Suchi. The Cure For The Friends Gala. Afternoon.

A figure wearing sunglasses and a breathing mask was tying up his mount at a stable on the outskirts of the gala grounds. In comparison to the surrounding horses, his mount, its shoulders failing to reach their stomachs, seemed kind of shabby.

“I’m going to be stolen.”

“No one’s going to steal you; you look like trash.”

Donkey Bro glared at Henry. “I hope my abductor is a slavedriver. I hope they lock me in chains and make me plough the fields until my joints have been ground to dust. My misery will rest on your conscience.”

So, yeah, during the year in The Redeemer’s Jungle, the donkey’s intelligence had steadily grown until it could communicate. In turn, Henry’d learned to ignore it because most of what came from its mouth was irritatingly melodramatic.

“Anyway, you want anything in particular from the market when I get back?”

Like a rebellious teen arguing with their dad, Donkey Bro flicked its head aside, refusing to answer. Under its breath, though, it whispered, "a bit of everything."

Leaving the stables, Henry entered the gala’s market to seek out his friends. Apparently, they were on meal pick-up duty for their Duchy’s research team.

Since he didn’t feel a great sense of urgency, he bought a rabbit shish kebab made from meat recycled from the tutorial area and strolled through the stalls, watching the Villagers haggling with NPCs and flaunting new clothes to their friends.

These galas were a fantastic way for The Empire to pilfer money from the populace. They restricted the number of stall spaces and rented them out by the hour through an open bidding process. Vendors, wanting to use the hype for business exposure, would cough up more than they would earn during the event.

If one ignored the inner workings, though, the event did have a certain appeal.

He imagined this was what it was like attending one of those Indian religious gatherings with millions of worshippers. Crammed in the narrow streets, jostled about by bodies, assailed by heat, dust, sweat, music, and the knowledge you might get shanked at any moment...there was something transcendental in this.

Finding his school friends wasn't hard. The group they were a part of was being led by a 7-foot Crusader in a full-set of gilded plate armour minus the helmet. His friends were using their real-life appearances for their avatars. Their attire was an eclectic mix of dungeon gear, except for the fashion-conscious Anderson, who’d colour-coordinated with the purple-gold flag of the Byzantine empire that served as their Village’s logo.

Henry removed the fake armband he’d been wearing to avoid harassment and slipped in step with them.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” replied Abigail. “What’ve you been up to today?”

He shrugged. “The usual: teleporting between deserts and snowscapes, taming wild beasts, slaying Gods, unlocking the secrets of immortality.”

"Nice."

“H.," crooned an auto-tuned voice, a feature of the Accompanist class, "what is the theme of this ghastly outfit?”

“The theme is evading my countless enemies.”

“And why are you speaking so deep?”

“A warlock's curse! Where’s Brian?”

“He’s hanging out with a DJ,” answered Abigail. “They’re hang gliding.”

She meant in real-life. While Henry’d been preparing for the tournament, they’d been at a multi-day beachside moosestep-jazz fusion festival. Right now, they were playing from an internet cafe near their camping ground. They wouldn’t return to the city until tonight.

He suddenly found his arms being gripped tight and his eyes blinded by a halo of light from the top of a Miracleworker’s head.

“Where's this warlock? What did you do to invoke his wrath? Oh no..."

A short, chubby chick was ranting at him.

“Relax, Cathy. I was joking. The truth is that I'm super famous; I can’t have my fans swarming me everywhere I go.”

“Oh, is that so? That would be inconvenient.”

Cathy, being a turbonoob, accepted the explanation without a second thought. His other friends assumed he was talking nonsense.

The next second, with the sound of clattering metal, as though a toaster had come to life, a golden gauntlet was thrust at him by a tall, blonde guy who looked like he belonged in a Marvel movie.

“Sir Henry, your reputation precedes you.”

Henry shook the offered hand, the gauntlet scalding hot from being baked by the sun. This guy must have been cooking inside the suit.

