The clamor of the Lower Market descended upon the arriving Rosenthals long before they crossed its invisible boundary.
The trading city was always bustling, but it was most noticeable in this particular quarter.
The shouts of barkers, the rattle of wagons over uneven cobblestones, and the sharp stench of cheap tobacco, cured fish, and manure smoke filled the street, mingled with the acrid fumes of chemicals and the roar of a crowd speaking a myriad of languages.
Azalea walked confidently, her fingers tightening their grip on a thick sheet of paper.
In her hands, she held a list that would make any local shopkeeper scratch his head.
“Borax, ammonium salts, copper pipes, a heavy iron cylinder,” she repeated in her mind, fully aware that the required goods would likely bear entirely different names here, if they could be found at this market at all.
Before they left, Marcus had spent a long time stubbornly trying to dissuade the girl from venturing into such a place.
He insisted on sending servants or going himself, but Azalea was unyielding.
She categorically refused to entrust such a purchase to outsiders who wouldn’t know copper from brass, or ammonium from ordinary lime.
Marcus understood her logic intellectually, as he had no inkling of what she was even talking about, yet he worried desperately.
The filthy alleys of the Lower Market, reeking of tanning acids, were simply no place for a noble lady.
However, that was not the only thought tormenting him.
A physician was due to visit Elena that morning.
After that dreadful night and the search conducted by the Chancellery, his spouse’s condition seemed only to worsen, and Marcus simply could not leave his wife alone.
This was precisely why a sullen, battered port porter, whom Marcus had hastily hired at the wharves for a couple of silver coins, now walked half a step ahead of Azalea.
The mercenary kept looking around anxiously, hauling a vacant two-wheeled handcart intended for future sacks.
He clearly felt out of his element next to a lady who, despite her high standing, did not shy away from doing such grueling work herself.
They penetrated deeper, toward the area where the odors were heaviest, the apothecary warehouses and the tanners’ vats.
Azalea stopped at the first shop, where massive wooden barrels stood near the entrance.
An elderly merchant in a greasy apron was lazily picking at his teeth with a splinter of wood, looking appraisingly at the odd pair.
“What is my lady’s pleasure? Saltpeter, alum, purified lime?” he grunted, spitting beneath his feet.
Azalea’s gaze slid over a barrel bearing the inscription “White Jewelry Salt.” There it was!
The local, crude trade name.
Lacking a clear nomenclature, the craftsmen here relied solely on color and area of application.
But Azalea saw it.
Not merely with her eyes.
As a result of her work with essential oils, she had unlocked an intriguing ability.
Her magic allowed her to perceive chemical compositions.
Substances became clear to her on an atomic level, as if displayed on the pages of the chemistry reference book she used to read in high school.
“Sodium borate… borax,” Azalea noted with satisfaction, but she immediately winced.
“But gods, look at the impurities. Nearly a third of this is ordinary river sand, chalk, and some sort of gray clay. If this is loaded into an autoclave, the sediment will clog all the valves during the very first cycle.”
The high school chemistry curriculum, which Azalea had once memorized solely for the sake of grades in another life, now surfaced vividly in her memory.
She mentally thanked her old chemistry teacher, who had disliked her so thoroughly that the girl had been forced to learn everything inside out just to withstand the onslaught of her questioning. Find the original chapter at novelping . com.
“I’ll have to purify the solution manually,” she thought, shifting her gaze to the neighboring barrel of ammonium compounds.
There, the situation was even worse.
The composition varied wildly from batch to batch, heavily contaminated with organic impurities.
At that moment, Azalea realized that before squandering her newly acquired funds on the reconstruction of the purchased building, she needed to equip her own laboratory.
A small one to start with.
But it had to be a proper production facility equipped with precision scales, furnaces, and filters.
She could not rely entirely on magic all the time.
The permit that Mr.
Aldridge had so kindly procured for her allowed the girl to launch her small enterprise and legally trade her goods.
He had even extracted a one-year moratorium on manufacturing taxes for her.
“We need three sacks of this salt,” Azalea said, pointing to the “jewelry salt” as she looked at the merchant.
“But you will lower the price by a quarter. There is too much sand here, sir. I can tell by the color.”
The shopkeeper choked on his toothpick, and the hired porter looked at the girl in astonishment.
Both were stunned.
No, not by the lady’s audacity, but by how thoroughly versed she was in the trade.
