第四十五章 你可以入赘

"Blood can't be replaced. I don't have the supporting magical potions on hand for now." Li Ziran had to make that clear.

She was one of his high-ranking VIPs. Behind her stood Malando City, which could help him obtain specific magical potions. More importantly, Nicole was one of his shelters.

She was immensely valuable.

Precisely because of that, Li Ziran would not cut corners during surgery.

"What do you lack?" Nicole asked directly.

"Carnivorous Flower Allure Fluid." Li Ziran spoke frankly. "It's a rather rare bone-cleansing agent. I don't have much of the other potions in stock either. They may not be enough to support two major surgeries."

Nicole did not seem to consider that bad news. Instead, she gave an odd smile and lightly brushed her right index finger.

Thumb-sized bottles flew from between her fingers like a swarm of wasps—red, yellow, blue, green—clattering as they filled the entire large round bed in the blink of an eye.

Only then did Li Ziran notice the bright silver ring on Nicole's index finger. A clear, crystalline gem was embedded at its center.

A Spatial Crystal, produced by Void Grasshoppers.

These mysterious grasshoppers possessed unique magical organs that could absorb all kinds of elements from the Elemental Tide, repeatedly stack and recombine them dozens of times over, forming the rarest Spatial Element in the world.

Stacking and recombining elements to create special elements was the most profound branch of magic.

Spatial Crystals formed from accumulated Spatial Element came with a portion of Derivative Space. Once polished by an alchemist, they could become the Spatial Rings living beings dreamed of obtaining.

Li Ziran subconsciously swallowed. Something that required no burden to carry while storing goods was far better than his Transformation Spell.

If he had a ring like that, together with his unique Frog Transformation, how many corpses could he transport in one go?

Probably more than ten thousand.

Unfortunately, that was something one only dared to crave in dreams. With a starting price of five hundred gold coins, even dreaming of one would be a terrifying nightmare.

"What, you want one?" Nicole noticed the greed in Li Ziran's eyes and deliberately raised her finger before him.

Li Ziran's mental power stirred instinctively. He desperately wanted to turn the girl into a frog, twist off her head, rob her, and leave.

But reason told him it was absolutely impossible.

Not only because of Nicole's identity—just her skill at playing with daggers was probably enough to kill him in seconds.

Most importantly, it would seriously violate Li Ziran's own bottom line.

Nicole was so relaxed in front of him precisely because she understood Li Ziran's character.

Greed had to have limits!

"I want one. I'm practically drooling over it!" Li Ziran chuckled, forcibly shifting his greedy gaze away from the ring and toward the magical potions filling the bed.

You never knew until you looked; once he did, the sight gave him a fright.

The Dusk Potion that delayed aging, the Spring Flower Elixir that kept skin elastic, the intensely anesthetic Giant Whale Venom, the Sea Urchin Bile that greatly heightened blood activity...

"Which apothecary's treasure vault did you rob?" Li Ziran asked in shock. These things simply should not have been gathered together.

Like many professions, apothecary work required deeper mastery of knowledge the further one progressed. Any person capable of producing even one of the things before him could be called a top-tier apothecary.

If they could produce three to five, they could be considered a titled apothecary.

If you thought a peak apothecary could make dozens of the potions before him, then you could not have been more wrong.

Time.

That one factor alone tightly choked ninety-nine point nine percent of apothecaries to death.

Potion-making was not as simple as gathering ingredients. A single top-tier potion was often formed from hundreds, even thousands, of potions mixed together. To master one top-tier potion, one had to thoroughly understand hundreds of ordinary potions.

Apothecary was a discipline even vaster than magic. Its complex and trivial knowledge was enough to drain an apothecary's life dry.

There were at least seven top-tier potions here. Saying she had robbed an apothecary's treasure vault was already putting it mildly.

"So, is there anything you need?" Nicole asked with a cheerful smile, as though she had not noticed Li Ziran's astonishment. "Pick whatever you want. I don't understand potions anyway."

Li Ziran smiled bitterly. Pick whatever he wanted? Was she tempting him? The moment he started taking things, hundreds of gold coins would be in his hands.

Even with Bailando City backing her, she should not be this casual.

What exactly had happened to this girl over the past two years? The things before him were enough to challenge the limits of his professional ethics.

Li Ziran quietly shook his head. He knew he could not keep asking.

There was no need, and it was not worth it.

To ask was equivalent to beginning to interfere in a client's affairs.

Moreover, such information was useless to him. Even if he knew it, his current strength could not touch that sphere.

Every potion here was scarce to him. As he delved deeper into the field of organs, he needed more potions to make up for his shortcomings in perception.

The more thoroughly prepared his magical potions were, the more organ surgeries he could attempt.

Although Nicole was generous, he knew she was not a fool.

Keeping one's greed in proper check was one of the fundamental laws for surviving in the Wasteland.

Li Ziran directly ignored the top-tier potions that made him drool most and began searching among the mid-tier and low-tier potions.

