Li breathed in the scent of his new stall and lab, where he was to finally put weeks of preparation to use. It smelled like wood and varnish, new and untainted by herbal smells. That was soon to change.

For the whole week, Li had been harvesting and planting as many of the offensively oriented seeds that Triple Threat had given him.

Throughout the week, they had flowered and sprouted. The entire herbal garden had been packed with the bright reds, oranges, and noxious greens of Flameweed, goblin grass, bone bean, and wraith peppers.

With Old Thane's help, Li had uprooted a few of the herbs while taking cuttings from all of them. Now, before him, on the long working table that spanned from end to end of the hybrid stall-laboratory, were rows of brilliantly flashy colors.

There were the ever fiery tips of flameweed, their color shifting from reds to oranges like a flickering fire. Then there were was the goblin grass which looked just like regular grass, but their bases grew from spherical, almost rubbery green tubes that looked just like the pot-bellies of goblings, and it was these tubes that he had harvested. The ashen white beans of the bone bean plant lay scattered amongst the pile. Long, sickle-shaped peppers marred with what looked like scarred tissue – wraith peppers – stood at a separate pile, their toxic skins capable of contaminating everything else.

Li exhaled and smiled. Finally, he was about to get to work. He had thanked Charles thoroughly for the stall. The builder's crew moved on to different projects, but Charles himself attended to expanding Li's berry and herb gardens, working to enclose them in rudimentary greenhouses. More of an excuse to have his children stay with Zagan, most likely, but an excuse that helped Li nonetheless.

The early morning sun peeked in through the few windows of the stall. A crisp and cool breeze flitted in through the open but empty display counter. Li had left Old Thane to tend to the farm for today, and the old man was all too happy to show off that he still had it in him to keep everything running by himself.

Li had his work cut out for him. He was set to open his stall tomorrow, and for that, he needed to produce enough elixirs today to create a viable supply to last for the foreseeable future.

"Let's get to work," said Li.

Iona shifted forwards, standing beside Li as her eyes scanned the contents of the table. "Yes, O guardian."

"No 'O guardianing' in broad daylight while people might still come by, even in the confines of this stall. Low profile, understand me?"

"Understood, O-, I mean-"

"Li. Just call me Li like a regular human would. I don't take offense to it."

"But…." Iona put a pale hand to her lip, as if the very thought of forcing Li's name out was offensive to her.

"I understand that I was too harsh on you before." Li started to gather up all the flameweed tips to process first. "When you spoke to me before wasn't a great day. I was dealing with a few personal problems."

"Your divinity, I presume?"

Li nodded and pointed to the pile of burning red grass tips. "Yes, but don't bring it up while we're working. Focus on what's at hand. It's time to process. Let's start off with a batch of [Blood Boil]."

Iona gathered the mound of ember-like grass with steady purpose, knowing what to do merely from hearing the elixir's name.

"You forgot these." Li handed her a pair of worn leather gloves that shone a little, as if greasy.

Standard herbalist equipment. Gloves soaked in basilisk saliva. Expensive, but a staple for any herbalist to prevent unwanted acids and plant matter from burning into their skin. He also handed her a breather, a gas-mask with built-in goggles consisting of glassy film formed from crystallized griffin tears with a ventilator crafted from the hardy bladder of a lake serpent.

"Why do we need these?" said Iona as she took the gloves and mask and stared at them. "Nature's bounty will do us no harm, no matter the form it takes."

"Low profile. If anyone barges in on us, they won't be wondering why we aren't coughing our lungs out or why are eyeballs aren't oozing out of our heads."

Li saw as Iona began processing the flameweed. She took huge bunches of the grass tips, curled them under her fingers to flatten them against the table, and used a small but sharp knife to rapidly chop them up. Her movements were swift and controlled, cutting the grass tips into little particles perfect to extract their juices from.

Comparatively, Li was slow. He had incredible strength and speed, but he hadn't practiced these movements before. Eventually, he figured he was wasting his time and decided to instead take a wooden bowl and scoop up some cold and purified water from a pot nearby.

"Do the rest," said Li as he motioned to his pile of flameweed tips. Iona gave a slight nod as she moved with a driven speed, showing her all to prove herself worthy to Li. She blitzed through the entire mound in seconds, razing it down into tiny little bits that looked like little sparks flickering on the table.

Li gathered the chopped flameweed and with one quick motion, scraped them straight into the bowl of water. Immediately, the water started steaming. An acrid smell much like smoke sputtered from the bowl as the water bubbled, the flameweed releasing intensive heat.

Li took a stirring rod and gently made a little vortex in the water, keeping the flameweed from settling to the bottom and burning through the bowl. As he did so, he recalled the elixir creation process.

Three steps. Processing, extraction, and then purification.

