by Sarah Lin
Normally Melissa wasn't the sort to get excited about local events, much less a farmers' market, but she had to admit that it was a little interesting. There were stalls and tables all around her, filled with a rainbow of items. Roots and bulbs and crushed powders in all kinds of baskets and plastic containers. In addition to some normally dressed people, and others who looked very stylish, there were those dressed in crazy clothing and many who looked like they'd spent a lot of time with recreational drugs.
Though she was training with her brother a lot recently, for the past few days he'd been intensely focused on his own work, not even consulting with Emily. That was great for him, but it was honestly a bit boring for her. She was glad that she hadn't quit at the House of the Cosmic Fist yet, just because it gave her something else to do.
So when Lisa had called to ask if she wanted to go, Melissa had been happy to say yes. It was a complete change of pace from her usual, plus it might actually be useful. Having extra spending money felt weird, but since their expenses were easily covered, her money from working at the gym was stacking up.
"Here we go," Lisa said, gesturing for her to turn to the side. "This is one of the good places, if you ever come back on your own."
"Oh? What are these?" Melissa looked over the table in front of them, which seemed to contain... a bunch of leaves. She could see that there were a few different types, but they really just looked like different flat green things to her.
"These are one of the major components of serum. You can eat them raw and get a similar effect."
"Really?" Melissa immediately stuck one of the leaves in her mouth and chewed curiously. It tasted heavy and a bit leafy... so kind of how it looked. Definitely not the great buzz she got from drinking serum. "Is it better to eat them this way?"
"No, serum has the same active ingredient concentrated a thousand times more. But you can get some extra in your diet this way, some people just enjoy them as salad, and there are arguments about the body being able to absorb them better in this form."
Lisa smiled at the woman who ran the stall, who seemed to know her, and purchased a bundle of the serum leaves. She tucked them into her canvas bag and they headed onward. Once they were a short distance away, Lisa bent closer to speak in a lower voice.
"I wasn't going to say it in front of her, but the commercially grown ones are higher quality, and cheaper."
"What, you can buy them at the grocery store?"
"If you know the right stores, yes." Lisa made an odd face. "But don't buy any food at a grocery that sells lucrim products, because you can guarantee it'll be really overpriced. Anyway, I was just saying that the commercial stuff might be better and cheaper, but it's nice to support local growers. They also grow some local specifics that can actually be better, they're just getting squeezed out of the market."
"Kind of funny that serum comes from ordinary leaves like this." Melissa finished getting the last of the pieces out of her mouth and ran her tongue against her teeth. "I thought they'd be magical, floating, glowing flowers or something."
"Haha, lots of people expect that. But think about it: how much energy would a flower need to expend to constantly float and glow? That's a lot of energy that it can't use to grow bigger, or more importantly more potent. Some look showy because they want to be found - some flowers use dragons as pollinators, for example. But many of the best ingredients look ordinary because they put all of their strength into raw power. They grow by getting eaten and having their seeds spread around a wide area."
"Wait a minute, are you telling me that I'm going to be pooping out serum?" After Melissa said it she worried that it was too crass, and Lisa stared at her for a moment, but then the other woman gave her a wide grin.
"That's an indelicate way to put it. Better to say that you're taking part in the serum life cycle."
"Heehee! Best euphemism ever."
They wandered through the market a little more, Lisa examining strange-shaped roots and plants. These she examined a lot more critically, occasionally asking the owners careful questions. Presumably they were for use in her mixture business, so Melissa let her focus on her work and just looked around. She'd never want to spend a long time in a place like this, but it was a fun day out.
"So," Lisa said as they started walking again, "have you made progress on that technique you mentioned?"
"Oh, it's going great! It started out a bit slow, but I used the pill I got in the CLAT and it helped round out the Lucore. Now things are moving along, but..." She actually didn't want to talk about it, so just hid that fact with a sly look. "I want to keep it a secret until it's ready, you know?"
