A Five-Star Review
This voice…
“?!”
A body that had felt as heavy as lead was suddenly light as a feather.
Awakening didn’t strengthen your joints, cartilage, or nerves, so from the day he’d awakened as a tanker and started taking the front line with a shield in every raid, the pain had followed him like a chronic disease.
His lower back — the one the doctors said was developing a disc problem — felt so light it might float away.
Like before he’d awakened. No — better than before he’d awakened.
“Even twisting to the side doesn’t hurt…!”
The slightest wrong move used to feel like something would burst, but now his range of motion seemed wider than ever.
Chik.
After a long stretch of gleefully sitting down, standing up, and rotating his waist, Sangjin felt a coolness against the skin of his lower back.
Something cloth-like had fallen to the floor.
“The patch!”
The one he’d stuck on before bed last night.
The one he’d bought from that adorable little pharmacist.
“A review!”
Uga-uga. Like a primitive man who’d just discovered fire, Sangjin snatched up his phone with a speed that did not match his bulk.
“Heehee—”
Sia leaned against the counter, smiling down at her phone.
On the screen was the workshop review board of the Hunter Association app that Sangjin had told her about.
The review that had sat at the very top of the board at first, then slipped to the third page over the past two days.
The app had installed automatically when she registered as an Awakened, but aside from the note-taking and dictionary apps she’d needed for studying, she’d never used it — she hadn’t even known the board existed, or that the app was there at all.
Ever since that first review and star rating had gone up yesterday morning, though, she’d been peeking at it even while making medicine for two days straight.
“Heehee… Customer Park *jin… five whole stars… and the review is super long…!”
She carefully stroked the screen with her thumb. For something so small, her mouth felt sweet as if she’d just eaten ice cream, and her mood was floating on air.
It was lucky she’d only checked after the medicine was halfway done. If she’d seen it earlier, she might have botched the whole process and missed the deadline on the potions her aunt’s people at the NIS had ordered.
Beep-beep—
“Oops! Gotta switch the bottles!”
Fortunately, the remaining steps didn’t require fine concentration.
What she was working on now was the extraction process for the Red Potion.
The materials were dissolved by blowing mana into boiling pure water, then filtered through a column packed full of handmade beads that pulled impurities out, producing the extract.
(Something like this!)
In technical terms: chromatography.
It was a bit like a natural water filter for muddy water on a desert island — not an alchemy method, but something she’d learned in pharmacy school. Turns out substances still separate at different rates by their properties even in a world of mana.
The medicinal essence of troll blood ran a deep red, so all she had to do was check with specialized detection paper before and after the red came through to confirm no impurities were present.
Then she just kept rinsing the column with pure water as the solvent, held a vial under the spout at the bottom, and swapped in a fresh vial whenever one filled up. Done.
Other alchemists apparently made theirs with weird-looking alchemy kits — mana cauldrons linked to a bunch of flasks. She knew the theory on the alchemy side, but the fine techniques were workshop secrets, so she didn’t know the details anyway. And her body was too small to handle anything that complicated.
…She’d been a little worried about not using the method everyone else used, but somehow it felt right.
So — the result of changing the process…
“Drug appraisal!”
A potion that completely removes the impurities from troll blood and maximizes its medicinal potency. When taken internally or applied externally, it fully restores physical wounds and damage, excluding curses. Overconsumption grants a temporary strength boost. Has a strawberry flavor.
Her worries had been for nothing. Perfect!
Sip.
“Heehee.”
The taste was decent enough, too.
“And over here…”
This time she appraised the sky-blue liquid gently bubbling away at low heat in the mana cauldron.
A 70% pure mana solution refined from Mana Herb with pure water. Restores mana when taken internally. Has a blueberry flavor.
Hmm. Still unfinished.
But that was fine. The Blue Potion was the kind of friend you made by simmering Mana Herb low and slow with pure water while topping up the mana, stirring once every three hours — a medicine you had to budget at least a full week for.
Hitting 70% in a mere three days was actually faster than the theoretical average.
I wonder why? Do other workshops… simmer it more slowly?
Maybe it was a class trait.
Anyway.
“You’re the Red Potion! You’re the Blue Potion!”
??? (Name Undecided) → Red Potion
??? (Name Undecided) → Blue Potion
She named them, then finished off the Red Potion.
Closed the column, pressed the vial caps shut with a firm squeeze, and double-checked that the last bottle hadn’t picked up any impurities.
“Okay!”
…There was one minor issue — she’d been on her phone, so one of the vials had ended up a tiny bit overfilled —
“This much is just service. It’s fine!”
