Balancing and Baking

Just a few hours later nearing midnight, I finally received the notifications that the rest of my clan had arrived.

Only a few minutes after that my familiars arrived on foot after kicking up tall streaming plumes of dust and debris in their wake. Neither they nor I said anything when they arrived, I simply raised one of the potions I was working on and gestured toward the kitchen area fully loaded with leftovers.

My familiars split a pie between them and loaded a plate with all of the meat they could carry before taking seats near the lab area to watch my assistants and I work. Originally, Lil was only slightly interested in picking up the basic alchemy skills for potions, transmutation, and enchanting and Go himself was second only to Stonewall in having a magic-weak character.

Giants and orcs had several times more physical members than magical but nature. Based on this, I was currently training their brewing and refining skills to reach levels similar to Oleander and merch in ability. Using the supplies they carried like mules and my own recipes, it only took the last four hours to upgrade their brewing skills to the next stage.

Thanks to Melpomene's ability to acquire permissions, I was able to use a combination of qualifiers as well as written consent from Lil and Conansson to get a look at their stats and skills. Both of them had to provide this consent on the spot before I had access to their character information so I could only hope that Conan did not go around telling everybody that I was peeping their games.

Regardless, I was able to make a quick table containing all of their profession titles and corresponding skills. With this cheat sheet, I was able to work out a few methods for further testing the divine titles. Lil and Go had different blacksmithing levels because Lil favored making smaller sales weapons while Go worked on whatever he was given the materials for. However, all of their weapons had the same stats as one another.

Peeping at their characters showed me a great deal of valuable information, namely that all of their blacksmithing skills were at the journeyman level and the difference between the highest and lowest level was only eleven. Unsurprisingly, Go had the highest blacksmithing level among my companions and Lil herself was the third lowest.

Only Agnes and Conansson had lower levels than her for crying out loud!

In answer to the question of how the divine title made Lil and Go make the same qualities of equipment I had three main speculations. First, all of my assistants made items that were some percentage lesser to my own. Second, all of my assistants made items that were of the quality of the highest leveled assistant. Third, all of my assistants made items of a quality based on the average of their accumulative skills.

Making potions showed me that the first rule did not apply because even I could not make a 'normal' health potion of the same quality that Oleander had been producing recently. This, of course, disproved the second theory as well because none of us could make a three-ounce potion that recovered one thousand health overall.

In fact, I could only achieve one thousand health by using cordyceps in a five-ounce potion. Asking the others to achieve anything on that level with our current materials and means was like asking a pig to fly. Since Oleander's character was part dryad I was certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had something extra she could use in her potions as well.

Working on their alchemy skills, though, I learned some of how the remaining crafting rule worked.

As my two assistants kept bleeding themselves dry under my strict supervision, the quality of their potions in general began to rise as if in pursuit of Oleander's abilities. The fact that both of them could rise in quality quickly with only a few levels at a time proved that their abilities were being supported by the others and myself rather than being controlled.

Now, my current favorite mules were finally allowed to rest and relax after all but being forced to refine materials and make potions. It would still be a while yet before the others arrived with the overloaded wagon they had decided to bring along. Despite the fact that the wagon slowed them down I was honestly grateful they brought it with them.

More that they brought along all of our surplus crafting materials and left all of the equipment I was worried about behind. Just between the three of us who had been waiting on them for hours we had managed to build up a large stock of potions to sell as well as some weapons for us and the clan. Now we could all make more, together!

Everyone who had only just arrived initially thought they would get to sit down and celebrate while bugging me about the place's backstory but were in for a rude awakening. As soon as Papi tried to break out some alcohol I offered to pour the first round before stashing the entire bottle in my character inventory through my belt. Then I told them that we had work to do.

To keep them busy while they ate and give the lead mules more time to rest their characters, I went ahead and told them about everything that happened while I was left alone. It was only around that time when the others actually noticed that I got a new body. They were all so busy worrying about how to enjoy themselves that they would not even notice if I had shaved my head!

I was not even wearing my helmet right now! Lil and Go had decent excuses because I had put them to work for hours on end to the point where they probably hated just looking at me. They were excused but everybody else was disappointing.

I could only shake my head sadly while the others broke out in questions and exclamations, picking up on the differences upon hearing about how mass Devour recreated my body from the ensuing colony. I simply told them the flavor text was crystallized mana using carbon, calcium, and iron to replicate various forms of organic solids or fluids.

Go and Lil already knew that the replicated liquid was just a perpetual motion of misaligned crystals waiting to find alignment when exposed to oxygen. Finer points like those, though, were kept like cards in my sleeve because I wanted to rush things along.

"See that stack of recipes on the round table in the middle of the lab?" I ask while nodding my head in the general direction of the lab behind the table they had gathered around. "Those stations are set up for you guys. Agnes, Conan, Oleander, you guys are dragging the others down in smithing so you're with me. Lil, Go, you guys go relax looming up some canvas and carry the tailoring average while you're at it."

Leading my three new mules over to the smithing pavilion which had already been set up with numerous small stacks of sword bars that came in ten- and twenty-pound sizes. "On either side of your anvils are different stacks of swords. The stacks on the left are all blessed steel and the stacks on the right are normal steel. For now, use half of the ten-pound stacks on the left to make ten-layer fuller swords while incorporating magic and the other half to make one-hundred-layer swords. When you're done, make all of the left side twenty-pound bars into ten-layer swords."

