Antidote Potion

After settling into the town without a hitch, Drew's first order of business wasn't cleaning the house. It was finding the town mayor.

He asked the mayor to have a merchant caravan bound for a big city buy him a set of alchemy tools and some materials.

Compared with professions like blacksmithing, tailoring, and leatherworking, alchemy was an extremely rare trade.

The town had blacksmiths, tailors, and leatherworkers, but its residents had never seen anyone with a profession like alchemy or enchanting.

There were hardly any mages in town. The most powerful was a novice mage who led a few apprentices. Drew's arrival made him the town's first mage.

If the town barely had any mages, it was even less likely to have alchemists and enchanters, professions that could only be practiced by spellcasters. So alchemy tools weren't sold in a town like this. Only larger towns carried the necessary materials and equipment.

Fortunately, the town was close to a forest with abundant plant life, including some herbs used in alchemy.

Drew could buy those herbs directly from the townspeople at a much lower price than he'd pay at an alchemy shop in a large town.

As for the townspeople, although merchant caravans from the larger cities came by regularly to buy their herbs, they paid at least half of what Drew offered.

The townspeople's enthusiasm soared.

It was a win-win situation, and everyone was happy.

Once everything was ready, Drew began preparing for alchemy.

First, he cleaned the room. After all, if the surroundings weren't clean, impurities could contaminate the potions he made, seriously affecting their success rate and quality.

Once the room was spotless, Drew laid out a small dust-removal magic circle on the floor and used materials to make it permanent.

That was why Drew had bought a house instead of renting one. There was no point in making a magic circle permanent in someone else's place.

Then Drew searched Karen's memories and began setting up the Alchemy Laboratory according to Karen's usual habits.

Compared with Karen's house in Dalaran, this house was in a completely different league. There was a considerable difference in the size of the rooms.

Once the Alchemy Laboratory was set up, there wasn't much space left.

Fortunately, Drew was controlled by the system and didn't need to sleep. He could rest by sitting down to meditate, which saved him the need for a bedroom and freed up a large area.

When everything was finally in place, the room looked rather strange by ordinary standards.

But Drew was a homebody now. He wouldn't invite anyone over, and no one would casually visit the home of someone with such a wide gap in status.

So nobody would ever see the strange room.

After setting up the room, Drew sensed that his body was tired and unsuited for alchemy.

So he made his body sit down and meditate.

At daybreak the next morning, Drew brought his body out of meditation.

After meditating, Drew ate breakfast. It was a simple meal of plain food and weak tea.

Karen had once been an enormously wealthy heir. His life had been so luxurious that a single day's breakfast could cost as much as an ordinary person's monthly expenses.

Compared with staking out a spot without food or water before, even this plain meal would have driven Karen to despair—if the system hadn't been controlling his body.

The body controlled by the system now went by the name Drew.

The system had no concept of indulgence. It operated mechanically, with survival as its main priority. As long as the body got the energy it needed, it didn't matter whether the food tasted good.

After breakfast, Drew didn't start alchemy right away. First, he searched Karen's memories to familiarize himself with alchemy and learn its steps and formulas, even recalling what it had felt like when Karen practiced it.

Drew carefully recalled how Karen had felt while practicing alchemy, then used the analytical system to run a virtual analysis. The result: alchemy was extremely simple.

The first step of alchemy could be ignored. Even Karen had found it easy, and Drew could complete it with one hundred percent accuracy.

The second step was mixing liquid ingredients, which Karen had found difficult. Drew's analysis showed that all he needed was a large amount of experimental data stored in the system's database.

With enough data, he could determine the true composition of every ingredient and what each component did. Then he could record how different ingredients reacted with each other, along with the proportions and reaction times.

After analyzing all of this together, he could work out every detailed step required for each alchemy formula, including how much of each ingredient to use and when to add it.

What's more, the system's powerful scanning function could precisely identify the amount of every ingredient Drew held and tell whether the molecules in the mixture had finished reacting.

Finally, the system could control every cell in Drew's body, ensuring flawless execution with no mistakes and completing every movement with one hundred percent accuracy.

With all three advantages combined, alchemy was as easy for Drew as eating and drinking.

Of course, Drew hadn't mastered alchemy completely. As for magic, the system considered it an entirely new field that required further study.

This was especially true of the final stage of alchemy: crystallization.

That stage was entirely within the domain of magic, and even Karen had known the process without understanding why it worked.

Searching Karen's memories didn't help the system either. It still couldn't be certain about this stage.

If all the magical elements of alchemy were removed, it could be treated as a chemistry experiment. The system said this was what it had done before, so it had nothing to fear.

But once magic was added, it became an upgraded version of chemistry unlike anything it had seen before.

The system said it was still learning, but would certainly master it one day. Even though it was still unfamiliar with magic, it had Karen's memories in its database, so its understanding of magic was equal to Karen's current level.

Karen's grasp of intermediate-level magic and anything below it was still among the best, so the system had a solid command of those spells as well.

With that level of magical skill and its superior chemistry abilities, Drew's alchemy was exceptionally powerful.

With all the preparations complete, Drew was ready to begin.

First, he chose a formula. He picked the Antidote Potion.

The first reason was that herbs found in the forest made up most of the ingredients in the Antidote Potion formula. He only needed to buy a few more materials to complete the set.

The second reason was that the townspeople often went into the forest to gather herbs, hunt, and chop wood. After all, people made their living from what the land around them provided.

But there were many places in the forest filled with miasma, and poisonous snakes were common. Some herbs were poisonous, too. The townspeople needed antidotes, so the Antidote Potion had a ready market.

It was a potion that the townspeople would welcome and that could make Drew money. What else could he choose?