Act 2:
Potions
HE WHO DOES NOT WORK, neither shall he eat.
Before I knew it, I was an official employee of the Research Institute of Medicinal Flora. At first it felt a bit presumptuous making my hobby into a job, but thinking back on it, I definitely made the right choice.
It seemed my recruitment had been a bit hush-hush, because on my first day, Johan, the head researcher, gathered everyone around to inform them that I had been hired.
At Johan’s urging, I greeted my new coworkers. “My name is Sei, and starting today, I’ll be working here with you all. I look forward to our collaboration.”
For some reason, everyone looked flabbergasted. Even though I was acquainted with most of the researchers already, the news seemed to hit them like a bolt from the blue. As a result, my greeting fell kind of flat. There was an audible pause before a wave of murmurs broke out through the room.
“I suppose, in the meantime, we’ll put…Jude in charge of you,” Johan said in a slightly raised voice that suppressed the whispers.
“Huh? Me?” Jude asked in surprise.
I was honestly relieved that the person I was most closely acquainted with would be the one in charge of my training. Back in Japan, there were plenty of times when I had to work with someone I didn’t know all that well, so if I had to, I was sure I’d be able to stick it out here, too—but it’s so much better to get to work with someone you already know, especially one you get along with well. I bet Johan took that into consideration when he assigned Jude to me.
“I’m looking forward to collaborating with you.” I gave my formal greeting to Jude again.
“Me too.” Jude might have been surprised, but his smile seemed genuine when he said that.
With that, he began walking me through the research institute’s business. As one might glean from its name, the institute’s main subject of research was medicinal flora, as well as potions. Also, as I noted, the benefits of the herbs were about the same as the ones found in my original world, so when I described what I knew from my time back in Japan, Jude was impressed.
“You sure know a lot already,” he said.
Apparently, the knowledge I had acquired pursuing my hobby was equivalent to the information imparted in upper-level courses at the Royal Academy, which was where the nobility attended school.
In general, noble children attended the academy from the age of thirteen until they turned fifteen, at which point they were considered adults. Upper-level courses were for those who continued to study until they were eighteen years old. While he was there, Jude had studied pharmaceuticals and medicinal flora. All in all, it seemed like the world I came from was far more advanced in its knowledge of the natural sciences and the like.
Speaking of Jude, his research area of expertise was, of all things, potions. Potions! That trademark item of RPGs.
Potions in this world could either be drunk or smeared on wounds. My impulse was to assume they were similar to the medicines from back home, but it turned out they were quite a bit different—they worked instantaneously.
Just how fast did they work? The second I got my first accidental cut in this world, I dabbed a drop of potion on it. Between one heartbeat and the next, my cut vanished. No matter that I had been warned, I was shocked.
Though, I think Jude was more shocked when I immediately grabbed a blade to cut my fingertip again. I just wanted to know more about the effectiveness of potions! It was only a little cut, too, but he panicked, and later he seemed actually mad.
The rest of my first day consisted of him showing me around the facilities and describing the work they did in each location. The next day, Jude finally showed me how to brew potions—not just because that was his field of research, but because I was champing at the bit to learn more about this strange substance that was so unlike anything in my world. I had made up my mind that I wanted to research potions with him.
“All right, let’s get started,” he said.
And just like that, Jude set about concocting a potion with practiced hands. He started by adding a careful selection of herbs to a pot, along with some water. Then he boiled it all together while continuously imbuing it with his magical power. At last, the potion was finished.
Potions were divided into grades—low, medium, and high—which were partially determined by ingredients. However, you couldn’t brew a high-grade potion just by following a specific recipe. To achieve such potency, subtle magical manipulations were required. In the end, the potential quality of a potion was determined by the maker’s Production skill level.
Additionally, the ingredients for high-grade potions cost a great deal on their own. Between the exorbitant cost and the fact that only a few people alive could actually produce them, high-grade potions were sold at a price that would make anyone think twice before using them. Not that most people had to worry about such things, seeing as only royalty and titled nobility could afford to buy them anyway. You definitely couldn’t find these potions for sale at a typical apothecary.
But let me return to one small detail involved in the process of making potions—one you might have wondered about when I seemed to skip over it, earlier. To make a potion, it was necessary to boil the ingredients while imbuing the whole with magical power. That’s right. Magical power.
