The temptation was real. He could feel it pulling.
But he held firm.
Five hundred star crystals. Nearly half of everything he currently owned, gone in a single transaction. He couldn’t afford to bleed out his resources like that — not when there were other things he still needed to account for. The math didn’t work, and Lukas had learned a long ti ago not to let want override need.
He exhaled slowly and turned back to the young man.
"Do you happen to sell star monster at?"
The young man blinked.
"Star monster... at?"
He repeated the words carefully, as if testing whether they ant what he thought they ant. The shift in topic had clearly caught him off guard. For a brief mont, his dull expression gave way to sothing almost resembling confusion.
But he recovered quickly enough and gave a single nod.
Lukas’s face broke into a rare, genuinely excited smile.
"Good. Pack twenty kilograms for ."
Silence.
The young man looked at him. Then looked at him again, more carefully this ti, the way soone does when they are quietly trying to determine if they have misheard or if the person in front of them has simply lost their mind.
Twenty kilograms.
He was familiar enough with the concept — so awakeners used star monster at as a crude shortcut for body refinent. It worked, in the way that hamring a nail with your fist technically worked. The thod was brutal, dangerous, and notorious for leaving complications that beca invisible walls during future breakthroughs. Most awakeners only resorted to it when they were desperate or had simply run out of better options.
The sheer amount being requested, though — twenty kilograms — that was a statent in itself.
Still, given the packed chaos of the hall and the list of transactions waiting behind this one, the young man swallowed his questions and simply quoted a price.
Compared to everything else that had soared through the roof in the past few days, the at was practically untouched by the inflation. Nobody was exactly hoarding it. Lukas walked away with twenty kilograms for fifty star crystals — an almost laughably small sum given the haul — and spent another ten on a magical stove and a set of basic cooking utensils, because he was not, under any circumstances, eating twenty kilograms of raw star monster at.
He settled the paynt and was already turning toward the exit when a thought crossed his mind, idle and unplanned, arriving the way most of his better decisions did — without announcent.
"One more question," he said, glancing back. "Do you happen to sell the recipe for the Moonflower Essence Star Energy Recovery Potion?"
He wasn’t entirely sure why he had even bothered asking. Recipes of that caliber were closely guarded property — the kind of thing guilds and sects locked away behind multiple layers of secrecy and wouldn’t part with under almost any circumstances. Getting your hands on one was harder than reaching the moon on foot.
But instead of laughing or dismissing the question, the young man simply pointed.
Lukas followed the direction with his eyes and found a modest whiteboard mounted on the far wall, easy to miss in the crowd. Written across it in plain, no-nonsense lettering:
Moonflower Essence Star Energy Recovery Potion
Considering the precarious situation of the settlent, the Green Heaven Guild is willing to purchase potions from any refiner capable of producing them using the public recipe below.
A look of quiet understanding crossed Lukas’s face.
Of course.
The recipe wasn’t charity. It was bait — cast wide in a ti of crisis, designed to pull every available potion maker in the settlent into an unofficial production line, funneling supply back to the guild at whatever price they were willing to pay. Clever. Calculated. And entirely within the guild’s interest.
But no matter the reason behind it, Lukas was not going to say no to a free recipe.
He stood before the board and read through it once, slowly and deliberately, committing every ingredient, every ratio, every step of the refinent process to mory with the focused attention of soone who did not intend to read it twice. Then he turned and walked out of the guild without another word, the young man already gone, swallowed back into the tide of custors.
He returned to Whitewood Inn perhaps half an hour after he had left it.
The door had barely swung open when a voice greeted him from inside — slightly surprised, carrying a note of open curiosity that the speaker hadn’t quite bothered to conceal.
"You’re back already? I thought you had sothing important to take care of."
Ambrose’s eyes moved over him as he stepped through the doorway, scanning with the asured attention of soone doing a quiet inventory.
After parting with that sum of star crystals, she had been fully prepared to settle in and wait — maybe hours, maybe until the following day. Half an hour had not been part of any reasonable expectation. And now he was standing in front of her carrying what appeared to be a steel wok and a pan.
She stared at the cookware.
Then sothing reached her nose.
The sll hit before she ccould identify it — thick and pungent, raw and faintly tallic, the unmistakable scent of freshly packed star monster at seeping through whatever wrapping it had been bundled in.
Ambrose’s expression shifted slowly, the way a sky shifts before rain.
at.
Her brow furrowed. Her lips pressed into a thin, faintly disgusted line as she sniffed the air again, hoping the first impression had been wrong.
It had not.
What in the world does he intend to do with at?
Lukas, for his part, offered absolutely no explanation. He moved past her as though she hadn’t spoken at all, set down the magical stove on a flat surface, and began laying out his utensils with the quiet, thodical focus of a man who had already moved on from the previous Chapter entirely and was now several pages into the next one.
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