"Sure, I get that. Just let me know if you ever want any of the kind of help I can offer. The more I know, the better the mixtures I can give you."
"Yeah, I'll definitely ask you later, I just... ooh, what is that?" Melissa swerved to the side to get close to a large table that caught her eye. There were several large translucent jugs that glowed brightly in orange, green, and purple. The same liquid was being sold in smaller bottles, while the stall owner occasionally poured sample cups and handed them out. He was a ripped guy in hemp overalls who looked like he had some real experience fighting.
Though Lisa started to say something, the man seemed to hear and turned. He poured out a cup of the bright orange stuff and handed it toward Melissa. "Locally brewed philosopher's elixir, you want a taste? If you're from around here, it'll be a hundred times more powerful than the cheap commercial swill!"
Honestly, Melissa was happy to try it. The bright colors reminded her of the kids' drinks her parents had made a very long time ago, when she'd been too young to understand that anything was wrong. Besides, what harm could it do? Yet when she started to move, Lisa slid a hand around her wrist.
"Thanks for the offer," Lisa said, "but we'll be fine."
"You sure about that, missy? You might have had a bad experience with some, but maybe you're not from around here? Hmm, I'd guess Scandinavian extraction, so maybe this..."
Before he could pour another cup, Lisa ignored him and turned to Melissa. "Local philosopher's elixir is one thing you never want to try, not unless they've been locally licensed to meet national quality standards. If you're not careful, you'd run a serious risk of lucrim overload."
The man frowned at her. "You're welcome to do what you like, we just want the government to let us do what we like. In the old days nobody needed the government to tell them how to brew their elixirs!"
Melissa could see that Lisa was gearing up for a big argument, and though those could be fun sometimes, Melissa wanted the day to stay light. She caught the other woman's arm and pulled her away. "I was just curious, that's all. Have fun with your philosopher's moonshine."
Though the man just shook his head as if disappointed, when Melissa tried to turn them to go, she nearly ran into someone else. It was a woman wearing a similar set of overalls and also beside the stall, maybe the guy's wife or partner or something. She had a huge number of carved talismans of some kind on necklaces, which she now fingered as she reached a hand toward Melissa.
"Be careful, young woman. Commercial products may seem like the easy path to power, but they're filled with chemicals. Your body may already be overflowing with toxins - they won't damage your strength now, but they'll inhibit your growth in the end. I can feel how disturbed your chakras are."
"Wait, chakras?" Melissa knew she was probably blundering into something, but she was curious.
"Chakras underlie the system of lucrim itself. They're-"
"A load of nonsense." Lisa cut in, giving the woman a glare and putting her hands over Melissa's ears. "Don't fill her head with that kind of thing."
The woman looked down her nose at Lisa and sniffed as she turned away. "Of course someone with chakras as chemically-laden as yours would think that. If your mind is already closed, I'll thank you to go on your way and not interfere with our work."
"That's fine, we were just leaving." Lisa marched away,
leaving Melissa to scramble after her. When they weren't very far away, Lisa spoke tersely. "Chakra is a perfectly valid way that some Indian experts talk about lucrim, but you shouldn't trust anyone spouting nonsense like that. It's just based on a popular idea about how lucrim works, all chemicals and toxins and... what are you smiling about?"
Melissa just grinned at the other woman. "Oh, it's just fun to see you get worked up about this stuff."
"It's important! Worthless supplements are an industry worth billions of dollars a year, and it does some real harm. Even aside from that, the alternative companies are usually run by the same giant corporations in the end, so their whole anti-corporate angle is just..." Lisa trailed off and gave her a sheepish grin. "Okay, so admittedly ranting at people in a farmers' market isn't going to do a lot of good."
"Nah, that's okay. I was serious when I said that it was fun."
"It's just frustrating. I'm spending a lot of time and effort getting an education on these things, and somebody who's done fifteen minutes of research on the internet comes in..."
