As we continue our north by northwest route, I eventually decide to ask why we are heading north when the goblinoid tribes are primarily located to the south. The answer Regina provides is rather simple: Because we don’t care about all goblinoids or even all Orcs. Our commission is to investigate the cause for the increased Orcish activity in the area, and therefore we are heading where the highest concentration of increased Orc activity, as measured by the number of unique reports, have originated from. Break Mountains, here we come!

Joaqim and Bucky drive my carriage, while I remain inside of the carriage crafting away, and Regina ranges ahead, scouting and foraging for us. I do not have the heart to tell Regina how much of her herb gathering efforts are being wasted, but I feel like I must. Courtesy of the class ability I know how to “brew potions”. I would like to clarify that the actual knowledge of brewing itself WAS intrinsic to the skill, but I still had no idea how to brew potions, because I had no understanding of the proper preparatory methods. The knowledge gained basically ended up being innate starting the moment I gained the skill, with details becoming clear with each piece of appropriate equipment in front of me, but that knowledge does not extend to ingredients. For the most part other skills haven't given me so much trouble because I already knew the basics of where to start, but that's just not the case with potion brewing.

Think of it like this: Can you assemble a computer? I can, it's actually pretty easy. Grab a power supply and motherboard, attach the CPU, and so on. It's basically just a glorified lego assembly. So you see, putting together a computer is pretty easy, and most people could do it if they had the parts and access to the "how" of it via some video instructions or something similar. But what if you have to build that computer completely from scratch? Even if you had access to the assembly instructions, if you didn't have a CPU, but had to MAKE the CPU? Being able to build a computer becomes an entirely different animal at that point.

Without understanding the properties and preparation methods appropriate for the herbs I’m trying to use as the base ingredients, when spoofing heal wounds to finalize the potion the effects are ranging from completely ineffective to downright harmful, causing bloating, irritable bowls, and so on. One major positive from my excursions into potion brewing is that I have become deeply appreciative of my “Architectural Comprehension” skill, which allows me to determine the lack of effectiveness of most of my potion attempts without having to experience them firsthand.

When I eventually break the news to Regina that my efforts to brew healing potions are failing because my knowledge of the plants she's providing are inadequate, she appears frustrated at first, but she soon decides it’s better to just go over the characteristics of the plants she collects rather than to continue having both her and my efforts wasted. It is an immediate success, and as soon as she finishes giving me a crash course I am finally able to start making potions of healing. I craft them exclusively on the road since there are no major restrictions on doing so. Once I finally get the ball rolling on production, I am able to bring the potion making to the point of finalization at a rate of about 1 potion every other day, though spoofing failures sometimes push me back a day or two.

Although potion brewing is a priority for me and I try to make sure that a potion is continuously being made while we are traveling, there is a lot of time to spare between steps, water only evaporates so quickly, after all. So, I am regularly making detours into other tasks and projects, such as having created a mould for paper which I then incorporate into constant use as well, to develop and maintain a continuous a supply of paper. Additionally, while healing potions are my primary output while actively traveling, while in camp I focus on making the full plate armors, starting with a set for Joaqim since he can heal Bucky, but Bucky wouldn't be able to heal Joaqim if he were the first to fall.

I continue to use my magical tool imbuement when working on the armor, and more than that I discovered that the magical tool imbuement actually works on my operate magical device skill, so I start pre-casting Magical Tool for Operate Magical Devices on my armor prior to finalizing potions, which greatly improves my success rate. It’s hard to say exactly, but I think I am probably succeeding nearly half of the time when magical tool is active. Maybe it's not exactly 50% of the time, but I'm pretty close to that. In the future, when I have the duration to support this becoming my standard modus operandi, I think that this may end up pairing well with Spell Releases.

Working on Joaqims armor, my focus is on quality. I am planning to make this the absolute best quality of nonmagical armor that can be produced. But this, even the attempt is… Very time consuming. I knew it would be months at the least and possibly over a year, but… It's much worse than that, and it’s discouraging to realize how much time this is going to take. This is not a matter of a week’s effort, nor a month, not even a year. Not for this many pieces, and not at the level of quality I'm aiming for, and definitely not when I can only invest a few hours a day towards making it. Realistically, at my current skill level and with the time I can invest, I think this might end up taking close to 5 years before I have finished this one set of armor.

I’m finally beginning to see the importance of the Expeditious Architect talent. Not that Expeditious Architect would help me here since it only applies when crafting magical items, but it does drive the point home that painting the Sistine chapel took 4 years for good reason, and it effectively reinforces the realization that even with my monstrous crafting carriage, there are things it's simply not practical for me to attempt even if I do have the appropriate system recognized skills.

