hand.
*Wow.* He held it up and looked at it in the dark. "I wonder how much mana I actually get from this."
Tyler held the glass vial close to his face, tilting it slowly, watching the way the blue liquid shifted and caught what little light the candle across the room was throwing. The color of it was deep and slightly uneven, darker where it pooled at the bottom and lighter where it clung to the glass in a thin film near the top. He stirred it gently with a slight twist of his wrist. "Will it actually give me the same effect as the health potion if I drink it with a full mana bar?"
The system panel appeared immediately, positioning itself just behind the vial and pulling his attention away from it. He lowered the vial and read.
[Basic Mana Potion refills the user's mana by 30%.]
*Oh. So it works similarly to the health potion. But will it have the same hidden effects? It doesn't hurt to try.*
He tipped the vial back and swallowed it in one motion.
The liquid moved across his tongue with a faint thickness to it, denser than water but not by much, and the taste came in layers, first a clean warmth that spread across the back of his throat, then something cool and sharp underneath it, a mint flavor that flickered at the edges of his tongue and disappeared before he could fully grasp it, leaving only the warmth behind as it went down.
The moment it settled, his irises flared faint blue for a fraction of a second and dimmed. Something shifted inside him, quiet enough that most people would have missed it entirely, but James had spent weeks making Tyler sensitive to the movement of mana through his own body, and he felt it clearly.
His mana pathways expanded slightly, the mana already sitting inside them pressing outward against their walls in a slow, steady pulse, as if the channels themselves had briefly grown wider before settling back.
"Wow," he breathed, the word coming out quieter than he intended.
A panel appeared.
[+2 MP]
[+1% Virility]
"Huh. So it does have the same kind of effect." He glanced down at his leggings. *Well. Not exactly the same. But that's probably for the better.*
The vial dissolved into his inventory. *The system said I need to keep experimenting, that's how I find more things through alchemy.* A second mana potion materialized in his hand, the glass cool and smooth against his palm, the blue liquid inside it shifting lazily with the movement. In his other hand the small white sleeping pill appeared between his fingers, rough and powdery against his skin, light enough that he could barely feel the weight of it. He looked between the two of them for a long moment.
*What would happen if I dropped this in here?*
He paused on that. The rational part of him was already pushing back, he had limited resources and no real certainty of finding these ingredients again easily, and what he was considering had no foundation in anything except the kind of curiosity that tended to waste things. He stared at the pill sitting between his fingers, small and chalky and completely unremarkable.
*This feels exactly like being a kid doing a science experiment without knowing what any of the equipment actually does. I don't understand how any of this works on a scientific level. And honestly, science probably couldn't explain any of it anyway. Nothing will happen.*
He dropped the pill into the vial.
It broke the surface of the liquid with a soft, wet sound and sank slowly, drifting downward through the blue in a lazy spiral, trailing the faintest disturbance in the liquid around it as it went. It settled at the bottom. Tyler brought the vial closer and watched it. The pill sat there, perfectly still, doing absolutely nothing.
*Just like I thought.*
He lowered his hand, and then heard it. A faint hiss, thin and dry, rising from the vial. He brought it back up quickly. Fine bubbles had begun forming around the base of the pill, rising in a slow, steady stream as the powder started to break apart, dissolving outward into the liquid in what looked like a spreading fog, pale and thick, bleeding the blue out of the potion from the bottom up.
The color shifted gradually, the deep blue giving way to something murkier, then lighter, until the entire contents of the vial had turned a dense, creamy white that caught the candlelight differently than the blue had, warmer, almost milky, with a faint luminescence that hadn't been there before. Tyler straightened, his eyes fixed on it.
Then the bubbles surged. They came up fast and hard, churning upward toward the opening, and he slapped his palm over the top of the vial before they could spill over. *Damn it, I don't even have lids for these things.* He held it shut, feeling the faint pressure cycling against his palm, surging upward, then pulling back down, then surging again, over and over in a rhythm that made no sense given that no air was moving in or out. He had no explanation for it.
He held it closed and watched it settle, the white liquid eventually going still and opaque, the last of the bubbles collapsing back into it without a trace. The faint warmth of whatever reaction had just happened lingered against his palm through the glass.
Then the system panel appeared.
[Congratulations. The user has discovered a new recipe for an entirely different potion. +5]
"What?" A grin broke across his face before he could stop it. "So I actually made something. What is it called?"
The panel shifted.
[Mana Infusion Draught]
"Oh." The enthusiasm left his voice immediately, dropped flat without ceremony. "I don't know what that means, but it sounds strange. Sounds like some kind of condition, if anything."
Another panel replaced it.
[Once consumed, the potion will place the user in an unconscious state for several hours. During this period, the user's natural mana absorption rate increases by one hundred percent.]
Tyler's eyebrows climbed slowly as he read it. *So it's actually useful.* He turned the implications over in his head. *Though it entirely depends on the situation, I can't drink this mid-battle, that much is obvious. It'd be more practical after a fight, when I've burned through my mana and my potions and I just need to recover. If I drink this before I sleep, it doesn't just help me rest, it doubles my mana recovery at the same time. Two things at once.* The grin came back, slower and quieter than before.
The panel dissolved. Another one took its place. Tyler's eyes moved across the familiar formatting of it, and whatever had been warm in his expression drained out of it completely. The vial disappeared into his inventory.
[SYSTEM QUEST]
[THE USER MUST SLAUGHTER THE GLOOMFANG ALPHA WOLF]
[TIME LIMIT: 24 HOURS]
[PENALTY: DEATH]