Side Effects
And so, without even realizing when I had drifted off, I fell asleep and dreamed.
It was a dream of meeting Dad, who lay inside a vampire’s coffin beyond the gate—not for a full cure, but to freeze the curse’s progress—and telling him everything that had happened since.
“Dad! I graduated from school now, you know? I even used the New Year’s money you gave me to open a pharmacy, and guess what…”
“……”
I shared my heart with Dad, whose eyes remained closed, right up until the moment just before sunrise when the sky brightened and the coffin had to be sealed.
It was a happy time.
“Haaam…”
Whenever I dream of Dad, my heart gets all restless and fluttery.
In the dreams he always lies with his eyes closed inside that coffin. I know it’s placed beyond a mana-rich, state-owned gate inside the Vampire Lord’s coffin to halt the curse, but still—it’s seeing Dad lying in a coffin.
“Heuheheng.”
Even so, it felt good to dream of him after so long.
Aunt had been busy, and I’d been busy graduating and opening the pharmacy, so we hadn’t been able to visit lately.
I was so happy I even slept in.
Crack-pop—
“Kkeuaaang.”
No, actually, that wasn’t why. Making the soil yesterday must have worn me out more than I thought.
Hiiing… I should’ve stuck some of the patch paste on my shoulders and arms too.
My hands trembled wildly as I ladled Blue Potion into the bottles.
But who am I?
“…Hat!”
Professional Drug Master Han Sia didn’t spill a single drop!
I sealed the lids and checked the medicine ledger.
Drug Appraisal!
Classification:Potion
A 99.9% pure mana liquid refined from Mana Herbs using pure clear water. Restores mana when ingested. When consumed beyond current mana capacity, permanently expands maximum mana by +1 per bottle. Has a blueberry flavor.
“Huh?”
My eyes went round all by themselves.
Just like the Red Potion, a side effect had attached itself—but the content was pretty unusual.
With the Red Potion it had been “Overconsumption grants a short-term strength boost,” vague about both duration and degree. This time it was a permanent effect, and the exact amount of growth was spelled out in numbers.
Wondering why, I looked closer and saw a single star had appeared next to the Drug Appraisal skill.
Drug Manufacturing 3/3 times
Drug Appraisal » Drug Appraisal★
Just as I’d had to study to activate the Drug Master class, some of the class skills required clearing prerequisite quests to unlock. This seemed to be the same sort of thing.
Even so, one part still didn’t make sense.
Mana capacity expansion.
That’s the effect of a high-grade Blue Potion, isn’t it?
When people think of potions, the ones that usually come to mind are Red Potions and Blue Potions.
They restore injuries and mana respectively, and that holds true whether it’s a low-grade bottle for three million won, a mid-grade for thirty million, or a high-grade for three hundred million.
But high-grade Blue Potions carry one extra effect.
Namely, a mana capacity expansion of somewhere between +8 and +10.
High-grade Red Potions don’t get any extra effect; they’re just so potent they can supposedly stick a person cut clean in half back together and bring them back to life.
That’s why high-grade Red Potions earned the nickname “three-hundred-million-won spare life.”
They use the same base materials as the low- and mid-grade versions; the difference comes from the sheer quantity of primary ingredients and the skill of the craftsman handling them. That’s the accepted theory.
And yet that effect had attached itself to a potion I made—and a mere low-grade one at that.
Guessing the cause was easy.
“It’s because of my class, right?”
The craftsmen who make ordinary potions are alchemists. I’m not completely certain, but my class seems to be a higher tier specialized in magical drug crafting.
Compared to potions made by alchemists, mine come out in larger volumes, and I suspect it’s because I draw out the medicinal properties of the herbs to their absolute maximum.
The patches were definitely more effective than their cost would suggest, too.
Medicine basically doesn’t work on hunters as a default, yet Uncle Sang-jin’s progressive disc had improved past its pre-awakening state after a single application—enough that a freshly adult nineteen-year-old who still looked nine got polite speech from him.
“Hmm…”
The problem was that even if a high-grade effect appeared, I couldn’t just raise the potion’s price however I liked.
Red and Blue Potions had such a long, messy history—watered down, dyed, mixed with human blood—that a fixed-price system had been adopted for them.
Normally a pharmacy marks up the wholesale cost for profit, but that was impossible with potions.
That’s why pharmacies used to sell them and then stopped; sales shifted to direct sales from workshops, or so I’d heard.
…Anyway, dealing with the side effect was simple. Take a sample to the Hunter Association and have a professional appraiser verify it.
Appraisal skills were rare enough that the Association kept dedicated appraisers on staff.
High-grade potions require a hundred times the materials of a low-grade one, plus concentration, aging, and extra herbs mixed in. If I demonstrated the manufacturing process myself and showed it was just an ordinary low-grade recipe, that should settle it.
I’ll have to visit the Association again soon.
Even if a premium price wasn’t approved, just the appraisal result would let me advertise once more on the Hunter Gallery and maybe pull in a few extra customers.
“Hehehe… huh?”
While I was giggling, a new question popped up.
If a low-grade recipe produced this result, what would a high-grade one do?
