Hey, this is pretty good. The extra eight points of HP was a nice bonus, but that +3 to Endurance was also great for a backliner. It wasn’t super powerful or anything, but it was definitely useful. The only problem was it was just a little too cutesy for me to wear. It was a glittery, green flower corsage, after all. The flower looked like it was based on a peony. It was clearly meant for women.
“Tra-la-la.”
Eine was looking at me expectantly. Did she want me to equip it?
“Is there someone you want to wear this?”
“Tra-la!” Eine exclaimed as she pointed right at me. There was no getting out of it now.
“Of course you do.”
There was no denying it was a useful piece of equipment anyway, so why not? I’ll equip it!
“Wh-What do you think? Does it look good on me?”
“Tra-la-la!”
Well, if Eine was happy with it, that was reason enough to wear it for a little while.
“Okay, let’s get back on track. What should I do with the other miracle herb?” I pondered aloud. I could just let Eine make something with that too, but I wanted to make something new out of it.
“Right, I’ll pay a visit to Alyssa and see if she knows any recipes.”
However, after checking my friends list, I saw that Alyssa wasn’t online. Now what should I do? Wait for her? But even just a fifteen-minute break in the real world was an hour in the game. And if she had left to go run some kind of errand, then she wouldn’t be back online for a while.
“Hmm. I want to decide how to use this miracle herb by the end of the day, though...”
No, hang on. Even though I always bought information from Alyssa, I had no real reason not to buy from someone else. I had only been going through Alyssa to buy and sell information because I didn’t feel like negotiating with someone I didn’t know...
But I did know other people in the Quick-Eared Cats now, so why not go buy from them? Lewin specialized in information related to smithing, but there were other people who might be able to help me, like Maple, Carlo, and Highwood.
“The person most likely to know something would probably be...Maple?”
She was a Farmer, which meant the likelihood was high that she knew about miracle herbs. Plus she was online, so I decided to give her a call.
“Hellooo,” Maple answered. “It’s lovely to hear from you.”
“Is this a good time to talk?” I asked.
“Why yeees! How can I help you?”
“I wanted to purchase some information, but Alyssa is logged out right now.”
“Aaah, I see. Well, if you don’t mind going through me, I would be happy to do business with you.”
Woo-hoo! Score! I decided to meet up with Maple right away to buy information from her. Her farm was really close by—only a short, three-minute walk away from mine.
“Thanks for having me over,” I said as I entered.
“Mm-mmm.”
“Hello and welcome to my faaarm,” Maple greeted me.
Her farm was currently an unorganized mess of crops. I guessed she was in the middle of experimenting rather than planting crops for profit.
“Mm-mmm.”
“Mmm!”
“Mm?”
“Mm-mm!”
Olto started playing happily with another gnome on Maple’s farm. Recently, gnomes had been popping up on many people’s farms, thanks to more Farmers learning about the usefulness of gnomes and obtaining Taming skills to get them. Some farms even had multiple gnomes. Gnomes all had slight variations in hairstyles and facial features, so it was fun to walk around farm plots to look at them.
“My Remrem is playing with Olto...!” Maple exclaimed. “Wh-What a marvelous sight!”
“Um, Maple?”
“Ah! They’re holding hands! Oh, this is just wonderful!”
“Maaaple?”
“Aaah! My heart! They’re attached at the hip already! Th-They’ve become fast friends!”
Maple was drooling and muttering to herself as she watched Olto and Remrem play. She was acting like a ditzy, doting older sister, and I realized suddenly that she was a big gnome fan. And a bit of an extreme one at that. I also suspected she was probably a bit of a shipper.
“Mrrrghhh!”
“Maple!”
“O-Oh no, there’s the alarm! I need to calm down. Hee, hee, hoooo. Hee, hee, hooo.”
“Why are you doing the Lamaze technique?!”
“Aaahhh!” Maple cried, her expression dazed and unfocused.
“Hey, Maple! Earth to Maple! Snap out of it!” I shouted close to her ear.
I felt like I was committing borderline harassment, but since she wasn’t responding to my attempts to grab her attention normally, this felt like my only option. This didn’t seem like the time to be worried about common courtesy.
“Oh! Pardon me. It seems I had a small fit. Alyssa’s always scolding me for doing that.”
“A-A fit...? And you say you have these a lot?”
She got like that so often that she said Alyssa was “always” scolding her for it? This problem ran deeper than I imagined. The Quick-Eared Cats really were filled with some interesting characters.
I suddenly felt drained, but I couldn’t go back home just yet. I still hadn’t done what I came here for. I breathed out a sigh, then said, “So, I’d like to buy some information. Can I do that?”
“Yes, of cooourse. Goodness, I almost forgot. You wanted to ask about miracle herbs?”
“Yeah, I wanted to ask about recipes. And other ways they can be used.”
Since I had monsters who could perform a wide range of crafting actions, any recipe had the possibility of being useful. Maple gave me recipes for how to make a buff and debuff potion. Since they were original recipes made by players, that told me that the official in-game recipes for these hadn’t been figured out yet.
“The effects and quality of the items made with these recipes will be somewhat limited. They won’t result in items at the level of those made with a proper recipe,” Maple explained.
“So that’s why it’s called an Inferior Buff Potion?”
“Precisely.”
The proper recipe could probably be unlocked with some tweaking of this player-made recipe, but that would require a lot of miracle herbs.
“Anything else you’d like to know?” Maple asked.
“I’m interested in how the herbs could be used as intermediary ingredients. Not just for potions either. It seems like they can be used to make equipment too.”
Maple showed me data on a weapon. It was an iron sword made using an Endurance-Reduction Miracle Herb.
Ability-wise, it was like any other iron sword, but it was called an Iron Sword+ and dealt a slight Endurance debuff to its target.
“Interesting, this seems pretty useful,” I remarked.
“Yes, doesn’t it? We’re conducting our own research on it, so we should have more interesting information about it in the near future.”
Next, Maple showed me some pretty nifty-looking items: Miracle Herb Potpourri and a Pressed Flower Bookmark.
“Potpourri!” I exclaimed. “And it comes with an effect!”
Around the time I first started playing this game—which, since time passed four times faster in the game, was only two real-world weeks ago—I had tried to make potpourri and failed.
I even researched how to make it in the real world, but I still couldn’t make it work, so I had completely forgotten about it... But apparently, someone had figured it out.
“I see, I should be able to make it pretty easily now,” I said.
“Yeees, it’s simple as long as your Alchemy level is high enough. Aaand it’s even easier if you know Concoct and Cooking.”
The ingredients were dried flowers, essential oil, and clean cloth. Essential oil was what I hadn’t been able to obtain in the early stages of the game and what led me to giving up. But now that I had learned the Alchemy art Extract, I shouldn’t have much trouble making it.
If I made decorative potpourri, it wouldn’t have any special effects, but it would have a scent that would last forever. If I made potpourri to be used as an item, then it could function to grant special buffs to my party or deal debuffs to enemies. Incidentally, once the number of available uses for the item-type potpourri had depleted, it would turn into trash.