Chapter 27: Lives 51 to 57
My seclusion lasted longer than I had planned.
Over the course of several lives, I earned a total of 48,000 credits and spent 25,350. A small amount was needed to hide my affinity each go-round, but I had been able to permanently upgrade all my affinity for the five basic elements (fire, wood, water, earth, metal) to low eight-stars, create a Rank 2 mental bookshelf, and learn how to expand my storage space.
The last one was where a new problem arose.
To expand my storage space on my own, I would need to have the seed of a spatial spirit fire in my soul. A soul could only house a single fire seed, though. I could discard the Cold Mountain Fire seed, but that wasn’t going to happen unless necessary. The option I chose to pursue was to buy an expansion to my storage space large enough that I could put my current seed in there when I absorbed a new one.
First, though, I needed to pay the associated costs. I needed 1,000 cubic centimeters of space to store the seed. The cost for that was another 29,760 credits.
So, I lived life after life as I practiced my skills in solitude. My alchemy advanced far beyond what I had expected.
I had practically unlimited access to Rank 1 herbs. At first, I was careful about using anything other than peonies, but no one ever confronted me about it. There was always a servant to keep everything stocked. The herbs had a natural shelf life, so they commonly had to be thrown out for being too old. I just accelerated that process.
Additionally, others did take things from the supplies, though I didn’t know who. I strictly adhered to Rudy’s ‘stay out of sight’ policy, so I never saw who was coming and going from the place, but I didn’t care anyway. The fact that others were using the herbs had helped cover over my own uses.
I performed all kinds of experiments on various herbs. I began to get a sense of what kinds of pills I could make from them just by their energies. I would make a pill and then use my pill analysis ability, which I had upgraded for 1,000 credits, to see what I had made. I wasn’t paying attention to recipes. I was focused on understanding the medicinal energy and how the combinations of different energies would affect the body.