Lucius looked at Kiana with a calm look and pondered for a bit.

'Her thought process was quite similar to mine as well. And the option of making a trading company of our own in the future is one of my plans too. She's worthy of nurturing in the long term.' Lucius thought to himself with a nod.

​​

"That's right. We shall go with the merchants for now." Lucius said.

"Yes, that would be the best for now," Kiana said, feeling happy that Lucius agreed with her idea, not knowing that Lucius had already made a decision.

"You can show these letters to Father and mother too if they want to see it. And if they don't want to you can finally send them to Alessa." Lucius spoke.

"Sure, I'll do that. Aunt Lita will definitely be happy reading these." Kiana said with a smile, and almost skipped away.

~kacha~

Lucius locked the door of the lab behind her and went back to his test subjects. He lifted the cloth that was covering the two new bore shrews and saw that they were now ready for meat.

~thud~

Lucius dropped some pieces of meat in front of them and the bore shrews struggled to move, but eventually managed to get to the meat. It was now that Lucius realized one of the bore shrews was slightly faster in moving than the other.

It was also able to move its limbs with greater dexterity than the other beast. Overall, he was pleased with the change and wondered if this will be the next outline in the samples. He watched them ate and fall asleep once they were done.

"Hmm… this will take a day more…" Lucius muttered to himself as he put the cloth back down on the cages.

He then went out to eat dinner and do the rest of his tasks for the night.

***

Six days passed quickly and it was finally the day when the wine was supposed to be sent out.

Lucius had mostly been busy with his own things in these few days and had spent studying the effects of Hell energy on the bore shrews. He had gotten some interesting results, to say the least.

One of the two new bore shrews that he got had reached the same size as the at of the very first bore shrew he had gotten. They were almost the same in size and strength too, with the first one being a bit superior due to being fed Hell energy for longer.

Lucius had also trained all of the bore shrews and they now obeyed him very well. There were also three more additions to his little sample group, and it had reached a total of eight bore shrews now.

The new ones were mutated using the hell energy as well and trained to Lucius's satisfaction.

Currently, Lucius was doing some of the more complex tests that he had not done yet.

"Let's begin…" Lucius muttered to himself and looked at the eight bore shrews.

"Come out!" Lucius ordered.

~skwee~

The bore shrews let out a low screech and woke up.

~clink~clink~clink~

They then opened what were small latches on the bottom of their cages. Lucius had managed to train them to do this. Now that they were habituated to Lucius and desired the hell energy, they didn't try to run away at all.

They mostly spent their time asleep until Lucius commanded them to do something or when it was feeding time. They didn't even need that much food, only once every three days. If they were fed hell energy though, they could stay satiated for longer.

But Lucius found a loophole around it. He could simply command them using hell energy and they would stay asleep for longer without needing any hell energy or food. But after a few days, they would wake up naturally and then need food.

Lucius had been doing different experiments on the different bore shrews and thus had managed to do multiple of them.

~skwee~

The eight bore shrews came out of their cages and lined up in one file.

"Turn left!" Lucius ordered and the beasts responded.

"Turn right!" He ordered again.

"Go forward ten steps!" another command was spoken.

"Turn around!"

"Split into two groups!"

"Join back up!"

"Assemble!"

One after the other, different commands were sent and all of the bore shrews responded promptly. While there were some inconsistencies in their movement, it was still negligible at this level. After all, these were beasts and not humans!

"Perfect!" Lucius said upon seeing the success of the beasts.

"Return and sleep!" Lucius ordered one last time.

~skwee~

The bore shrews responded and returned to their cages before locking their little doors. Seeing it all made Lucius feel pleased, and he covered the cages with the cloth once again.

"Hmm… it should nearly be time for them to leave." Lucius muttered to himself as he looked out the gap in the window.

He left the lab and locked the door on his way out before heading downstairs.

"Ah Asher, you're going to head to the brewery?" Kiana met him in the middle and asked.

"Not fully there. I'm just going to observe from a distance. Me being there at this point could become troublesome if there was someone we don't want observing." Lucius replied.

"That's true." Kiana nodded.

"You want to come?" Lucius questioned.

"Sure, I think the carriage is already drawn up to the front." Kiana answered.

The two of them then headed outside and boarded the carriage before heading to a location that was slightly farther from the brewery. From there, they couldn't see inside the walls of the brewery, but they could still see the transport carriages that were carrying the goods out of the brewery.

Lucius and Kiana watched the wine being taken out of the brewery for about an hour before Lucius was finally satisfied.

"Seems like everything is going well," Lucius stated.

"Of course! John and Alessa have been double checking everything to ensure that nothing problematic happens." Kiana replied.

"That's good. Now we just wait for a while more to see our fruits of labor…" Lucius muttered .