The Insider System

Chapter 115: The Grind Pt.1

Reaching the 85th floor Lake walked up and flashed his badge to the door to let himself in. Walking in he saw there was one other person inside who was already doing what looked like the same thing he was here to do. The only thing was they were clearly a servant. Lake could tell by the clothes they were wearing.

With them being the only person in the room Lake walked over and said. "I'm here to help process ingredients." The servant pointed over to the center of the room where there were quite a few of those metal containers he knew the Alchemist guild kept the most poisonous ingredients.

"There are nine separate ingredients you need to turn into powder than that's one set. You can pour the powders into those over there; they all have labels so you should be able to figure it out. I don't know how many you're supposed to do, but I would recommend sticking around until I need to bring the powdered ingredients to Master Nancom, so you can help."

Lake took back his negative thoughts on the only person other than him being a servant he had thought he would be dealing with a normal servant, but this person was clearly perfectly normal, and not being affected by the loyalty like most servants in the spire. This meant he could actually have a conversion with them like a normal person.

"Hello I'm Lake, I'll help, you don't need to worry about bringing all those upstairs by yourself." Lake was expecting some form of introduction but after a few seconds of silence Lake just got to work. It was too bad when he had figured out the servant wasn't under any restrictions he was hoping they could have a conversation but it seemed he had been unlucky and met the one rude person in the guild.

It was bound to happen eventually, and there was probably a reason they were in a bad mood. There was probably a connection to them being the only person here. Lake didn't know how long they had been working alone or how much they had to do, but it had probably stressed them out trying to meet the quota alone.

It would make more sense for them to be nice to him out of relief of not having to do it alone anymore, but sometimes people stayed mad even after whatever they were mad about was over, and it caused them to take it out on however was the closest. It could also be they were always rude, and it had nothing to do with anything other than their personality.

Walking over to the canisters Lake saw the first one was filled with what looked to be feathers. Lake wasn't sure what they were and he didn't waste his time inspecting it because he had a lot to do. There were 9 ingredients he had to do 40 times meaning he had to grind something into powder 360 times before he was done.

It did seem he didn't have to do it by hand though which was nice. There were auto grinders here so all he would need to do is supply his mana and the machine would slowly turn whatever you added into a fine powder. He would still only be able to do one at a time though, and he would have to either clean the grinder or move to a different one every time he started the next ingredient.

There were a lot of grinders in this room so Lake would just move around and clean them at the end once they were done for the day. Adding the feathers in Lake touched the grinder and started to feed it mana. He could tell it didn't take a lot to power the grinder and that he would be able to do this for hours before he needed to top up his mana.

If he added in his regeneration he might not need to at all. He wasn't actually sure how fast his mana regenerated at the moment because he hadn't been using it for anything. After a while Lake saw the feathers were now a fine powder so he extracted them and dumped them in the canister that said Wind Wyvern Feathers. Getting the next ingredient that looked like moss, but was apparently hair from a large monster, Lake started up a new grinder.

About halfway through he finally lost a point of mana meaning he would lose a mana for every one and a half ingredients he grinded. Lake was pretty sure that would mean it would take 240 mana to finish the job for the day. He had 90 mana naturally plus whatever he had in his ring for a total of 210 meaning even if he didn't regenerate mana at all he would almost be able to finish the job just on his banked mana.

That meant he could just stop worrying about how much mana he was using so that's what he did. Finishing the second powder lake grabbed the next ingredient which was scales that he assumed would be from a snake but when he looked at the name it turned out to be a fish called Water Eye Fish.

With the name Lake was surprised he wasn't grinding up dried fish eyes but he guessed the fish was named before anyone tried to use it for alchemy. It could also be that the eyes did similar things as the scales but at the volume they were using ingredients they had decided to use the scales because a fish had more scales than they did eyes typically.

...

After a while of working Lake had finished eight sets of ingredients meaning he needed to do 32 more and he would be done. He was starting to get really bored and thought it might be worth a shot to try and talk to the servant again. "Are there really not any bigger grinders?" He had been wondering for a while why the grinders only had enough room for one set of an ingredient.

"There are, but they work off of the guilds internal magic power system which is off to save power. It wouldn't matter even if they were on though we wouldn't be allowed to use them for poisonous materials anyway. You aren't allowed to prepare poisons anywhere someone might wander into by accident."

Lake guessed this made sense; it wouldn't be good if someone accidentally breathed in some of the powder that would be in the air while you ground down the ingredients. "So is this room only for poisons?"

"Yes, now stop asking me things, and get back to work." Lake guessed that explained why no one else was here. Maybe people like them who were able to be around poison with no risk were quite rare. Lake guessed the odds of getting the one skill that made you immune to poison out of the hundreds that were possible made it unlikely.

That was with the assumption that there was only one skill that made you immune to poison, but Lake didn't think there was a reason there would be more than one. Finishing the next set of ingredients, Lake started to think about what kind of poison would need so many non plant ingredients to pass the time.

After thinking about it he decided he should ask the servant if he knew what they were helping to make. "Is this all for the same poison?" This seemed like a good thing to confirm before he started to ask about the poison. Lake didn't receive an answer though which made him a little annoyed.

Lake knew how to get him to talk though. It had always been his go to when someone wanted to keep something from him. "Is this all for the same poison? Is this all for the same poison? Is this all for the same poison? Is this all for the same poison?" Lake just kept saying it over and over again till he saw them snap.

"Yes." With his first question out of the way Lake asked the next one. "What is the poison called?" It seemed the servant understood that he would just do the same thing if he didn't get an answer because they told him right away. "It's a poison Master Nancom has been working on for a while called Nine Element Acid."

Lake would have liked more information but he guessed this was all he had asked for. Now that Lake had interacted with the servant some more he was pretty sure they just didn't like other people around while they worked. The exact opposite of what he had assumed earlier when he had first gotten here.

This meant they had probably actually enjoyed working by themselves even if it meant they had to do all of it alone. It also meant he would never be able to have a conversation that was coerced out of them with his slightly embarrassing to do as an adult, ice breaker.