What surprised them even more, however, was the quantity she intended to take.
“This is only the beginning,” Azalea said calmly, proffering the money to the shopkeeper, who was still staring at her blankly.
Swallowing hard, the shopkeeper hastily began counting out the change, constantly casting sidelong glances at his strange customer.
The hired porter, whose handcart had instantly grown heavier by three massive, dusty gray sacks, looked at Azalea with none of his former condescension.
In his eyes, accustomed to seeing port ladies as mere fickle maidens who looked down upon the market and its folk, a glimmer of genuine respect appeared.
This girl didn’t just know what she wanted; she spoke to the merchant like a seasoned receiving master, yet with impeccable manners and a distinct noble accent.
The next two hours turned into a hunt for Azalea.
She moved through the Lower Market like a predator, scouting amidst the chaos of the shops for what others would have deemed refuse or second-rate raw materials.
Thanks to her magical vision, she unerringly determined where a desirable commodity lay hidden beneath a plain, crude name, and where someone was attempting to sell diluted swill under the guise of high-quality acid.
She bought up everything that could be of use for purification and the initial assembly.
Copper pipes from junk dealers, heavy forged fasteners capable of withstanding high pressure, clay filters, and glass flasks that had miraculously survived intact within the crates of foreign merchants gradually filled their containers.
The porter hauled this motley assortment of goods to hired carters, who loaded the wagons and transported the supplies to the address specified by Azalea – to that very half-ruined building that now belonged to the Rosenthals.
The porter, whose back was already drenched with sweat from the grueling labor, observed the girl with mounting curiosity.
Why on earth did a noble lady require tons of filthy salts and crude iron in an abandoned quarter?
Besides, highborn ladies were rarely pleased if someone of his station opened his mouth in their presence.
Azalea stopped at another shop piled high with old steam engine parts and pressure gauges, inspecting the wares intently.
As her fingers sifted through the cold brass adapters, she suddenly felt a strange ripple in the air at the back of her neck.
It was as if a barely perceptible tremor had passed over her mana.
A familiar tremor.
She turned around abruptly.
“Mr. Lenoir?” escaped her in surprise.
Dallion Lenoir froze a couple of paces away from her in the middle of the filthy thoroughfare, nearly colliding with a fishmonger.
He was clad in a thick travel cloak and worn, dusty clothes.
His face reflected an unfeigned astonishment bordering on shock.
Azalea Rosenthal was the last person he expected to encounter in these slums reeking of rotten leather.
Beside Dallion stood a tall, broad-shouldered man with a harsh face and a cold gaze – Gilbert, the very same trusted man whom Dallion’s mother had assigned to her son for oversight and protection.
Or espionage, the Duchess always joked about it whenever her son brought it up.
Gilbert immediately placed his hand on the hilt of a dirk concealed beneath his cloak, scanning both Azalea and her sullen porter with the handcart.
“Miss Rosenthal?..” Dallion finally found his voice, which sounded muffled against the background of the market noise.
He shifted his gaze from her stained fingers to the handcart piled with scrap copper and sacks.
“What… by all that is holy, what are you doing here? And in such surroundings?”
“Is it not obvious? I am buying necessary provisions. As for you… this place looks nothing like a pleasure house,” the girl responded calmly.
It was entirely none of her concern by what avenues the young Mr.
Lenoir chose to amuse himself in the slums of the Imperial city.
She turned back to the merchant of brass parts, cold-bloodedly counted out the necessary coins, and retrieved the weighty bundle containing the adapters.
“Add it to the rest,” she tossed to her hired porter.
The mercenary obediently clattered the parts into the cart.
Azalea gave Dallion a parting nod, intending to move past him further down the rows toward the coppersmiths’ stalls.
“Keep watch on the target yourself,” Dallion commanded quietly, but loud enough for Gilbert to hear, his eyes never leaving the back of a retreating Azalea.
“I will join you later.”
Gilbert looked after the young master in surprise, his face reflecting utter bewilderment.
Dallion had always taken his assignments seriously and preferred not to delegate his tasks to others.
The knight shifted his gaze to the fragile figure of Azalea Rosenthal, who was navigating confidently between the rows of tanners, forcing her porter to push the heavily laden cart.
The knight grew genuinely curious about what kind of girl this could be, if for her sake Dallion had, without a second thought, shifted urgent work onto someone else’s shoulders and gone off in pursuit.