While Lisa ranted and Melissa listened in amusement, they continued through the market. After that encounter they stayed away from the weirder tents, instead just buying some locally grown vegetables that Lisa thought might be useful. She eventually brought them to a modest stall with surprisingly high prices, which she said might be useful to help support Melissa's condition.
Honestly, she just pretended to look at the various things with no idea what she was doing. Melissa didn't know anything about plants, that was why she trusted experts like Lisa. Yet as Melissa looked over the various supplements that were supposed to help her, she found her thoughts wandering instead to her brother. His new foundation had worked, but he needed it to grow so much faster...
"Lisa, do you think that there's anything at the market that would help Rick? He's got a new foundation and he could use anything he could get."
"There are potentially some, but they won't compare very favorably to investing all the lucrim he's been saving." Lisa answered easily enough, but her tone was cool and she didn't quite make eye contact. She was usually a little stiff when it came to Rick, but this was especially bad.
After considering if she could repair the mood with a joke, Melissa decided that it was too late. Instead she bought some things and stuffed them all into a bag. Maybe she could make a salad back at home, if "chopped plant things" was a type of salad. As they headed out, the atmosphere still seemed a bit awkward. When they got to the parking lot in silence, Melissa decided to just take it head on.
"Lisa, it's great that you're helping out. You've given us so much for free."
"No, I'm happy for all the data from the two of you. I can't experiment with clients, so this is a critical step in-"
"It's generous and you know it." Melissa shifted her bag into a better position and then looked the other woman in the eye. "It just gets really awkward every single time we talk much about Rick. I get that you like him and it makes things uncomfortable. But doing whatever you're doing with those feelings can't be healthy."
Lisa stared at her and for a moment Melissa was afraid she'd stepped over a line, but then the other woman let out a long sigh. "I guess we're together enough that I can't hide things from you. Look, I want to be a good friend, it's just frustrating."
"And that makes you a good responsible adult and everything, but come on. You can bitch at me if you want. We're friends, aren't we?"
"Yes, we are." Lisa gave her a smile that suddenly faded as she narrowed her eyes. "You're not going to report everything I say to your brother, are you?"
"Cross my heart and hope to die!"
"Well... the truth is that I was really hoping he'd ask me out. I thought he might, but then Emily came out of nowhere and asked first, and now they're together. I just can't help but think... if I had asked first, would it have all gone differently? Does it really all come down to something like that?"
Melissa shrugged awkwardly. "Yeah, my brother can be a blockhead about that kind of thing, so the direct approach definitely works. Maybe it could have gone differently, but who knows?"
"Not that I'm not happy for him and Emily. Like, even if I'm a bit unhappy, I really mean that. It's just frustrating."
"I don't think he's thick enough to completely miss it, but he might have convinced himself not to see it. If you need some distance, I think he'd understand. But... we can still keep hanging out, right?"
"Of course." Lisa leaned in and gave her a quick hug over their groceries. Awkward, but the warmth in her touch was what Melissa needed right then. "But if we're really going to talk about love lives, you're the one who basically never leaves the house."
"Hey, I go to work sometimes! Anyway, my plan is to meet some dashing person in the YLAA who sweeps me off my feet. Then I hear once you get married the hard part is over and it's smooth sailing from there, so I pretty much haven't thought about it."
Lisa laughed and picked her up as they went to fly back home. For the rest of the trip Melissa relaxed and enjoyed herself, but she knew it was only a matter of time until the period of rest was over.
Chapter 49: Bunyan's Lightning
A bolt of lightning was flying directly for him, but Rick decided to step into this one. It tore through his body, severely damaging his defensive core, and much of it coursed through his limbs. He convulsed involuntarily, struggling to resist the effect but still failing. When it ended, he collapsed down onto one knee and still had to prop himself up with an arm.
"Okay..." He barely gasped the word out before he had to take several breaths. "We can take... a quick break..."