Processing was to reduce the herb to its most useful and base components. Extraction would be to draw out the needed elements from the base components, often taking the form of a liquid solution. Purification was detoxifying the raw, concentrated, and often deadly lethal elements that remained in any solution derived from extraction.

Although magical herbs grew incredibly quickly, they were extremely unstable and dangerous things. One step wrong in the mixing process would change a healing herb into one that liquefied flesh. A little misstep, maybe a wrongly lit spark or an accidental drop of one solution into another might cause an explosion that would reduce the stall to ashes.

All of this made the harvesting of magical herbs an incredibly risky and knowledge intensive trade, oftentimes not worth the trouble. On top of this, there was the dissipation phenomena. During one of the three stages of elixir creation, a herbalist would likely find that the magical essence running through the herbs would simply leave, scattering up in fine particles of raw mana, leaving them with useless husks.

Any herbalist that managed to have a majority of their harvest retain mana and turn into viable elixirs was exceedingly skilled, but more often than not, this was a game of chance. Nobody knew why the dissipation phenomena occurred, and even the most painstakingly caring herbalists could find their brews turn useless.

As a result, mass production was the most rewarding and profitable way of creating elixirs. That was what Black Vine did, essentially industrializing the trade, churning out low quality elixirs but ensuring that they made enough that no specialist could compete with them.

But that wasn't how Li had learned. Aine had a near one hundred percent success rate, and it was through her notes that he had learned and evidently, that Iona was familiar with this more time and care intensive process.

Together, they almost wordlessly poured out their entire attention and effort, doing what needed to be done, giving each other little indicators that they needed this tool or that.

Li carefully looked at the bowl. Aine's notes stated to dump the water right when the smoke was warm but not hot and the flameweed tips darkened. When that happened, Li went to a wooden sink, a hole that funneled out of the stall, and dumped the water while making sure none of the flameweed escaped.

Iona tapped his back. "Extraction?"

Li nodded and gave her the bowl of darkened flameweed. She went back to the table and dumped it into a mortar and used a pestle to ground them up. The flameweed had become brittle, almost like ash, and it broke apart under the pestle into a fine, black powder.

While Iona did that, Li took one of the uprooted herbs - it didn't matter which - and sliced the roots off. He refilled the bowl of water and cleaned the roots thoroughly until the veiny white strands were glistening clean. Afterwards, he went to the cauldron and got the fire going with a firebrand.

As the dark iron cauldron warmed and the water within started to boil, he called out to Iona. "Get me the processed flameweed."

She came by in a second, handing over the mortar filled with black powder.

Li dipped his finger into the cauldron and nodded. It was boiling. He carefully peppered in the flameweed, bit by bit, until all of it got into the cauldron. The darkened flameweed began to reabsorb the heat it had lost, but now reduced to tiny particles, the individual particles exploded. Each little crushed particle of dark flameweed heated up, brightening into a pinprick of heat for an instant before popping, a small geyser of water ejecting upwards from the force of the miniscule explosion.

Li had made sure there was only a thin layer of boiling water in the deep cauldron so that the explosions didn't plough up waves of hot water and spill over.

As the particles burst apart, they clouded the water in their essence, turning the liquid a dark, almost blackish red. Li smelled the bubbling mixture, taking in strong hints of iron and smoke. He nodded and put the lid of the cauldron on.

Now he just had to let it simmer for half an hour until all the particles had exploded and leaked out their essence. When all was said and done, he would use the root he had washed earlier to soak up any toxic waste, leaving only a deep, blood red liquid behind.

The nice thing about magical herbs was that they were self-contained ecosystems. They were toxic, but their antidotes grew right with their poisons. In most cases, their roots did the job, useful in the brewing process for taking in certain toxins and impurities.

Li patted his gloves dry on his trousers and took a seat on stool. He looked forward to the next step – purification. That was the one most reminiscent of his labwork. It involved all the beakers, flasks, pipettes, burners, and other equipment that lay in neat rows at the other end of the table.

Li cast a glance to Iona. She remained standing at the table. She pointed to the goblin grass tubes.

"Should I prepare these for processing next? It will save us time."

"No need. We have all day." Li waved her towards an empty stool in front of him. "Take a seat. I've evaluated you enough."

"Am-am I suitable?" she stuttered, her gloved hands wrung together.

"You're good at this. Far better than I am. I know how to do everything, but I don't have the practice that you do. It's like knowing the recipe for a meal while never having cooked it before. I can get the job done, but it takes time because I'm unpracticed and clumsy." Li paused. "You'll be a good assistant. Just let me do the majority of the work so that I can learn. What I want to talk about is your other 'job'. What you initially offered me. I want to hear about what it means to be a forest spirit."