Rein had already mapped out his escape plan, so he no longer paid attention to the stealth assassin watching him outside.
Even when Piscis deliberately left him alone in the laboratory, he did not rashly choose to flee.
Besides, there were still two days until the Black Market Trade Fair, and Rein needed to make some preparations in advance.
Late at night, he entered the dreamscape.
The dreamscape created by the Mind Core was no longer a library. Instead, it was a one-to-one reconstruction of Piscis's potion laboratory.
Not only was the workbench fully equipped with every kind of apparatus, but even the potion ingredients in the storage cabinets were identical to those in the real world.
Rein did nothing else. He walked straight to the workbench, picked up test tubes and measuring cups, and began trying to prepare an antidote for the Zombie Potion.
To outsiders, a Potionry Apprentice who had only started a few days ago attempting to prepare a finished potion was absolutely an act of overestimating himself.
Even the genius students of the Oma Empire's finest institution, the Royal Potionry Academy, needed at least several months of grueling practice in every basic step—purification, extraction, and fusion—before they could attempt to combine them into a finished potion.
What apprentice who had only just started learning would begin by preparing a finished potion?
But Rein was an exception.
Potion Masters held lofty status in this world and were exceptionally rare. It was not because few people wanted to learn, but because the threshold for this field was simply too high!
To get started in Potionry, one needed not only a vast and tedious body of specialized theoretical knowledge like a scholar, but more importantly, one had to spend money.
For a Potionry Apprentice to advance into an official Potion Master, they needed a tremendous amount of hands-on training.
The materials wasted in that process amounted to a figure that would leave ordinary people dumbstruck. Even many noble families might squander their entire fortunes without necessarily raising a single official Potion Master.
And even after spending all that money, there was no guarantee of a return. This was the second threshold that discouraged the vast majority of people.
Talent, rigorous cultivation, opportunity, and tutelage.
These were the second, third, fourth, and fifth thresholds.
Not one could be absent.
Because of these high barriers, Potion Masters had always been a profession only nobles and the absurdly lucky could afford to pursue. Their starting point was often the endpoint of an ordinary person's lifelong struggle, and their status was destined to be higher than that of other Extraordinary Professions.
But Rein had no need to worry about the threshold of spending money.
With the Mind Core, he possessed an overwhelmingly unfair advantage!
Because in the dreamscape, he had limitless materials to waste.
As long as the Mind Core had recorded a potion ingredient's effects, properties, and pharmacology, it could convert them into precise data and simulate them perfectly within the dreamscape.
He could retry endlessly after failure, and even if he made an operational error, there was no life-threatening risk of an explosion.
That was the most important reason Rein could directly begin refining finished potions.
In the dreamscape, Rein got busy.
The antidote formula was on his left, while a projection before him played the entire process of Piscis brewing potions during the day.
He did not even need to think. He only had to follow the projection and try each step in sequence.
Whatever material Piscis took, he took the same.
Whatever Piscis did next, he did the same.
The Mind Core had precisely recorded every piece of data: the heating temperature, the number of purification cycles, even fusion times accurate to the millisecond.
After all, this was merely a low-level potion. It did not involve complicated reaction processes requiring difficult Transcendent abilities to control. It could be said that as long as one perfectly replicated the projection's movements, even an apprentice could successfully prepare the potion.
Yet even so, Rein failed countless times.
Just purifying and extracting more than a dozen ingredients to a usable standard took him no fewer than several hundred failures.
That was how potion preparation worked. A tiny mistake in one step could cause the entire potion to fail.
Fortunately, the dreamscape's twentyfold time flow and its limitless supply of virtual materials gave him ample time for such extravagant attempts.
For anyone else, never mind the effort involved—even using such high-grade materials for practice would have been an extravagance that even top noble apprentices would not dare indulge in.
At night, Rein practiced repeatedly in the dreamscape;
During the day, once Piscis left the laboratory, he immediately conducted hands-on experiments.
At last, diligence paid off.
After numerous failed attempts, Rein, aided by the Mind Core's incredible cheat-like power, finally successfully brewed the antidote that only official Potion Masters could prepare!
Did that mean Rein's Potionry level had reached that of an official Potion Master?