“Not as much as yours, Sir Justinian."

Sir Justinian ‘The Great’...Henry recognised him from his notes.

Despite his avatar, he was speaking a weird mix of Indonesian and archaic English, which was being translated by the system.

A roleplayer.

Him being Indonesian was somewhat unusual given that The Empire’s administrational divisions were based on real-life locations, but there were many reasons to choose a foreign Village. In fact, Byzantium wasn't in his friends' time zone either. Being part of the 'County of Western and Central Australia', it'd been picked by them because they played late at night.

In this Justinian guy’s case, Henry guessed he’d chosen the Village purely because of its name. Justinian the Great, Emperor of the Byzantines.

A hardcore roleplayer.

Disgusting.

“This is the trainer I was telling you about,” said Cathy, “the greatest duelling teacher in all of Suchi!”

“Please, Lady Cathy. A young maiden should never speak falsities. I’m the fifteenth greatest.”

Henry suspected this was accurate. The guy had spent six months stuck at tier-0 redoing his recruitment tournament. This experience should have made him the world's premier expert in beating up noobs.

At least, it would until a certain someone began training in his brand-spanking new hyperbolic time chamber.

HahahahahahaHAHAHAHA!

With Justinian leading the way, their group went around the market stuffing food into their Spatial Bracelets, some vendors charging them nothing in return for the crazy Crusader's past heroic deeds.

In the meantime, Henry listened to his friends chattering on. Their talk fluctuated between their last dungeon run and an arts and crafts competition scheduled for tomorrow. There was always something going on in the slums.

“Right,” said Cathy, “have you picked your class yet? Do you need any—“

“Earthfriend. Hence, I’m praying for this curse to be lifted soon.”

“As are we, Sir Henry! We pray that the light of God may scorch away the goodfolk of The Society's affliction!”

“What role?” asked a Beast Tamer with a monkey sitting on his shoulders, another member of the Village’s 6v6 arena team.

Earthfriends were a hybrid class that could alternate between combat roles, from tanks, melee damage, crowd control, spell damage, to healing. In general, they were a jack-of-all-trades master of none class, although higher-level Earthfriends tended to specialise in one role by choosing a ‘Path’.

Initially, if Henry’s plan to act like an idiot to avoid selection had failed, he would have focused on a melee role, since that was his weakest area. After acquiring The Cap, though, he wouldn't waste his mental energy min-maxing his hours to this extreme.

“Whatever,” he replied. “I can fill.”

A Bowman leaned in. “Even support?”

“Sure. Whatever.”

Backline play suited him fine. During the quiet moments, he could whip out a novel and read a passage or two.

The Beast Tamer and the Bowman shared an enthusiastic high-five, as though he’d relieved them of a substantial burden.

He nudged Abigail, who seemed to be the least noob of his school friends. “What’s that about?”

“You’ll find out tonight.”

Her smile was concerning.

When their group arrived at the competition grounds and made their way to their Duchy’s station, Henry studied the work of the competitors.

To discover the cure faster, he’d made the competition an open format, where teams could spy on each other freely. Prizes were awarded based on achieving certain milestones rather than producing the final cure alone.

Presently, the teams were testing dozens of different methods for refining the ingredients, from adding catalysts to dissolving in acids.

Them still doing this was unusual; once the missing ingredients had been identified, the processing methods should have been solved shortly thereafter. The combined output of the teams here was about 5000 new batches per hour, while there were only around 7660 possible processing combinations, the bulk of which would be eliminated by an understanding of Alchemical theory.

From what he could see now, the delay wasn’t being caused by incompetence. The local Alchemists were more skilled than he’d accounted for, so they should have finished earlier than his initial prediction.

At their Duchy’s station, a team of 30 were at the workbenches, while several hundred others, the majority of whom weren’t Alchemists, just here for fun, were lounging around gossiping.