There were many types of potions here, including quite a few obscure ones.

Li Ziran was fortunate enough to find a bottle of Revival Potion and a bottle of Sacred Potion. These were the magical potions he consumed most heavily, especially the Sacred Potion and Revival Potion. Their consumption in the coming days would definitely be terrifying.

He did not hold much hope for Carnivorous Flower Allure Fluid. It was a highly obscure potion; even master apothecaries rarely spent effort researching such a thing.

But when he pushed aside two orange-yellow potions, he saw a bottle of liquid as black as thick ink, leaning at an angle against another bottle of vivid red solution, lying quietly on the large round bed like a sleeping beauty.

That almost viscous black color nearly made Li Ziran suffocate.

Carnivorous Flower Allure Fluid came from the very core of a Carnivorous Flower's pistil.

Li Ziran hurriedly grabbed it and stared at it fixedly.

Indeed, it was blacker than ink.

He had only seen it once in a necromancer's laboratory. This was absolutely the Carnivorous Flower Allure Fluid required for the surgery.

Li Ziran abruptly turned to look at Nicole. Though the laws of survival told him not to ask about messy, irrelevant things, necromancers and Corpse Witches never sold this potion to outsiders.

How had she obtained it?

The more he came into contact with her, the more terrifyingly numerous the girl's secrets seemed.

He even felt that he no longer understood her at all.

In the end, he still restrained his urge to interrogate her. He did not ask. He put away the bottle of Carnivorous Flower Allure Fluid, then found a special Revival Potion and left the large round bed.

"Did you find what you needed?" Nicole had not stopped him from beginning to end. Only after Li Ziran stood did she quietly ask.

Li Ziran nodded and smiled. "Your stock is abundant."

"You can take a few more bottles. It's fine. I still have to pay you for the surgery later anyway." Nicole smiled sweetly, as though these were discarded bits of trash.

Li Ziran shook his head. "You know me. I never take more than I need. I don't feel right using things like that."

"Hehe!" Nicole laughed. Her palm swept lightly across the large round bed, gathering all the precious potions away in an instant. Then she turned to Li Ziran. "Can I ask you one more time?"

"What?" Li Ziran asked suspiciously. The girl had suddenly become serious.

"Marry me!" Nicole said with a smile.

"Don't joke around!" Li Ziran rolled his eyes. He arranged the thumb-sized bottles needed for surgery one by one on his wizard's robe, then dipped a brush in Frog Sweat and began writing Frog Script bit by bit.

This was necessary. Ever since returning from the swamp, Li Ziran had discovered the difference between Transformation Arrays constructed through mental power and those constructed through sweat.

Mental construction was fast, but it was easily detected and easily destroyed. At the same time, the frogs it transformed were somewhat irregular.

In contrast, Transformation Arrays constructed with Frog Sweat were extremely stable. They could completely ignore mental interference. As long as the Tadpole Script on the Transformation Array was not damaged, they basically would not fail. Moreover, frogs formed through Frog Sweat had highly regular structures.

These were details of transformation, as well as a small conclusion Li Ziran had drawn.

"I'm not joking!" Nicole directly snatched Li Ziran's brush away. "I'm giving you one chance."

Li Ziran froze. Nicole had never been this solemn before. In the past, though she had said such things, she had always been joking. He had never taken it seriously and simply let the little girl fool around.

On the contrary, after spending so long in the Wasteland and witnessing all kinds of schemes, intrigues, right and wrong, he had actually come to like this sort of fooling around.

"What happened?" In the end, Li Ziran still asked. He sensed that something was off about Nicole. "What exactly did you experience over those two years?"

Nicole stood stunned where she was. She did not speak. Her two eyes stared blankly into the air, and only after a long while did she let out a heavy sigh.

"My father died! I'm sorry, I lied to you just now."

That ordinary sentence exploded in Li Ziran's mind like a gigantic thunderclap. The figure he respected collapsed in an instant.

Although Malando had warned him more than once, he had never directly stopped him from meeting Nicole.

In Li Ziran's mind, Brando was the favored son of all slave rules, the undisputed overlord of the Wasteland.

Yet now he was hearing this terrible news.

If he had calculated correctly, Brando should have been fifty years old. With both Forbes and human blood in his veins, he should have had at least thirty more years to live.

"I'm the city lord now." Nicole gave a bitter laugh, yet she was not as sad as he had imagined. "Father had me take control of Bailando City. Before he died, he gave me this most precious thing and told me to come find you."

"Find me?" Li Ziran found it absurd. "He still remembered me?"

In his eyes, he had been nothing more than an ant before Brando.

"Of course. My father remembered every person he had met. He said that was an ability a city lord must possess." Nicole sighed softly. "Actually, I never intended to see you. I'm in danger now. Bailando City is not so easy to control. I need strength, and you can continuously make me stronger."

Nicole suddenly took Li Ziran's hand and asked earnestly, "You can marry into my family. This isn't a joke! Of course, I have feelings for you too."