Chapter 141. Less is More
Time passed. Their profits grew, and Rhys purchased the building outright, then started shopping for their next location. In the meantime, he had a few of his underlings build a second cart, then walk the streets with it and record their sales at each location they stopped at. The more they wandered the city, the more they learned about the best places for sales. As expected, anywhere near the mage school did well, but surprisingly, so did the areas near any gate, where the adult mages who worked day in, day out, doing gods knew what for the Empire, could stop out and grab a quick salty snack.
Honey started coming in, and Rhys started selling his weak potion soda. The students took to it like flies to—well, honey, while the adults were a little more reserved to it, unused to cooled beverages or sweet potions.
Rhys frowned, thinking on it, then snapped his fingers as the answer came to him in a flash. Obviously! Adults liked soda, sure, but what did they need? What did they crave more than life itself? Coffee and energy drinks! For adults, flavor was secondary; the chemical effect on the body was far more important. So, he’d plunged back into the sewers, raided the library for potion books, and popped back out to practice stamina potions, concentrating them over and over again until the other mages made him practice outside, because the fumes were too fierce for them to focus anymore, and their hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Lira, a little more delicate to water vapors as a water sprite, insisted he not get too close to her, lest she start buzzing around the building. Using the concentrated stamina potion and the weak healing potion, Rhys developed a second drink with a higher concentration of active ingredients. It was more bitter than his soda, not carbonated, and meant to be served hot, cold, or iced, just like coffee.
Lira eyed the strange, brownish fluid from a distance as he wheeled it out for its first test run. “Are you sure about that? That stuff is downright toxic.”
“I know. Isn’t it great?” Rhys replied enthusiastically. The potion was laden with traces of impurities, of course, but even better, it was the most trashy beverage available outside of cheap beer: an energy drink. Even if his victims—ahem, patrons—didn’t get too badly impurified, they would still get physically and emotionally hooked on the upper… ahem, energy drink. Serving it in the mornings would only cement his power over them, hooking them to using it to wake themselves up. Sure, mages didn’t need to sleep, but plenty did it as a luxury, and even if they didn’t, conditioning their bodies to expect a surge of energy in the morning every day meant he could count on them to have a zombie phase every morning when he rescinded his drinks.
It was the perfect plan. He couldn’t be more excited.
“I’m not sure ‘great’ is the right word,” Lira replied, crossing her arms skeptically. “You’re strengthening the enemy.”
Rhys winked. “Exactly.”
“I don’t get you,” she muttered, and walked away.
“Sable hasn’t said anything?” Rhys called after her.
Lira shook her head in the distance. “But I’m listening!”
He nodded. With Lira and Sable watching the tunnel, one of them a little more at a distance than the other, he could safely go peddle his new wares. He could still retreat to the shop if they sent an urgent summons and get there within a few minutes, so even in the worst case that the Water Syndicate finally stopped nickel-and-diming them and launched an all-out attack, he wasn’t too far to help. Lira and Sable were capable fighters, and that was totally discounting Mouse and everyone else in the store. All of them together could hold against almost anything in the superior defensive formation of the bottlenecked tunnel for the amount of time he would need to drop everything and run back.