Yearning for the Moon

Chapter Twelve

Now that I didn't have to worry about upsetting the city lord, not when I've already established that I was the stronger one between us, I could finally start working. I wanted to set up a shop for my potions and pills, I had thought at first to sell them by the bottle, but when I realized how much money could be earned by selling the pills individually, well I changed my mind.

The tainted lands were like nothing I had experienced before, I had come here originally expecting a wasteland, still filled with resources sure, but not like this, where nature wasn't just abundant but thriving. I had originally thought finding herbs would be hard, but here in the tainted lands, finding herbs wasn't hard, the problem was safely collecting them with the monsters. While the daylight certainly seemed to subdue them, it didn't drive them away completely, they were still there lurking in the shadows, waiting for someone to get close.

In truth apart from the protective shields from the lodestones, it didn't seem like there was much protection from the monsters, and because it took so long to set up a barrier, it made travelling difficult, I knew many in the outpost likely risked their lives to move quickly collecting herbs and trying to retreat back to the outpost before the monsters noticed them, I expected many died from this. But that was the normal here, deaths from the monsters were expected.

I had known it would be dangerous here, it wasn't called cursed for nothing, but I certainly hadn't anticipated the problems I had come to face. The most prominent one currently was I lacked money, I lacked the gold I would need to use to fund the rebuilding of the city I had been granted. Of which I hadn't even visited yet, but I had heard rumors of how treacherous the northern territory of the tainted lands were, none of the other empire's that had managed to survive here ever dared to near the place.

They said it was overrun with monsters, even more than what the outpost faced nightly, which was at least a couple hundred. I had only seen them a few times on our trip here, but they looked almost human with a few definitive changes, scales, claws, sharp teeth, and raving mad eyes filled with an endless hunger. How someone without a lodestone could turn into something like that because of the so called curse over these lands.

It intrigued me, the curse, how something could infect someone over such a wide distance, to cover the entire tainted lands, to last for thousands of years, as far as I could tell the empire of Ulnaga had fallen not long after the art of pill refining was seemingly lost. There was no way to explain how such an integral craft as pill refining was lost except one, someone killed everyone who knew anything about pill refining. And though it seemed they hadn't managed to smother it completely, they had done enough, after all without knowing to split the pills into a string, one could successfully refine a pill, but it could kill the consumer anyways.

There may be many herbalists who had successfully refined a pill and believed it failed because it killed their test subject. Of which I knew there must be, not everyone had a powerful cultivation crystal that was capable of conjuring a spirit. Fluorite could test all manner of things without any harm coming to her, she was a useful tool specifically because I refused to sacrifice anyone to something untested in the pursuit of knowledge, it just wasn't me.

The money issue was simple enough to solve even if it would take some time, I wanted to open a shop that would sell pills, but it wasn't the time, not yet, so for now I gave a bottle of pills to Andreas to bring to an auction house with specific instructions on the use of the pill, and to sell them individually. The starting price of a single pill was ten thousand gold coins, expense to the average person sure, but nothing to the rich, and with others bidding, it would only make the price higher.

With one string of pills consisting of twelve pills I could easily get a few hundred thousand gold coins from a single string of pills. This was the better way, I had come to the realization that a shop to sell pills should only be formed in my own city, under my control. There was too much to lose here, and not enough to gain, a simple raid could have dozens of pill bottles taken from a shop if the city lord decided to test me, now he would only ever get one bottle if he decided to take it from the auction.