Hades's Disappointment

Hades realized he might have gotten it wrong. He had assumed the low yield of his alchemical solution was due to the ore.

He thought he could increase the yield simply by switching to the ore Nfirea said he often used to extract the solution. But that wasn't the case at all.

No matter what ore he used, the yield didn't improve. Even with a huge chunk of ore, he still got only a single drop. He'd need at least enough ore to fill half a room to make a single bottle.

Through experimentation, Hades gradually came to understand that the ore had little to do with it. His Advanced Extraction spell, on the other hand, had a great deal to do with it.

Of course, that wasn't entirely accurate either. The spell itself was still the same; it was just that the quality of these ores was practically nonexistent. If he used the ordinary Extraction spell to refine them,

the resulting alchemical solution was exactly the same as the solution Nfirea obtained through distillation. The potions he made from it were blue, too. Still, at least the yield of alchemical solution was fairly normal.

And since Advanced Extraction increased the yield and slightly improved the quality, the reason those ores could be refined into red solution wasn't the ores themselves, but the effect of the spell.

But if that were really the case, it would've been fine. He could just use the lowest-quality ore if any ore would do. But when Hades switched to the lowest-grade ore, he couldn't extract a single drop of alchemical solution. In a game, that would mean the extraction had failed and the materials had disappeared.

After reaching that conclusion, Hades couldn't help letting out a groan. This meant his workload would increase dramatically, and the cost of making potions would skyrocket.

He didn't really care about the money. If he wanted to make a profit, he could simply use Extraction to refine the nearly worthless ore and make blue potions.

Nfirea's workshop sold them for 1 gold coin and 10 silver coins. Even if Hades sold his at half price, he'd still make a profit. Compared to Nfirea's method, using magic to extract the solution was simple and easy.

He could cut some of the costs that way. Based on his mana, he could produce nearly two hundred blue healing potions a day. After expenses, making close to a hundred gold coins a day would be a breeze.

But making money wasn't his goal right now. He was trying to put out bait, so he couldn't focus only on making a profit.

Considering the cost, each red potion was ultimately priced at 10 gold coins. Hades got 7 gold coins per bottle, while Nfirea barely made any money.

That made Hades look at the kid in a new light. This was a losing deal. As they'd agreed, the cost of materials was deducted from Hades's share, but transportation fees weren't included.

His 7-gold-coin share might've seemed generous, but a large portion of it went toward the cost of materials. Ore enough to fill half a room wasn't cheap, so his net profit came to only a little over 2 gold coins.

Nfirea got 3 gold coins. Before this, his workshop hadn't needed nearly so much ore to make blue potions. And since the potions were made entirely by hand, he couldn't mass-produce them.

In fact, nearly every potion workshop in E-Rantel was like that. Demand wasn't high enough for them to need the ore used to make alchemical solutions on a large scale.

There was only so much ore on the market, but now Nfirea was buying up most of it, prompting protests from the other potion workshops.

The miners didn't dare offend so many workshops. Potion workshops were the only buyers for their ore, and if they all refused to buy it, the miners would be the ones in trouble. The workshops, meanwhile, were highly profitable and had stockpiles. They could afford to wait.

Nfirea might've wanted a lot, but he couldn't use up that much ore by himself.

With no other choice, Nfirea had to pay the Adventurer's Guild to arrange for its mining.

Adventurers were adventurers, not miners. In a fight, a standard four-person adventurer party could take on even ten miners without breaking a sweat.

But when it came to mining, that was another story. Maybe two people in an entire party could do the actual work, and one party simply couldn't mine enough ore.

So they had to hire several more parties, as well as wagons to transport the ore. That sent costs soaring: about 7 gold coins for enough ore to fill half a room.

And that didn't even include various additional expenses, such as taxes and city entry fees. All told, Hades was guaranteed 2 gold coins, but Nfirea wasn't.

While marveling at how honest the kid was, Hades also complained about the low productivity of this world, which was practically stuck in primitive times.

He had important things to do right now. Otherwise, once he had some free time, he'd have to make sure all those potion workshops went out of business. Red potions really were expensive to make.

But blue potions weren't. He could sell his at half price, make up for it in volume, and take over E-Rantel's potion market.

"Ugh..."

Sitting on the sofa, Hades sighed. Since the potions weren't going to make him rich overnight, he turned his attention to scrolls.

Using the Create Paper scroll he'd bought the other day, he'd made two sheets of white paper. But after testing them, he found they were completely useless for making scrolls.

Whenever he tried to infuse them with magic, the paper burned up. Clearly, it couldn't withstand the magical power, even though the spell he'd infused was only first-tier.

It was only after asking Nfirea that he learned scrolls had to be made with parchment. So he bought some parchment from a materials shop and found that he could indeed make scrolls, but the parchment could only withstand spells up to the second tier.

There was another thing he'd overlooked: making scrolls required not only the basic material, parchment, but also a small amount of gold.

Hades hadn't made scrolls for a long time, so he'd forgotten that detail. In YGGDRASIL, he could buy scrolls directly. They were a little more expensive than making them himself, but he wasn't short on money.

If he could just buy them, why go to all that trouble to make them himself? But when he started making one, he suddenly remembered the detail, as if something had reminded him.

That put an end to his plans to make money from scrolls, too. Potions were fine—he could use YGGDRASIL's techniques to reduce costs. Scrolls, though, were hard to sell, and there was no way to cut their production costs.

He looked up at the mechanical grandfather clock in the room. The hour hand pointed to the Roman numeral two. Hades put away the second-tier Extraction scroll he'd just made.

Then he sprang up from the sofa. It was time to get to work. He'd arranged to go make potions with Nfirea every afternoon, and while he was there, he could learn more about the things he didn't know.

As for the Adventurer's Guild, Hades hadn't gone back since his visit a few days ago. Why bother being an adventurer? The Guild's adventurers were working for him now.

They might be adventurers, but they still couldn't escape the fate of day laborers.

Once the bait took, and after things had settled down for a while, he'd start making money with blue potions.

The inn was comfortable, but the food really wasn't to his taste.