Chapter 44: When It Rainiers It Pours
Kir paid Urvi a silver strip for a potato sack's worth of beans, mostly on principle.
What followed would forever go down as a haze of memory and madness. Kir experimented on individual beans, extracting them from the coffee berry, then figuring out the exact combination of spells required to safely dry out and remove the mucilage, the hull, and the silverskin... all to get to the raw beans.
It was around dawn of the next day that he finally counted himself successful. The entire project had consumed his focus to the point that he'd ignored his roommate and possibly Stella for all of the day... Not that he could remember.
Now came the moment of truth.
With just a small amount of extracted beans, Kir gently roasted them with a small fire spell, careful not to overdo it as he sought out the rich brown appearance he knew from another life.
Though he'd expended half his mana to do it, after half a day of work and countless failures, he finally had a single shot glass' worth of coffee beans.
Just the smell alone was enough to reinvigorate him, and he stood up, feeling his body creak a bit from all the hours of sitting at his desk, and turned to the door. Curiously, Rainier wasn't in his bed, though the now-messy sheets indicated he had been. A quick sanity check verified that Rainier was not in the shower either.
Thus, bleary-eyed and smelling of roasted fruit, Kir decided to forget about his sexy roommate and make his way to the cafeteria. He kept his precious beans clutched in his palm as he got in the elevator, slightly slouching from his exertions. No one seemed to be awake, the common room was empty, and the first signs of life he saw was when he entered the cafeteria.
A few adults sat scattered about the room. Some appeared to be staff and others appeared to be grad students. Possibly. Kir hadn't looked into whether or not the school even had graduate programs.
He was too tired to remember that much of this world operated on a Master-Apprentice relationship, but not too tired to ask for a massive breakfast consisting of eggs, toast, cloudberry jelly, a small mountain of bacon, and an orange. He tried asking for a carafe and burner but got a negative response on that request and all variations until he finally asked for a kettle of tea and some boiling water.
After paying a ridiculous amount for his first breakfast at the school, Kir took his meal to the nearest table, not caring that the man across from him displaced himself rather than sit with a demonkin.