"Seriously?" From across the combat chamber, Tom eyed him with a mix of surprise and concern. "Are you sure you don't want to be finished for the day?"
"No. You know what I'm facing, thanks to you."
The reminder brought a flash of guilt to Tom's face and he nodded before turning away. That left Rick to just lie down on the ground and try to pull himself together.
If they had really fought, it might have been an interesting match, but that wasn't the point. Instead he was just subjecting his defensive core to repeated attacks in order to improve it as quickly as possible. Though Tom's lightning wasn't as monstrously powerful as as Jack's Aura Ink skills, it was the best opportunity he had aside from Emily. Between the two of them, his defensive core would be improved by their next fight.
But as he'd concluded in the strategy meeting, he couldn't win this fight by relying on his defense. Rick sat down, wiped himself off, and popped open a bottle of 250k philosopher's elixir. By using up the money he'd been saving for the fighter's deposit, he was able to get all he needed. Unfortunately, he was also seeing the limits of trying to increase his strength with raw money.
When he'd first met Birthrighters with generation rates of six digits or more, he'd assumed that their parents just handed them 100,000 lucrim. Now that he'd actually held almost that much in his bank account, he realized that it wasn't actually that much money on their scale. Oh, it was a small fortune by his family's standards, and a lot more than he and Melissa needed to live for a long time, but not compared to Birthrighters.
Just how much money would it take to actually create a Birthright Core that had a generation rate of six digits? A hell of a lot, that was for sure. Emily had implied that the orders of magnitude actually had some significance - apparently the lucrim analysis system had been calibrated that way. Hence why he was struggling to get any of his smaller Lucores above 10,000, and why 100,000 total generation rate was a difficult barrier for many.
Not that he was anywhere near those heights. For now, all he could do was continue with incremental improvements and hope that they would be enough.
Once he had some serum and elixir in his system, Rick set about what had become a familiar routine. He took several supplements that Lisa had left for him, then began his usual exercises of Lucore reformation and meditation. Since he was already stretching his body beyond norm
al training, he extended his rest periods by working on Graham's Stake as well. Maybe he couldn't be completely respectable, but it wouldn't hurt to improve it if possible.
All of that would help, but it was really just laying the groundwork. His more significant progress came from two things: hardcore biking and training with Melissa. When he still made attempts at finding anomalies, he tried to push himself, biking in 38th gear or higher. It was exhausting, but it was helping his Dark Blood Kettle foundation grow.
Working with his sister provided even greater benefits, though they were hard to pin down. In the beginning, her manifested void flames had been great for improving his defenses and making his foundation more efficient. Yet over time, it had stopped hurting him. Melissa said that she thought she was gaining control of it so that she wouldn't harm anyone she liked.
In any case, contact with something that dangerous made the pool of the Dark Blood Kettle grow. Likewise, when Emily really attacked him with her aura blades, or now with the lightning attacks. The pool of black blood within his lucrima soul didn't seem to grant any amazing abilities, but it was growing, and that theoretically aided all the rest of his development.
When he finished another cycle of everything, Rick took several deep breaths. He needed to make sure that his lucrima soul was in order, plus it was just difficult to throw himself into that much pain repeatedly. This was the only chance he had to make Tom help him, so he needed to get everything he could out of it.
Currently the other man was on the opposite side of the room, shadow-boxing against a wall. It looked like he was serious about improving his melee combat skills, though Rick suspected there was something more to it. Maybe he could combine those blows with bolts - Rick presumed he was holding back a trick, but it didn't matter, since the important thing was being exposed to all the lightning.
Since this would be the last session, Rick grabbed his backpack and carefully pulled out the "Great Wheel Heaven and Earth Realmshattering Pill". He still hated the name, but it had cost a hell of a lot and Damian had vouched for its efficacy. Most importantly, it was supposed to help a person absorb some of the qualities of elemental attacks. As soon as Rick felt it begin to filter through his system, he stood up to begin the last match.
