This follows directly on from the end of chapter 4/start of chapter 5.
The next chapter will probably be in the past again.

Chapter 6 – Doing Something Useful.

Hongbin is still in a state of disbelief. He’d travelled for days to reach Hakyeon’s place but after spending only two days there he was off somewhere else.

In front of him Ravi is brewing several potions and Hongbin tries to follow his movements but fails a lot of the time. He was here to ‘learn some new things’ from Ravi, as Hakyeon had put it, but so far Ravi had simply been filling orders.

Hongbin wants to focus on what Ravi is doing, to try pick up some tricks – like how quickly Ravi can cut roots – and get something out of this, but his mind keeps wandering back to what Hakyeon had told him last night, that sorcerers used magical creatures in potions to make them stronger. Right now Hongbin can spot several ingredients that were definitely from animals, so did that mean that Ravi also used creatures? Did he use top-level creatures?

After nearly two hours of just watching, Hongbin works up the nerve to ask.

“Do you use creatures in your potions?”

Ravi looks surprised by the question but he doesn’t falter in his movements. He adds some sort of eyeballs to one of his potions – he’s very careful to only add seven – then stirs another potion before looking at Hongbin.

“Did Hakyeon tell you about magic?” he asks.

“Last night.”

“Ah,” Ravi mutters.

One of the potions changes from a horrible, murky brown to a pure, milky white in the space of three seconds and Ravi turns off the heat. Hongbin always hated getting potions from the cauldron to the vial or bottle. Because he didn’t know the spell yet, he had to use a pipette or ladle but it had to be the right kind so it didn’t affect the potion and he couldn’t spill it in case it was corrosive or poisonous... Ravi on, the other hand, sticks his hand right in and the bottle fills to the exact right spot, then he stoppers it and moves on to the next. Hongbin feels a little cheated.

Once Ravi has filled all of the bottles – and there were a lot – he empties the remaining potion and stretches.

“So many orders,” he grumbles, quickly making adjustments to the other potions that were still brewing.

“Are you always this busy?” Hongbin wonders.

“I supply potions to sorcerers all across the country,” Ravi says. “Sometimes the orders pile up.”

“You said yesterday that you had to send customers away, but today there’s nobody here.”

Hongbin could see the shop from where he was perched on a bench. It had shelves all around the walls and display tables in the middle. From what Hongbin could see half of the shop had ingredients and half had potions. What the shop didn’t have was customers.

Ravi rolls his eyes. “It’s brewing day. If I have the shop open then I can’t make potions like this that require heaps of attention. I make potions that take longer to brew on Mondays and Wednesdays, that’s when I open the shop.”

“Oh. Does Hakyeon know that?”

“He does. Leo does too but he doesn’t give a .”

It’s then that Hongbin realizes Ravi had never answered his question – also Hongbin had gotten distracted. He’s about to accuse Ravi of avoiding it when the older man stops everything he’s doing, glances at the clock and then sighs. He must have a small break now.

“I only use minor creatures, and even that’s because there is no substitute for them. With major creatures there’s always a substitute, it might mean having to use twenty more ingredients, but at least it can be done. Top-level creatures are – or were, I guess in some cases – used to make potions that give unnatural abilities, like breathing underwater or teleporting. They also don’t have a substitute.”

“Is that why you don’t have any deliberate magic? Because you don’t use creatures?”

It’s only after he says it that Hongbin realizes it might be a bit personal. Is he supposed to know about Ravi’s magic?

“No, I used to use a lot of creatures in my potions until Hakyeon came back. I just never developed deliberate magic.”

Hongbin wants to ask what Ravi means by ‘until Hakyeon came back’ but Ravi has returned to his potions, adding even more ingredients.

A few minutes later Hongbin’s mind is wandering again. “The book I was reading last night had potions that needed spells to work. How do you do those if you can’t do deliberate magic?”

Ravi is stirring two different cauldrons at once – at different speeds and with different intervals – but he still looks at Hongbin to answer, a smirk on his lips.

“I find a way around it, come up with an alternative method.”

“You can do that?” Hongbin asks, surprised. He’d always thought recipes were absolute.

“Of course I can do that,” Ravi scoffs, changing the direction he was stirring one of the potions.

Hongbin rolls his eyes at the cockiness. “I meant in general. I didn’t know you could deviate from recipes.”

Ravi laughs and turns the heat off on one of the potions he’d been stirring. With one hands he repeats what he’d done earlier but this time with vials. Instead of stoppering them he puts them in a stand where they smoke dangerously.

“You can’t deviate from the recipe,” he chuckles. “I can.”

That leaves Hongbin a little speechless. Ravi finishes with the potion and moves on to bottle the second. After adding more ingredients to the remaining potions he adds a lid to two of them and then stretches his arms.

“Do you know how to make bases?”

“A few.”

There were eighty-three bases. Hongbin knew seven.

“The sixth?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. Set up a silver cauldron over there and I’ll teach you how to tweak it so you don’t have to learn bases eleven and thirty-two.”

Hongbin feels his excitement grow, he was finally going to learn something useful.

Hakyeon stares at the list in front of him. A lot of the sorcerers remaining on there were his friends or people he’d met and it bothers him that they’re the people he’s going after today. At the same time he feels like they deserve it.

Leo sits up and stretches with a yawn, he’s ready to go. Hakyeon purses his lips, he knows Leo doesn’t really want to do this, that he’d rather not get involved with these people again. But he also knows that Leo couldn’t sit back and do nothing as people continued to go through what he had.

“Can you change?” Hakyeon asks.

Leo meows.

“No problem. I’ll do most of the work today then.”

He meows again.

“Don’t worry, I’ll just lay off magic afterwards for a while. Hongbin can stay at Ravi’s. Besides, we can go longer between so it won’t be as bad as last time.”

Leo doesn’t like the plan, but he doesn’t protest either. He wraps his tail around Hakyeon’s leg and in the next second they’re gone.

Go on, take a guess at what creature lets you breathe underwater *rolls eyes* creative aren’t I? I think the teleporting should also be pretty obvious.

Ravi is probably the strongest potion maker in the country/world because he doesn’t have to follow the conventions that everybody else has to.