Master Barnaby, the Chief Bursar of the Royal Academy, was a man whose entire worldview could be measured in ledger ink and heartburn.
When I walked into his office at eleven-thirty in the morning and slid a fresh, royally stamped severance voucher for eight thousand gold crowns across his mahogany desk, he didn’t even blink. He simply adjusted his brass spectacles, dipped his quill, and sighed like a man watching a carriage crash in slow motion.
“House Solaris is paying out the no-fault clause in cash,” Barnaby murmured, inspecting the wax seal of the Crown Prince’s personal steward. “I assume the entire central courtyard already knows?”
“And half the eastern dormitory by now,” I replied, leaning comfortably against the wooden partition. Now that I had ducked into a ground-floor washroom and loosened the back laces of my corset by three inches, I could actually inhale using both lungs. “I’d like four thousand transferred directly into an anonymous merchant guild promissory note, two thousand in stamped Imperial silver bars, and the remaining two thousand applied directly toward leasing Property 14-B on Bramble Lane.”
That finally made the old man stop writing. He looked up over the rims of his glasses.
“Property 14-B,” he repeated flatly. “The condemned glasshouse bordering the Southern Woods? Lady Vance, the previous tenant was an eccentric herbologist who blew off half the slate roof trying to distil fire-newt spleen. It has no running hot water, no maid quarters, and the local stray cats use the conservatory as a maternity ward.”
“Which is why the Academy has been failing to rent it out for six semesters,” I said cheerfully. “The standard commercial lease on Bramble Lane is nine hundred gold a year. Given the structural neglect and the feline squatters, I’ll give you twelve hundred gold upfront for a three-year lock-in lease, provided you throw in a Class-Three Commercial Apothecary License and forfeit my room in the Rose Spire Dormitory.”
Barnaby stared at me for a long, quiet moment. In the game, he was a minor merchant NPC who charged extortionate fees for inventory expansion, unless you passed a hidden Mercantile check.
“If you vacate the Rose Spire before the first week of term ends,” Barnaby said slowly, “the room deposit reverts to the Academy treasury.”
“Keep it,” I said. “Consider it a convenience fee for processing my paperwork before the noon bell.”
The corners of Barnaby’s thin mouth twitched upward—just a fraction, the closest a career bureaucrat ever came to a grin. He pulled a thick iron key with a rusted brass tag from his lower drawer and dropped it onto the blotter with a heavy clink.
“Sign the bottom three parchments, Lady Vance. And do try not to blow off the remaining half of the roof. Slates are expensive this time of year.”
By two o’clock in the afternoon, I was officially homeless by noble standards, remarkably wealthy by commoner standards, and standing ankle-deep in damp clover at the very edge of the Academy’s territory.
Bramble Lane wasn’t really a lane so much as an overgrown cobblestone cul-de-sac where the paved streets of the Lower Merchant Quarter surrendered to the encroaching roots of the Southern Woods. The air smelled of wet pine needles, woodsmoke from the nearby blacksmith forges, and old rain.
Property 14-B sat at the very end of the path, tucked beneath the sweeping boughs of a massive, silver-barked weeping willow.
To be fair to Master Barnaby, it was a wreck. The front half of the building was a two-story cottage built from dark timber and crooked river stone, with a faded wooden signboard hanging by a single squeaky chain above the porch. The back half was a sprawling Victorian-style iron-and-glass conservatory—though at least a dozen panes were cracked, and thick green ivy had crept through the gaps to wind around the interior rafters.
I unlocked the heavy oak front door, pushing it open with a low groan of protest from the iron hinges.
Sunlight filtered through the dusty front windows, illuminating a wide wooden counter, rows of empty apothecary drawers along the back wall, and a thick layer of grey ash sitting in the cold hearth. A fat marmalade tomcat sitting atop the counter cracked one yellow eye open, judged my velvet noblewoman’s dress, let out a raspy mrrp, and went back to sleep.
“Keep that attitude up and I’m charging you rent,” I informed the cat.
I dropped my single canvas travel bag onto the floorboards. Before leaving the main campus, I had stopped by a tailor’s stall in the outer market and traded my silk overskirt and silver hairpins for three linen work shirts, two pairs of sturdy wool trousers, a pair of calf-high leather boots, and a heavy canvas apron. I had also paid two copper pieces to a street urchin to deliver a polite, two-sentence letter to my family’s townhouse in the capital, informing my father that the royal engagement was off, encloses a bank draft for one thousand gold crowns to pay off the family’s immediate creditors, and asking him not to write me until winter.
Knowing Viscount Vance’s programming, he would spend three days raging about the family honour, realize one thousand gold was more liquid cash than he’d seen since the silver mines collapsed, and promptly forget I existed.
I walked past the counter and pushed through the swinging half-door into the back workshop.
Here, things looked much more promising. The eccentric herbologist who blew up the roof had left behind his heavy equipment when he fled the lease. Sitting on a reinforced stone workbench was a surprisingly intact, heavy-bottomed copper alembic, a tarnished brass balance scale, two cast-iron cauldrons, and a stone mortar and pestle the size of my head.
As my eyes swept over the cluttered shelves, my new passive skill hummed softly behind my temples.
[Alchemist’s Appraisal (Lv. 1) — Active]
[Item: Cracked Copper Alembic (Standard Grade)]
[Condition: Soot-clogged, minor mana leakage along the condenser coil.]