Initially, I was shocked when Jude mentioned that part. I mean, potions were one thing, but there was absolutely no way there was any such thing as magic in my world.
“How do you ‘imbue’ something with magical power?” I asked Jude during his demonstration.
“Huh?” The question barely made sense to him.
This world was, in a word, magical, and magical power, MP for short, was required for using magic. Furthermore, there was a variety of magic known as Practical Magic that just about anyone could use. That meant magical power was a concept familiar even to the youngest children of this world.
First potions, now magic. Everything I learned made this new world sound more and more like it had been born of a fantastical video game, but no—this was my concrete reality.
“Wait, you’ve never used magic before?” Jude asked.
“Right.”
“Not even Practical Magic?”
“Nope.”
Even commoners could use Practical Magic, so Jude was utterly bewildered. However, since potions couldn’t be made without magic, Jude was going to have to give me a whole lecture on how to use it if I was ever going to follow in his footsteps.
“All right, it’s finished,” Jude said when he had wrapped up his demonstration.
“Wow!”
He filtered the boiled contents and then poured them into a slender vial. The completed potion was a delicate, translucent pink liquid. It was the simplest low-grade HP potion possible to make. Jude chose it for the demonstration partly because the key herbs grew right outside in the institute’s garden and were therefore easy to acquire.
“I can hardly believe it’s possible to make these,” I said.
“Low-quality HP potions are actually pretty easy to produce.”
“But you have to use magic for it to work, right?”
“Yeah, but like I said, it’s not that complicated.”
“Really? Well, I still think it’s amazing.”
“Y-you do?”
The more I thought about it, the more excited I was to see something that should exist only in fantasy, but I was making Jude bashful. The cheeks of his handsome face turned a slight pink to match the potion in my hand. They were a sight to behold as well.
After Jude’s demonstration, he segued into the promised lesson on magic.
The first step was to feel out the magic power within oneself. As someone who came from a thoroughly unmagical world, this was no mean feat.
Since Practical Magic, which was largely invoked with simple chants, was accessible to anyone in this world, people often simply weren’t conscious of their own magical power. However, a heightened awareness was required in order to concoct potions or call upon other types of magic.
At first, Jude walked me through various techniques for feeling the magic within myself, but no matter what he tried, I felt as magical as a doorknob. That was when he assisted me with the method used at the Royal Academy, which required me to place my hands in his.
“Okay, here we go.” Jude held up his palms towards me.
I did as he instructed and placed my palms on top of his. His hands were bigger than mine and roughened from his work with earth, loam, and the like. They were, without question, a man’s hands. Wherever we touched—the pads of his fingers, the flat of his palm—his temperature was just the slightest bit higher than mine. It made me self-conscious, since this kind of intimacy was a bit out of the ordinary.
Stop, stop. Don’t lose your cool over this. This is for work. For work!
As I was struggling to keep my feelings in check, Jude interrupted my thoughts. “Okay, here we go.”
And there—that was when I finally felt something. A gentle heat, or force, or something like that, steadily transferring into my right palm as Jude channeled his magic into it. Even harder to describe was the feeling that, after he started channeling, something moved inside of me, almost like it was being washed away. That was my magical power.
The magic Jude fed into my right hand didn’t emerge from my left—instead, it circulated throughout my body like blood.
I supposed that, the second I was summoned here, I stopped being an earthling. The magic I could now feel flowing through me definitely didn’t qualify as earthling stuff.
“It feels like there’s something moving through me, like a pulse,” I said.
“Really? You can feel it already? That’s your magical power.” Jude seemed a bit startled, but he smiled all the same.
Apparently, even using the Royal Academy’s method, it took most people about a week to be able to grasp the feel of their magic. Yet here I was, somehow able to sense mine the second he channeled the tiniest smidgen of magic into me.
“You’ve got talent,” Jude chuckled.
Even after Jude broke the channel, I was able to feel that flow of magic within me. That meant we could move right on to actual magic manipulation, which ended up going so smoothly that Jude was startled all over again.
“Wow. I didn’t think I’d be done with the lecture so quickly.”
“I’m sure it’s because you’ve been such a patient teacher. Thank you very much,” I smiled.
His cheeks flushed as he got all bashful again. But it was the truth—everything Jude said about magic just clicked for me.
While in that good mood, he moved on to start teaching me Practical Magic as well, saying that it just didn’t make sense for me not to have it at my beck and call.