Once Lucas was no longer worried he was going to break something if he got out of bed, he got his ass in gear and back to work. The first thing he did was write a small note and tuck it into his window's casing in case Danaria thought to look for him there. It was a long shot, but she was a smart girl, and he was sure it would occur to her to look for him eventually.

If it didn't, well, he had an idea about how to fix that too, but he wanted to give Heisenburgle a little more time to come around before he put any more plans in motion. For now, he had more important things to do, like making a body that could stand up to the limits of the potions he wanted to try.

While he wasn't sure having twenty endurance would offset twenty strength, he was pretty sure that it would. So, until experiments proved otherwise, that was his plan.

Endurance potions weren't exactly new to Lucas. He'd practically lived off Flasks of Long Lasting Curative when he was recovering from his freak owl bear accident, but he hadn't made any of those in a while. This time, though, he didn't want to make something long-lasting. He wanted something that would make him as tough as a dwarf, tougher, maybe. It didn't need to last too much longer than whatever strength potion he paired with it.

After his recent brush with human frailty, the idea of maxing out his strength or his agility without seriously reinforcing his body seemed like a terrible idea. Still, for those first few days, he stuck to inventorying ingredients as he studied his attributes. Strength actually turned out to be the thing that was easiest to increase, followed by agility, endurance, and appearance.

That might just be because Heisenburgle has no interest in getting pretty, Lucas reminded himself, but the explanation didn't quite fit since the gnome was definitely a hardcore completionist when it came to alchemy, but at least at first, Lucas bought it. It was only when he discovered how few powerful Intelligence and Soul modifying reagents there were and how none of them seemed to play well together that his curiosity was piqued.

Heisenburgle had less to say on the subject than he would have thought. "Of course, it's easier to strengthen the body than the mind!" he declared as if it should be obvious. "Elixirs that empower the intellect cost many times what those that affect muscles do. It's the same reason that healing potions cost less than mana potions!"

"No, that's the cartel pricing of the alchemist guild," Lucas muttered too softly for the alchemist to hear. Lucas did find the dichotomy interesting, but for the moment, it was just a curiosity, as he was focused on the subject of getting tougher.

Endurance was one of the most common attributes found in reagents in his experience. Nearly anything that was earth-aligned had at least a little. What was more interesting to him was what kind of endurance he wanted. When his system hadn't been plugged in quite right, before the Gods had rearranged it for him, he'd only seen numbers. Now, he saw little descriptors next to the numbers.

The implication, of course, was that not all numbers were created equal, but it was only when Lucas started to sift through all the ingredients that he noticed that the reagents that were most compatible had a couple of things in common. The first was that their elemental alignments usually matched up, which was a point for Heisenburgle. That wasn't always the case, but it was enough to make it a rule of thumb. More interesting, though, were those qualifiers.

Reagents where endurance was listed as (tough) were more likely to be compatible with other (tough) ingredients than with those that were (solid), (tireless), or (steady). That interested him, but it required a whole extra level of tests. He'd planned to create a powerful endurance potion and then get right back to his original plans, but suddenly, he wasn't sure which kind of endurance potion he should make and how much of a difference there really was between them.

Heisenburgle seemed amused by those experiments, but the more Lucas tried to explain them to the gnome, the more amused he became. At first, he just enjoyed telling Lucas how expensive some of the powders and dusts he was using were. "That one you'd never be able to afford outside these walls," the gnome declared as Lucas eyed the Essence of Powdered Mummy. "It comes from the desert kingdoms far to the north and costs three dragons a vial!"

Essence of Mummy (powdered): +9 Endurance (undying), +2 strength (implacable), -3 soul (drained), -20% mana (enervated) Weakly Earth Aligned. Imbibers of any potion containing this ingredient have a small but increasing chance of being afflicted with tomb rot. The disease is slow, painful, and inevitably fatal.

While Lucas was intrigued by any ingredient with an endurance of 9 and an attribute like (undying), it was the side effect and not the cost that made it undesirable. Maybe I can add that to whatever poison I whip up for Skylara, he thought, smirking at the joke that he chose not to share with Heisenburgle.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

When Lucas tried to explain to him that there were different kinds of toughness, though, the gnome looked at him like he had three eyes. "Take these two," Lucas said, "Both of them increase your endurance by the same amount, but this one makes you tougher, and this one makes you tireless."

They both looked the same shade of muddy brown. Without Lucas' pop-ups, he doubted he would have been able to tell the difference.