When Henry's group summoned lunch, everyone abandoned what they were doing, the on-going potions left to boil over and burn.

Most of them had given up long ago.

The players sat in a circle.

Following the dining custom of the Ibanmothe, the slum-dwelling class, Cooks placed the food in communal bowls, which they enchanted to make float and travel around like on a conveyor belt. Diners would pick out their favourites with their hands. If it were an informal occasional like now and they couldn’t wait, their choices would be thrown to them.

While they were making a mess, Henry went over to inspect the workstation for further clues.

“Go eat,” he said to Cathy, who got up to tail him. “I'm just curious about this competition business.”

“I’ll keep you company.”

“It’s fourteen metres away.”

“Teach me some Alchemy. I’m a healer; it might help me improve.”

She’d been babying him ever since his mother past. Every week, another bottle of useless nutritional supplements arrived in his delivery shoot along with a hand-written note about taking care of himself. At this point, he’d received so many that eating even an eighth of them would ruin his liver.

In the past, this treatment had annoyed him. Now, though, after so long away, it seemed cute.

“Suit yourself.”

He went to a display rack containing vials from previous attempts. Most of them were duds, but a couple were remarkably close to the ideal description written in the recipe.

“Should I grab someone else to help?”

“Nah, although it's a Secondary class for me, honestly, few here will be more experienced."

He'd literally written the book on this curse. Also, most of these people were noobs.

He unracked a promising-looking vial.

“What are you doing?”

“All potions have a set of quick tests unique to them for determining their efficacy without application.”

He pressed the vial against his hand and raised it to the sunlight.

“My palm lines are visible. That’s nearing this potion’s ideal opacity, indicating that it isn’t riddled with impurities that would interfere with its functioning.”

Next, he shook the vial vigorously, then gave it to her to hold.

“It’s hot.”

“A positive sign. It means something's going on in there.”

“The purple colour’s pretty.”

“The hue is slightly off. It should be redder, more magenta than fuchsia, though this might be due to ingredient substitutes. If you stare closely at the silver particles—”

“Ooh, they’re sparkling.”

“They’ve also turned whiter, which is a strong indicator that the potion should work. Short of applying it, there’s one final, sure-fire test we can do. Put that one back, first.”

After she reracked it, they went over to a crate containing potions for in-depth testing. The vial corresponding to the batch of the one he’d played around with was two-thirds empty. He handed this and three others that seemed successful to Cathy to hold, before going over to an ingredient crate and fishing out a palm-sized cloth pouch.

Together, they carried all these materials to a workbench with a contraption the size of a mini-fridge.

“What’s this thingamajig?”

“Functionally, it's a microscope. Technically-speaking, Saana places restrictions on technological advancement that prevent glass optics being refined to this level. Any modernish gizmo you encounter has been magically engineered by Arcaneworkers."

He fiddled with some knobs to power the device on. Using tweezers, he then pulled an object from out of the cloth pouch and set it on the microscope’s specimen stage.

“Ewww.”

A 3-D projection of a moth had appeared with camouflaging to make it resemble a cactus.

“By playing with these controls, we can move the viewing point, zoom out, zoom in. For this quality of device, the maximum magnification is about 22. Look, the ‘powder’ on its wings is actually tiny, delicate scales. That’s true of real-life moths, too.”

Not bothering to use a dropper, he poured the liquid from a potion into the glass dish until the moth was fully submerged.

At once, the silver particles in the solution could be seen clashing against the scales, destroying them.

“What are the silver things doing?”

“They’re called Corrosites. Think of them like white blood cells. They bind to ‘protein markers’ in the moth’s cells, before gathering other ‘proteins’ floating in the solution to corrode them. The markers aren’t present in human cells, which prevents the Corrosites eating away at the rest of the patient's body. The real process is way more complicated. We could watch it play out if we had a higher quality microscope with better magnification and slow-mo functionality.”