Leaving with a cheerful smile and a warning about not using Quick Craft, I walk over to take a quick review of the others as they started out refining their materials in bulk. This was actually the easiest and laziest part of the process since the system handled the preservation aspects when the plants and parts became loot. Because of this, they probably thought that they would be able to drag out time and try to go to sleep soon.

Instead, they were just giving themselves an estimated five hours of steady potion making.

Gathering up the group's familiars to help Lil and Go with mass producing the various spider silk canvas we need, I start pacing a circuit around the camp spending around twenty minutes at a team in each area keeping my own levels up to par. In twenty minutes I could easily cycle through a set of five ten-pound, ten-layer blessed swords crafted from ancient steel by itself. Each of these handmade swords did sixty-six physical damage and one-ten MATK on top of twenty-percent blessings.

At the potion stations I worked on crafting one of Oleander's prized recipes of a stamina boosting potion. Since there was no way for someone like me to actually improve upon Oleander's recipe I simply made a personal stock using cordyceps. The original recipe had the effect of 'doubled stamina for thirty minutes' but the cordycep enrichment extended the duration to an hour while increased the effect to '2.5xStamina'.

Why they rewrote it in such a confusing manner, I will never know, but then again I constantly had to remind myself to stop asking questions to begin with.

Since looming and lining canvas was a lot more time consuming than I had imagined, I only hung out around there overseeing the familiars who were mostly working independently of Lil and Go. Mostly because they were hardly working at all, taking numerous short breaks after looming out only a few yards of cloth every time.

Being mad at them was impossible considering I had already worked them so much earlier, but I could still be upset with my own laziness for not being willing to stay there and work with them.

Over the course of the next few hours, I made two full stacks of energy potions that came in a two-ounce vial and were crudely mixed into my personal healing potions. For swords, I crafted thirty blessed ancient ten-layer swords of ten-pound bars and thirty more of twenty-pound bars who came out with eighty-six damage. Oddly enough, these names were now a silvery color with a purple gleam as if to show that they were closer to legendary than epic.

After this even I was tired enough to let everybody else go to sleep after cleaning up their areas and storing the leftovers in their player inventories to keep them edible. The others stayed awake for a while, checking through their skills and the rest of the in-game system before finally heading into the command ten to find somewhere to sleep among the partitioned areas along the inner walls.

Bright and early the next day was when I hopped up like an energizer bunny from my bed of goblin hides on the ground, swiftly making my rounds through the inside of the tent waking the others. The others were all already awake but, like in reality, they were lazing around enjoying the inactivity. Until I told them that I would be making breakfast.

Keeping my end of the threat, I left the command tent ahead of the others to get to work on CRAFTING breakfast. As much as they probably expected me to make something wild and entertaining or downright questionable, I planned to keep things quick and easy. With the help of normal food ingredients from the wagon, food would be ready in less than an hour.

Gathering together the tools and ingredients I would need from the kitchen, wagon, and my inventories, I quickly set about dicing ice bird breast meat into numerous smalls cuts and cubes before dumping it all in a large and flattish wok kind of pan with a thick wooden handle. While the meat was cooking, I got to work mincing and crushing a large variety of different seasonings and herbs with various magical and mundane properties.

Mixing a third of this into the giant pan of frying chicken by carefully shaking and flipping in small portions at a time, I once again leave the chicken to fry in its own thin but copious oils. Scooping and scraping the remaining seasonings from the large quartzite tabletop in the kitchen and into a large porcelain mixing bowl, I take up one of several nearby five-pound bag of the game's all-purpose flower to start mixing into the bowl of wet and sticky vegetation blend.

Adding only a few cups of water and some eggs to the bowl containing twice as much flour as herb blend and mix it into a dense herb dough before splashing out copious amounts of flour onto the table. Dumping the dough out onto the table, I immediately begin punching and slapping the dough into a single large mass before rapidly but lightly punching the dough with a steady torrent of cycling jabs.

Surprisingly, a combo counter actually appeared and rose above ten within the first three second, causing me to slow down in my steady sweeping of cycling fist striking the front edge of the top and causing the back to stretch and mushroom outward. After the twelve percent increase set in at five strikes, the sixteen-pound blob of dough began to mush and distort too much in the wrong areas and directions. However, in only about twenty seconds I had managed to knead and stretch the dough out into several feet of broad and thick flat dough.

Cutting off roughly a pound of crudely stretched dough with a swipe of one stretched finger across the top of the table, I lightly slap and stretch it again to make a one-foot by one-foot square. Hurrying to the chicken to flip and shake several times and check the contents, I find that most of the originally pale meat was now mostly completely white with some areas around the edges that had become translucent and opaque.

Draining the pan with a slightly smaller pans lid to hold most of the meat in place, I empty the pan's fluids into a collection of small metal earns. The herbs alone had a large range of values and the meat itself had descriptions that boasted about having its own magical properties to different kinds of mages. The herbal grease alone was worth recycling if not using in making potions or even selling.

Letting the meat sit off to the side of the stove I was cooking it on, I return to the table to cut the slightly risen and shrunk square down the middle before wrapping and folding into envelope sleeves. Easily and swiftly chunking apart a small wedge of cheese, I take turns every other minute between preparing sleeves and shaving small chunks of cheese until I had used half of the dough.

Ignoring the dough, I use a small pair of tongs to load the sleeves with meat and cheese before finally folding the ends closed. Once the sleeves were filled I used the ice bird grease to oil up a giant baking tray to keep the sleeves from sticking. Entering the oven at only twenty minutes after I started, I cut out the rest of the dough into long loaves to place on their own tray and go in the oven roughly five minutes later.

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