Chapter 140. An Unexpected Visit
Rhys stared into the vat, thinking. The sun was finally setting after a long day of chips and fries, and he was back at his usual efforts at refining his drink offerings. He had his soda more-or-less ready to go; all he needed was a steady source of sugar to sweeten it. He couldn’t exactly put his soda into full production when he relied on random merchants bringing enough sugar into the city for him to continue making it. He didn’t want the rush of a short-lived fad—trashy though they might be—but the long, slow, insidious infiltration of soda into the lives of every mage in the Empire. If he was going to turn this incredibly-mild-healing-potion-slash-soft-drink into a profitable sales leader, then he needed a steady and low-cost source of sugar. After all, that was ultimately the secret of soft drinks: a steady and low-cost source of sugar, utilized to make the ultimate of delicious, cheap, and unhealthy drinks.
Bzzz. A strange buzzing echoed from the yard behind the tavern. Rhys left the vat, and his thoughts, behind, and wandered out to check on the source of the sound. The backyard was a tangled mess, all weeds and trash, which he’d left there with great sadness in his heart because if he hadn’t, his yard would have stood out from all the other shops’ back lots. It wasn’t a large area, just a small ten foot by five foot space meant to be… who knew? An herb garden? A holding space for trash? In any case, the source of the buzzing noise was immediately apparent. The female mage who’d helped him clean the building stood in the small yard, focused intently on a small flock of honeybees. Her eyes were glazed yet intense in the way that told Rhys she was doing something important and magical, so he stood nearby and waited for her to finish.
At last, she breathed out and blinked, then looked up, meeting his eyes. “Good evening, Rhys.”
“Good evening…” Rhys abruptly realized he’d never caught her name, and cleared his throat in embarrassment.
She laughed good-naturedly. “Kuyie, my name is Kuyie.”
“Kuyie. I, uh. Couldn’t help but notice that you’re handling honey bees this afternoon.”
“Indeed I am.”
Rhys stood there for a second, a little awkward and uncertain of how to broach the topic, then decided to just go for it. “Could we use the bees to secure our source of sugar?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” she said, beaming. She turned to the bees. “Ordinary bees couldn’t keep up with our demand, not without a full-scale honey farm, but I’ve been working with these bees for a while now, imbuing them with mana. They can produce far more honey than the average hive, in shorter timeframes as well. The only problem is that they need nectar to create honey. Flowers. And we’re in a city.”
Rhys grinned. “That’s no problem at all. We’ve got farms. Plenty of plants out there. Surely some of them need to be pollinated.”