The Undying Immortal System

The Alchemy Office manager’s words about throwing some ingredients together to invent new recipes struck me as an incredibly good idea. I hadn’t done any real experimenting in several lifetimes, and I somewhat missed it.

The Blue Wind Pavilion should have channels to provide me with anything I needed, but they dealt in premium quality goods, and premium goods came with premium prices. I needed junk herbs I could play with to see what I could make. If I wanted to score a deal on some low-quality herbs, the place I needed to go was the Wind District.

There were shops of all kinds in the Wind District, but my focus was on the low-rent areas. There were several small shops that didn’t have any employees. The owners of these stores would sleep in an apartment above the shop so that they just needed to walk downstairs each day instead of commuting across districts.

Many of these shops didn’t open at set hours. They would simply be open whenever the owner was home and awake. If that was in the middle of the night, the shop would be open in the middle of the night, but if the owner wanted to go for a stroll, the store could be closed at any time during the day. Because of this, planning a trip to any of these stores was very hit-and-miss.

I searched the streets for hours before stumbling upon a run-down shop that was covered in grime. Signs advertised herbs for sale, though, so I went inside.

The shop’s interior was a mess of broken floorboards and dust. Old herbs were wilting in wooden bins throughout the store, and an elderly man sat behind a countertop covered in stains. When I entered, he didn’t greet me. He just kept reading whatever he was reading and let me go about my business by myself.

Looking through the bins, I was disappointed with the selection, but not surprised. He only had common varieties that were available anywhere.

"Old man,” I said, approaching the counter, “got anything else for sale?”

He snorted at the question without looking at me. “Everything’s in the bins.”