“Test mine.”

This request didn't come from Cathy.

An Alchemist with a massive head was peeking over their shoulders. He must've been passing by when he overheard their conversation. Like Henry prior to this morning, the Alchemist didn’t have a Martial class - an extreme rarity.

“Hello, uNmistAk3n!” said Cathy. “Henry, this is uNmistAk3n, the greatest Alchemist in all of Suchi!”

“Hi. Can you test mine?”

“Sure.”

Henry mistakenly assumed that Cathy was exaggerating again. After taking the Alchemist’s potion, he gave it a quick eyeball test.

“Very nice. The Corrositic density is nearing the limit of what can be preserved through the Enkathisation. I guess some of you slum people aren’t totally inept.”

When he soaked another moth specimen in this solution, the rate of destruction was about 130% quicker. This would translate to the potion curing a patient faster.

The Alchemist pointed to a spot in the projection. “Those segments are being left intact.”

“The Green-Lined Star Moth used in the recipe, whose Antigenoarcosignature the Corrosites are calibrated to target, is a related but different species from what you see here, a Green-Fleshed Noctophytum Wax. Both species are part of the same genus as the extinct Enuchibe Peyote employed in the formulation of the curse. With the genetic differences between the species, the Corrosites are slightly inefficient."

The Alchemist frowned. "Hyperinfusination? Microspears?"

Henry shook his head. "Unnecessary. In vivo, the number of Invadinytes denatured is sufficient to allow the patient's Immunafflictological system to deal with the survivors. In this respect, there’s no reason the cure should be failing; even the inferior sample tested before yours was adequate. Really, there's a hard limit to the complexity of a Tier 3-2 potion."

He was stumped. This should be fine.

“It’s 4-1,” corrected the Alchemist.

“How? None of the ingredients are at that level.”

“Sorrowblood, Tongue of Romelia, Tarpit Ironsage.”

“Those are just Extenders.”

“What’s an Extender?” asked Cathy.

“They extend the coverage of a potion, allowing it to affect higher-level patients. The ones he mentioned upgrade it to Tier 3-3, 4-1, 3-4 respectively.”

The Alchemist, hearing this news, closed his eyes and became motionless.

“Oh, no, you broke him!”

“He’s reviewing notes.”

Henry thought it strange, though. If a guy capable of concocting something so pure believed the Extenders were central ingredients, then everyone here must be under the same misunderstanding. This would explain the potion's discolouration, the recipe including higher level materials.

The big question was why this misunderstanding existed.

The answer came when the Alchemist sprang back into life and summoned a book from his inventory.

Henry laughed. "Those greedy little shits.”

“Language!”

“Sorry.”

It was the book he’d written, An Incomplete Treatment for the Dread Curse of Sikarmilki, except the Slum Empire had scrubbed his pseudonym from the cover and replaced it with the name of their Head Scholar. The sneaky dirtbags were stealing his credit.

Furthermore, when this big-headed alchemist opened to the recipe page, the cure was clearly described as a Tier 4-1 potion.

Henry took the book and quickly flipped through the pages from start to finish, creating a copy in his Mental Library. He then ordered the system to do a cross-comparison to mark the points of alteration.

The results indicated that the recipe had been doctored to create the illusion it was much more challenging to brew. With three extra ingredients, the number of processing combinations jumped by several orders of magnitude. Additionally, the microscope test and Corrosite theory had been omitted, forcing the Alchemists to rely on brute force trial and error.

Extra alterations had been made, but Henry didn’t want to strain his brain too hard over this low-level political plotting.

The Empire’s motives were already apparent.

One aim would be to prolong the competition to extract more money from the market. Henry'd placed a time limit on The Empire for producing the cure, after which they wouldn’t receive the final payment - more than what they would earn through rent. However, he’d been overly-generous in setting this limit.

The other goal might be assassinating the Earthfriends, just as they’d tried to kill the NPC trainers.