[Fix: Scrub with vinegar and salt; seal the neck joint with rendered beeswax and powdered ironwood bark to restore 100% thermal efficiency.]
“Easy enough,” I muttered, rolling up the sleeves of my linen shirt.
In Crown of Thorns, the alchemy subsystem was universally hated by casual players. Unlike standard RPGs where you clicked a button and two herbs magically merged into a red potion, the developers had designed an absurdly complex temperature-and-timing minigame. If you boiled a mixture for four seconds too long, or stirred counterclockwise instead of clockwise during a mana infusion, the potion turned into toxic grey sludge.
Most players ignored it entirely and just bought overpriced healing salves from the Temple of Light for fifty silver a bottle.
I, however, had spent an entire rainy November trying to unlock the Grandmaster Brewer achievement on Hardcore mode. I knew the exact boiling point of every weed within five miles of this zip code.
And more importantly, I knew that the Southern Woods directly behind my new conservatory was a tutorial foraging zone stocked with "junk" items that only seemed useless because nobody at the Academy knew how to process them.
I grabbed a woven wicker basket from beneath the workbench, snatched a rusty pair of iron garden shears, and pushed open the back door of the glasshouse.
The afternoon air was crisp and cool. Where the shattered flagstones of the back patio ended, the dense, mossy undergrowth of the Southern Woods began. Most first-year students avoided this section of the forest; there were no high-XP monsters here, only mud, thorny brambles, and aggressive woodland squirrels.
I took three steps into the shade of the giant weeping willow and crouched down beside a rotting oak log.
Growing in the damp hollow beneath the bark was a cluster of pale, translucent mushrooms that looked remarkably like melting icicles. Whenever a breeze hit them, they let out a faint, soggy squelch.
[Item: Weeping Ghost-Cap (F-Rank Fungus)]
[Market Value: 1 Copper per bundle (Used primarily as pig feed).]
[Hidden Property: Contains high concentrations of dormant Hydro-Ether. Highly toxic when raw. However, if flash-dried over birch charcoal and ground into a fine powder before midnight, it acts as a Silver-Tier stabilizer that triples the shelf life and potency of restorative draughts.]
In the game’s lore, Royal Alchemists used crushed pearls and imported desert lotus to stabilize their potions, driving the production cost of a single stamina potion up to thirty silver coins.
Pig-feed mushrooms did the exact same job better, and there were roughly four pounds of them growing on this log alone.
Working quickly, I snipped the Ghost-Caps at the base of their stems, careful not to bruise the delicate caps, and layered them over a bed of dry moss in my basket.
For the next hour, I moved through the edge of the treeline like a locust with a botany degree.
I harvested two dozen bundles of Ash-Crest Nettle from the base of the stone boundary wall. I dug up six gnarly, dirt-caked tubers of Bitter-Root Ginger—a weed that Academy gardeners actively burned because it choked out their decorative roses, completely unaware that its juice was a natural painkiller strong enough to numb a sword wound.
Finally, I climbed partway up a mossy boulder to reach the low-hanging branches of a Cinder-Berry Shrub, plucking the hard, unripe green berries instead of the bright red ones. Every textbook in the Empire said to harvest Cinder-Berries when red. Every textbook was wrong; once the berries ripened, the natural sugars fermented and destroyed the raw mana-conductivity inside the seeds.
By the time the late afternoon sky began to bruise into shades of violet and slate grey, my basket was heavy enough to make my forearms ache, and the hem of my trousers was thoroughly caked in mud.
“Not a bad haul for zero capital investment,” I breathed, wiping a stray lock of dark hair off my forehead with the back of my wrist.
As I turned to climb down the mossy boulder, a sharp, metallic crack echoed from deeper within the woods—roughly two hundred yards past the rusted iron fence that marked the boundary between the safe foraging zone and the Outer Rift Perimeters.
I froze, crouching low against the stone.
A second later came a low, guttural shriek that definitely didn’t belong to a squirrel, followed by the clean, unmistakable whistle of cold steel slicing through heavy air.
Then, silence.
I peered through the darkening canopy of pine needles. The Outer Rift Perimeter was supposed to be patrolled by third-year knights and Academy Wardens. In the first week of the semester, only minor Grade-5 pests—like Moss-Rats or Thorn-Hounds—ever slipped through the barrier ward.
Except that shriek hadn’t been a Thorn-Hound. That rattle at the end of the cry belonged to a Spined Rift-Stalker—a Grade-3 ambush predator with paralytic venom in its claws that wasn't supposed to spawn near the Academy until the middle of November.
I looked down at my basket of mushrooms and weeds, then back toward the dark treeline as the first heavy drops of evening rain began to patter against the canopy leaves.
The smart play—the survivor’s play—was to go inside, lock the heavy oak door, light the stove, and pretend I hadn't heard a thing. Whatever idiot was out there soloing mid-tier rift monsters in the rain without a healer was none of my business.
Except I already knew which idiot was out there. There was only one person in the entire Academy crazy enough, broke enough, and desperate enough to hunt Grade-3 monsters for their mana cores on the very first evening of the school year.
And if Seraphina Valerius died of paralytic venom in a ditch on Day One, the entire main plot of the Empire would collapse into chaos six months ahead of schedule—right on top of my new shop.
I let out a long, deeply annoyed sigh, hoisted my basket onto my hip, and hurried back toward the glasshouse.
“Looks like I’m skipping straight to the antidote menu,” I muttered to the rain. “And I’m charging her overtime.”