It really was fine. These weren’t prescription pharmaceuticals; they were hunter-grade medicines sold to hunters. Hunters whose bones and muscles had been reinforced, whose recovery was boosted by mana, didn’t suffer side effects from a milliliter or two of difference in dosage.
If anything, the industry’s real problem was that medicines often didn’t work, thanks to mana’s buffering effect and the reinforcement of the skeletal system.
And above all, the Red Potion was the kind of medicine you adjusted the dose of as needed for recovery. Too little was the problem — too much was actually better.
Now all that was left was tying a ribbon around the neck of each bottle, and the Red Potion would be truly complete!
Yap!
The medicine was really, truly finished.
Let’s have a look…
“…Whoa.”
Held up to the fluorescent light, the finished Red Potion caught the eye with a deep crimson glow.
A color that somehow made her think of being little.
“Whenever I fell down, Dad used to put red medicine on my knee…”
…But now that she’d done pharmacy practice and even made Red Potion herself, she was pretty sure that hadn’t been povidone-iodine. It had been actual Red Potion. The real thing.
The lowest grade of which cost three million won a bottle — and back then the market hadn’t even stabilized, so it was whatever price they asked. And he’d just been smearing that on.
Well. That was probably why legendary-grade materials had been lying around in a room she could reach, scattered all over the place.
Tears welled up for a second, then dried.
You big dummy.
(2) Red Potion1 / 100%
Having made the medicine, she checked her class window as the next order of business. Her proficiency had ticked up a little. At this rate, ninety-nine more batches and she’d master the recipe.
“Heheh.”
She stacked the Red Potions neatly into their dedicated box.
Jingle—
“Is our Sia doing well?”
“Aunt!”
She cheerfully greeted her aunt, who’d come by to see her face and pick up the Red Potions that had finished first.
“My goodness, are all of these the ones we ordered?”
“Yep! The Blue Potion isn’t ready yet, so ten bottles of Red Potion first!”
“Our Sia’s hands seem a little… generous.”
At her aunt’s words, Sia looked down at her palms. …They didn’t seem to have grown any bigger?
Pfft…
She was still staring at her hands when a laugh floated down from above. She looked up to find her aunt and the colleague-customer who’d come with her both laughing.
“Heh heh — I meant the bottles are bigger than other alchemists’ potions. A bit — bigger.”
Ah.
Her face went hot. Now she got it.
“I know! I just got confused for a second.”
“Heh heh heh—”
Her aunt kept laughing all the way through paying the balance and receiving the receipt — along with the three packs of patches Sia pushed across with it.
“Heh heh… Hmm? Oh, you’re giving me a receipt for the records? Hmm? When did you make the patches? You’ve got them by body part. Are these for me?”
“Well… I was going to give you the patches anyway… and the receipt is because I wanted a… review.”
The moment the words left her mouth, she realized handing them over like this made it look like a bribe for a review.
But the whole reason she’d chosen patches as her first product was for her aunt, who always complained that her whole body ached — and as for the review…
She’d already tasted what a review felt like. There was no way she could not ask.
“Ah, the Hunter Association app review! I barely use it, so I’d completely forgotten. Of course I’ll write one for our Sia’s shop.”
“Team lead, just a second…”
“Hm? …Oh for— I’m spending my own money, I can’t even leave a revi— Ah. Sorry, Sia. Reviews are basically under real names, and with a name as distinctive as mine, they say I have to post it privately. But then even if I write one, the star rating doesn’t count toward the average—”
“Mm, it’s okay.”
She shook her head hard at her frowning aunt to show it was fine.
Whether it counted truly didn’t matter. As long as she could see the stars and the review, that was enough.
“Haa— I really ought to quit this damn company one of these days. …And you too, Sia. Even as a freebie, you can’t just hand over four packs of patches. Here — go buy yourself some snacks. I’d love to stay longer, but work’s piled up.”
“Mm… see you next time.”
And so she saw her aunt off, several yellow bills pressed into her hands and a fond pat on the head for good measure.
“…Hah!”
When she looked at her phone again, it was already well past her usual six o’clock closing time.
“Closing, closing!”
She had to shut down fast. The electricity bill was no joke.
She scurried to the door, set out the doorstop, and started lowering the shutter from the inside with a long pole.
Rattle-rattle-rattle—
She’d gotten it about two-thirds of the way down when—
Thuk!
“Nngh… huh?”
The shutter wouldn’t go any farther. Looking down, she found a huge hand gripping it from the other side.
Huff, huff—
From beyond the shutter came a voice thick with the kind of breathing that had to be heavy on carbon dioxide — the presumed owner of that hand.
“Just a quick purchase — hah — is that okay?”
Something about it was strange and familiar all at once.
This voice…
“Customer Park *jin?!”