The gnome scrutinized them for almost a minute before he said, "Every potion has its own nuances. In a sense, none of them are the same, and only broadly classifiable into large categories—"

"No, like, these have exactly the same potency but only one small difference," Lucas tried to explain. "I could make others, too. They're the same, but they're not, you know?"

"So, what's the difference?" the gnome asked.

"That's what I'm trying to find out," Lucas answered as he watched the gnome's face light up with unspoken derision. "Listen, this is how science works, okay? You make experiments and compare your results, then you use those results to make better experiments."

"Ah yes, your strange religion of science," the gnome chortled.

"This is literally the same thing as when you made two separate potions of flight to demonstrate elemental affinities!" Lucas countered. "How is that okay, and this isn't?"

"The potions I created were done with the proscribed ingredients in the proper manner!" Heisenburlge insisted. "You are just mixing random ingredients together, regardless of the consequences and side effects!"

Lucas chaffed at the man's dogmatic worldview, but he brushed it off. Today wasn't about Heisenburgle's misgivings. It was about learning the difference between (tough) and (tireless), which turned out not to be much, at least at the +5 level.

He tried them both outside, one after the other, with only a short rest in between. His very subjective and not really scientific tests consisted of a jog around the walls of the compound and a duel with a couple of the guards who agreed to humor him. Including rest breaks for an accurate comparison, the whole thing took less than an hour, but by the end, endurance potions or not, Lucas was exhausted.

The first thing he did was fight. That was his control. He did that again after two long laps around the courtyard of Blackgate when he was sucking wind and did notably worse. His potion of toughness fixed that, though, almost immediately, and he did almost as well in the ensuing fight and much better in his next round of jogging than he had the first time.

The tireless potion offered even better results, but in retrospect, Lucas had probably chosen tests that were more in line with its particular strengths. "Does that mean I gotta let someone beat the shit out of me to really see the difference?" he wondered aloud.

He had no plans to do that, of course, but it did clarify things. Even after he let both potions fade and gave it a few hours, he didn't feel totally exhausted by his exertions, which was another good sign.

"Well, did you ever figure out the difference?" Heisenburgle teased him that morning over a breakfast of toast and sausage.

"I figured out which one I'm making, and for now, that's enough," Lucas nodded.

"Just as long as you make more of your Blue soon," the gnome smirked. "I've received word from the Prince that your favorite customer is asking for more."

Lucas gripped his fork more tightly, wondering what he might add to the potion to make it lethal while still keeping it the same color as the gnome added, "I'm told she has her drugs tested now, though. She seems to think you might bear a grudge against her."

That quip was enough to make him look sharply at the gnome, but Lucas didn't say any of the murderous thoughts he was thinking. Instead, he tried to refocus on his efforts to kill her. If she won't drink poison, I'll coat my blade with it, he promised himself. Or maybe I'll invent the world's first syringe and inject her with it.

The mere fact that he had to give that bitch what she wanted after everything had happened galled him and made it very hard for Lucas to sleep that afternoon. Even with how tired he was and the black-out curtains blocking out the light, he tossed and turned pretty much all day.

He kept trying to change the subject. He tried to figure out how many points it would cost to max out an attribute with just points instead of potions before eventually deciding it was unworkable. He also tried to think about which reagents he was going to use as his baseline to try to make a potion of +24 endurance.

Neither was very good at taking his mind off his anger since all roads lead back to what he planned to do with his potions. Upgraded abilities and upgraded potions were both just means to an end. "Honestly, I'd be happy just making healing potions for sick kids and booze for fun if I could, but that's not really an option, is it?" he asked himself.

It was his own fault. He should have known better. No good came from making or dealing drugs; that was as true here as it was back on Earth. The problem now wasn't just that Skylara was a murderess. It was that she was a junkie.

Even if she hadn't burned down Parin Manor, even if she'd been perfectly well-behaved for the rest of his life, then shortly after his death, she was still going to be looking for her next fix a few days after he was gone with all the violence she could muster. If Lucas keeled over tomorrow from a heart attack because he was testing his new potions too hard, she'd probably burn down the whole countryside inside of a year because she couldn't get her Lwynthall. While that wouldn't be his fault, he'd certainly be to blame.

That was the image that he finally fell asleep to after he'd finished dwelling on all this. He'd have to kill the dragon not because she'd wrong him but because one day she'd burn down the world for one more high. It was almost karmic.

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