On further thought, it was both of those.

Greedy little shits.

Regardless, with a functioning potion in hand, he could now cure the Earthfriend trainer he’d hired to power level him. He might also distribute the correct recipe and notes to The Earthfriend Society to spite The Empire for delaying him.

“Hurry, uNmistAk3n,” said Cathy. “Someone’s going to test theirs before you.”

Henry watched another Alchemist approach the area housing the sick Earthfriends. After they handed their potion to an assistant, its contents were rubbed pointlessly onto a patient's back.

And that was how they prevented anyone discovering that they were stalling. The potion’s effects were too subtle to penetrate skin; it needed to be spread through the blood.

He messaged Cathy, asking whether anyone had tried administering it intravenously or through any orifices.

She pointed at the Alchemist next to them. “He had them try a...”, she indicated her mouth, “application, but it failed.”

The Alchemist gaped at Henry, misconcluding him to be an Alchemy god for figuring that out in an instant, along with the Corrosite theory.

In reality, though, Henry would not have been able to do this using the doctored information alone. This big-headed Alchemist could draw the same insight only because he’d immersed himself so deep in the subject as to feel the common threads uniting the details, even with some of the details missing.

That was an indication of a true genius. Cathy hadn’t been exaggerating.

Henry scratched the chin of his breathing mask. “Which assistant administered it for you?”

“Duke Edwardo.”

Henry laughed again.

Edwardo was one of Ramiro’s closest henchmen. An original slum gang leader, he now controlled the Duchy representing the Brazilian states of Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo. Crucially, he was a Tier 4-4 Cutthroat.

“What’s so funny?” asked the Alchemist. “What does it matter who the assistant is?”

It mattered because at Tier-2 Cutthroats received an ability, , which allowed them to instantaneously swap items in and out of their inventory without a visual effect. Edwardo’d changed the working potion with a dud, pulling the ol’ switcheroo on this big-head.

Unfortunately, the Alchemist, not having a Martial class, lacked the general experience to guess this, while no one else here would have the specialist Alchemy knowledge to infer that the application method was incorrect.

As clever as that trick might sound, it was rife with flaws. What if another brilliant Alchemist was travelling through who specialised in poisons and would, therefore, be familiar with the Cutthroat ability? What if this Alchemy genius was in a belligerent mood today and pressed the issue further? What if 'Dr Iskander' chose to screw them over for fun?

Ramiro must've grown cocky after unifying the slums.

Henry supposed this is what happens when you spend too long in the sand pit. Styling on toddlers makes you think you're invincible.

“I was wondering if their level was sufficient to administer it," he lied. "Hearing that it was the noble Duke himself made me chuckle at my foolishness.”

The Alchemist was disappointed by the reply, feeling the cure he'd been working on so tirelessly fly away from him at the last moment.

Cathy patted his shoulder. “There, there, uNmistAk3n, I’m sure your next batch will be the one.”

Well, then, since Henry'd obtained what he’d come for, it was time to make a smooth exit.

“Alchemy guy, do you mind if I keep this vial?”

The Alchemist nodded dejectedly.

“Cathy, I’ve got to leave. I’ll catch you guys at training this evening.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

He pinched his temple. “I didn't want to say, but..." he sighed, "as an introvert, this noise, the people, I'm finding them overwhelming. The longer I’m here, the more drained I feel, the more I feel myself slipping into another episode of de...” He trailed off as if the word was too difficult for him to utter.

“Depression,” mouthed Cathy, finishing his sentence. “You go on, Henry. Don’t worry about us. Recoup your energy. Here, wait, I bought you something.”

Out of her Spatial Bracelet came a pouch of pick-me-up pills that she'd acquired from the market.

Receiving them with gratitude, Henry left.

As he was walking away, he glanced back, making a mental note of the fact the Alchemist returned to a workbench rather than giving up or notifying The Empire - a possible chess piece.