No, he was still far from it.
His fundamentals were even worse than those of an ordinary Potionry Apprentice.
For a conventional academy-trained Potion Master apprentice, progressing from learning the basics of Potionry to refining this finished antidote would likely require one or two years of foundational study.
But with the Mind Core assisting him, Rein had skipped that entire process.
The official Potion Master assessment was like a college entrance exam, requiring comprehensive evaluation across every subject. He was merely an eccentric talent with a severe imbalance in his skills, one who only knew how to solve a single type of problem.
He did not need to understand the enormous theoretical foundation involved in the entire potion-making process: what the properties of an individual material were, how medicinal effects fused together, or how temperature fluctuations affected potency.
He did not need to think through any of that.
Rein only needed to copy the footage recorded by the Mind Core from start to finish, secretly learning every movement Piscis made.
Two full nights, equivalent to more than a month of someone else's hard practice, all focused on a single potion.
Only then had he successfully prepared this finished potion that, in theory, only a One-Star Potion Master could make.
Of course, sharp-eyed Piscis had also noticed signs that the workbench had been tampered with, and that some materials clearly used for the Zombie Potion antidote were missing from the storage cabinet.
In the old man's eyes, Rein was naturally overestimating himself by trying to prepare a potion.
Heh, he had not even learned to crawl, yet he wanted to fly?
What a foolish thing to do.
At most, a few materials had been wasted. Piscis did not take it to heart at all, and he pretended not to notice, allowing Rein to keep fumbling around.
Thus, two peaceful days passed.
At last, they reached their destination.
Banditry in the southern Oma Empire had been a stubborn problem for decades. The imperial army had come to suppress it countless times, yet had never managed to wipe out these slippery bandit groups. The combined fighting strength of these hundred-plus groups was even enough to seize some large territories.
As always, the location selected for this large-scale Black Market Trade Fair had been chosen with great caution.
Storm Lake lay in open terrain. Once imperial troops were spotted, the bandit groups could flee in all directions. A complete encirclement and extermination was simply impossible.
Today, the weather was unusually good.
The mist over the land was thin and light, and visibility was quite high.
When the Weasel Bandit Group arrived at Storm Lake, more than a hundred bandit groups of varying sizes had already gathered there.
Bonfires stretched for dozens of miles, and the air was filled with a roaring crowd. The scene was extraordinarily lively.
Steam Machinery Cities of all sizes and bizarre designs were stationed along the lakeshore, resembling a herd of wild buffalo drinking together on the grasslands.
Chimneys rose one after another, black smoke streaming into the sky. Hyenas, crabs, iron barrels, octopuses, hedgehogs—these Mechanical Cities came in all manner of strange shapes, brimming with a dark industrial aesthetic.
Among the many Steam Machinery Cities, three War Elephant-class fortresses stood head and shoulders above the rest.
Their black-painted armor bore the conspicuous emblem of a ferocious one-eyed wolf's head.
They were none other than the organizers of this trade fair: the White Wolf Bandit Group, one of the Oma Empire's three great bandit groups.
And its leader was none other than one of the former Top Ten Legendary Demon Hunters, a legendary figure at the pinnacle of banditry, a top-tier Transcendent who had unlocked five Gene Locks, and a man jointly wanted by the Oma Empire and the Sid Empire for 180 million Lisos—White Wolf Bazel Gustav!
At such a lively Black Market Trade Fair, major fugitives with bounties exceeding ten million were everywhere. Even the arrival of a notorious large group like the Weasel Gang did not stir the slightest ripple.
This was the ultimate gathering of bandit groups, a carnival for outlaws.
"It really is lively."
Rein remarked as he looked at the blazing marketplace before him, a sharp glint flickering in his eyes.
At that moment, he finally saw the dawn of "freedom."
Hearing this, Piscis's lips curled into an imperceptible, sinister smile. Without turning around, he said, "Come on. I'll take you to meet some of my peers in the Potionry world."
"Yes, Teacher."
Rein obediently followed behind Piscis and stepped down from the Mechanical City.
Thanks to 'BAIPIAO' for the 500-coin donation, and to 'Wusheng Temple' for the donations as well. You are both familiar old readers. Thank you, thank you~
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