Kkeueung kkeueung—
“Low-grade was 1… and high-grade uses a hundred Mana Herbs, so… 100? No, I said I draw out more medicinal power, so…”
I fretted over it, but no answer came.
I couldn’t just jump into a high-grade recipe with the equipment, Mana Herbs, and other materials I currently lacked.
Instead, since it was a holiday and I had nothing better to do with my brain, I decided to knead Yongyong Patch paste while poking around my awakening window.
First I checked the recipe experience that had come in from making Blue Potion for the first time.
Recipe 3 / ??
(3) Blue Potion1 / 100%
“Skill check.”
Next I reviewed the skills.
Clear Origin
Drug Appraisal★
Herb Cultivation
Ingredient Preparation
Drug Manufacturing
Compounding
((Aging))
((Design))
Two skills were still locked: Aging and Design.
Accelerates the time required for drug reactions and stabilization.
Requirement: Mastered Recipes 0/3
Designs magical devices capable of reproducing the Drug Master’s manufacturing process.
Requirement: S-class Gate entry and clear contribution 0/1
Aging’s quest looked relatively doable. Design did not.
An S-class gate for a production class? That’s just mean.
From the description it seemed like a skill for designing automation machinery, but it felt like they’d locked it on purpose so I’d never unlock it.
No matter how many times I looked, it was still pie in the sky.
The rest of the holiday flew by.
I’d only taped a “Closed” sign on the door; I didn’t rest for even a second.
I made five times the previous batch of patches, hauled soil down from the rooftop and stacked square planters higher and higher, then pulled out both my usual mana cauldron and the new one Aunt had given me as a graduation present so I could brew Red Potion and Blue Potion at the same time.
The original cauldron was the one I’d stuffed full of legendary-grade materials at the moment of my awakening—legendary in its own right—so it was the one I used most. But even the best cauldron in the world couldn’t handle half red broth and half blue broth like some kind of shabu-shabu.
Anyway, the Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday holiday passed productively like that.
Even though my body was exhausted, the unexpected side effect on the Blue Potion left my heart swelling with hope.
The only real headache was that expanding the planters in the compounding room had completely erased my sleeping space, so I’d had to shove the partition and refrigerator farther out, shrinking the customer area quite a bit.
Even that turned out to be a completely useless worry the moment I opened the pharmacy Friday morning.
“Dori-dori. Dori-dori, hmm?”
“Aigoo, Grandma, we don’t sell drugs here.”
“Dori-doriii!!!”
Whether the space was smaller or not, the pharmacy was exactly the same as always.
I hadn’t wanted it to be this same, though.
“Ppeueeeeng! Dori-doriii!!!”
“Mm…”
Today’s first customer was the same drug-addict grandma who’d shown up several times before, throwing a tantrum right in front of me.
She was a dementia-stricken homeless woman and an awakened who had already been arrested and released multiple times.
Because of her dementia history, the narcotics investigation officers always looked sour whenever I called them—apparently their investigations never turned up much.
Reporting her to the public health center never did any good either.
Dementia, homeless, and awakened on top of it—though she didn’t seem combat-oriented.
If this had been a central commercial district, some other measure might have been taken. But my pharmacy sat in an awkward outer area, only a fifteen-minute walk from a slum that looked like a foreign zombie town packed with people high on drugs.
Of course, if I told Aunt—who was a top-tier hunter—she’d do something about it…
“Dori-doriii… heueong…. Younggaam…”
I didn’t want to bother busy Aunt, and something about the grandma—who still kept her reddish-brown scarf tightly wrapped even as the weather warmed—tugged at me differently from the other addicts.
So I couldn’t quite bring myself to press the button under the counter the way I did with everyone else.
In the end, today as well, I pulled a bottle of peppermint drink and two roasted eggs from the fridge.
“Grandma, eat these and please don’t come this week, okay?”
“Dori-dorii—.”
Muttering the street slang for MDMA and shaking her head, she accepted one of the eggs I offered and left the pharmacy.
Tinkle—
Watching her red scarf recede into the distance, a thought suddenly struck me.
“But the side effect on the Red Potion… it’s not like anyone’s going to drink a three-million-won bottle instead of a regular beverage, right? Until someone actually says something, nobody will ever know.”
Nod.
Unlike Blue Potion, Red Potion was something you carefully rationed just enough to heal your injuries. Even if I sold a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand bottles, no one would ever notice.
Sia nodded to herself, affirming her own prediction.
“Hey, Boss is handing out potions.”
“The old hag finally lost it? …Kkeuaaak!”
“Tsk, you bony bastard, if you’re gonna die at least do it properly. …What the hell, you weren’t even hurt—why are you drinking that?”
“Hss— I’m thirsty, that’s why. Pharmacy strawberry flavor… eungoooook?!?”
“Ah shit, you crazy pervert, now you’re getting off on strawberry flavor?”
“Yo, what is this? Boss only drank half a bottle after getting hit by an arrow and healed right away? Even if no aura was applied—”
“Eungoooot— the tiger’s energy surges!! Euryaaat!!”
—Kwaaang!
“Fucking bastard, don’t smash the furniture, Boss said…! Huh? What the—how did you, you pervert?”
The prediction had already gone completely off the rails three days earlier.