Money isn’t my only limitation, not anymore. I only have 2 hands and 1 brain and 24 hours in a day to work with. Granted, eventually I’ll be able to use magic to turn the raw materials into a finished product instantly, but that’s a mid-level spell, so spoofing it with spell release is a long way away, and even once I get that strong it would only work to address crafting speeds for nonmagical goods, but would be completely unable to speed up the enchanting process after having created the base nonmagical item. Aside from Expeditious Architect, I’m not sure if there’s anything else that can help with magical item crafting times. There has to be something, right? Well, I guess I'll cross that bridge after I've figured out a more immediate and attainable method of improving crafting speeds for nonmagical items.

It takes us 2 weeks of travel to get to the foot of the Break mountains and find some tracks for a group of Orcs. Up to now I’ve crafted a total of 4 healing potions, and have distributed one to each member of the group including myself. I would have accomplished a bit more but between wasted opportunities for the first couple days of travel and days where I failed the spell releases for finalizing the potion, that was all I was able to accomplish before we caught the trail.

I must admit that, while I do get better at crafting as I level up, and consequently my crafting speed will slowly increase, and the way to level up really is to go out and kill monsters… Looking at the sheer amount of time it takes to craft anything I am starting to lose faith in my class again. It’s not like Joaqim's quicksilver full plate armor would be the only one of its type in the world. It would be good, definitely, and rare, but it’s not even magical armor. Magical armor is the norm, not the exception, for mid-level adventurers. Granted even among magical armors quicksilver is rare, but even many low-level adventurers have magical armor.

In the meantime, I haven’t been able to upgrade so much as 1 piece of Regina's equipment, and she doesn’t have any magical armor or weapons or anything else sufficiently noteworthy for me to feel like that should be a challenge. By her level, whether it is 3rd or 4th or whatever, a well-equipped adventurer should have at the least their primary weapon enchanted, even if it's a weak enchantment, and probably her armor should be by now as well. I haven’t even created a superior bow for her yet, much less a magical one. I have neither the time, nor all required skills, nor the resources to keep my group appropriately equipped for their level.

Hence, the doubt. Is it truly sane for me to continue down this path, knowing that even with cheaper production prices and, eventually, some faster crafting speeds, equipping those immediately around me is going to remain a challenge? Did I end up, by attempting to avoid becoming a baker, seeking out and becoming the very class I was warned against? Is my role in this life to always be the guy everyone else has to carry, and who cannot contribute back in a meaningful way? Will my utility and value add always be as easily replaced as a visit to the market? I do not know. But trying to make this suit of armor, I am worried. Picking up the task of making a couple pieces of quality non magical equipment has really shaken my confidence in my ability to do something unique and special.

I console myself with the knowledge that a proper smithy would have a large team of people dedicated to a piece of armor like this… But knowing that a group of bakers can bake more goods than a single baker with a nifty gimmick is cold comfort.

I'm not giving up, just… It's sobering. This is a magical world, there's actual magic here. That's not all, it's like a LITRPG, there's a system here. If that's not enough, I'm living through an isekai, I'm reincarnated with many of my old memories intact. I mean, all the elements to be a super hero are all present, right? With all this going on I shouldn't even be *a* super hero, I should be absolutely unstoppable, right? So why the hell is so much of what I'm doing boring and tedious?

Honestly I can forgive being bored, but why the hell am I struggling to be able to provide any advantages to the people around me? If I could at least fight properly, I wouldn't feel so damned useless. If I could… No, stop it Elliot. You made the decisions you made because you know full well that hitting people with a stick isn't going to cut it. You would feel more useful if you were able to use your full ability, but the old you didn't have magic of any kind, and you'd never be able to accomplish any of your long term objectives if you just stuck to what you already knew. I probably won't be able to accomplish the bigger things anyhow, but doing it this way, making magic of all kinds accessible and manipulable, that's the only way you've found where there is any chance at all. So cut the crap and get back to work.

Once we find the trail of the orcs, we follow it. The trail itself is old, Regina’s best guess is that a group of wolf riders passed by here close to 2 weeks ago. That probably does not mean that we will take 2 weeks to find them, it might be more or it might be less, depending on what their purpose was when they were passing by. Were they just starting out on a patrol? Returning from one? A raid? Fleeing a terrible monster? We do not know any of that. But now that we have a trail, we should be able to find them. If the trail were a bit fresher, we would want to follow where they were coming from, but since time is continuing to pass while we follow the trail, and if we follow it back to its source we will end up following an ever older trail on top of that, Regina believes we should follow their path so that at least the trail itself isn’t getting older in the process. Since she is the expert, we all agree with her decision.

Another week of travel, another 3 potions completed. Now everyone but me is carrying 2 healing potions. Regina's herb foraging diminishes notably courtesy of her priority being to follow the trail of the Orcs, but she accumulated a fair amount of materials coming back from the abandoned monastery, and even more while trying to find the orc trail in the first place, so we still have ample stock for me to continue crafting potions while she is distracted. It seems that her judgement was correct, because as we are following the trail, Bucky and Joaqim spot her riding back towards us, frantically waving in a pushing motion. I am inside the cart and must instead rely on what I am hearing of the conversation between the two of them. I am no rocket scientist, not in this world at least, but I think she might mean that we should be running away.