Free Web NovelChapter 247: A Dangerous Miracle
Zhang Xi closes her eyes after the first sip.
For a moment, I think she’s measuring acidity, absorption, OXI stability, or some other technical detail a veteran Silver Fang healer would catch where I only see liquid OXI in a vial. Then she opens her eyes and smiles in a way so wide, so clean, that for a second it looks like I’d just saved hundreds of children from her orphanage with a single potion.
"This isn’t only OXI replenishment," she says, looking at the vial as if it were a relic too small for its own miracle. "The taste... it warms the heart."
Oliver, who until then had been trying to hold a responsible-manager posture, looks at me as if that sentence had raised the selling price by twenty percent.
"Don’t drink too much," I warn. "If your OXI is already full, it can still throw you into Overdrive."
Zhang Xi blinks, then studies the vial with renewed respect. "Even without rejection?"
"No rejection doesn’t mean no limit. Water doesn’t reject anyone either, but try breathing under it."
Veric lets out a low laugh.
Rhayne, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to find anything funny. She’s staring at the vial in Zhang Xi’s hand with wide eyes and a concentration so intense it starts to look dangerous. Zhang Xi notices before I do and passes the vial to her carefully.
Rhayne takes it with both hands.
"Just one sip," I say.
"I know."
She drinks.
The effect is immediate. I don’t know about her OXI, but on her face it’s obvious. Rhayne freezes with the vial near her mouth, her eyes going even wider. Then she looks at the liquid, looks at me, looks at Zhang Xi, and with the most serious expression she can produce, hugs the vial against her chest as if someone just trusted her with a rare dragon hatchling.
"Is this medicine?" she asks.
"Technically."
"Then why does it taste like dessert made of methamphetamine?"
"That was strange and very specific. Anyway. Don’t get addicted."
Rhayne squeezes the vial a little tighter, as if I’d threatened to tear it away from her. "I don’t get addicted to things."
Veric looks at her.
Rhayne looks away. "Not to many things."
Oliver raises a hand before anyone offers him the vial. "My OXI’s full, and I still need to finish the packaging line without starting to see colors that don’t exist."
Veric doesn’t try it either. He already knows the taste and the effect, and there’s a rare kind of discipline in not drinking something valuable for pleasure alone when you understand what it could become in the right hands. Or maybe he just wants to look superior. With Veric, the two options usually share the same face.
More vials begin coming off the runic boiler, slow but steady. The clear liquid runs through the final filter, fills the flasks, and moves to a packaging crate where two Drowneds fit corks, simple seals, and provisional labels. It isn’t a perfect line yet. Some hands tremble too much. One worker checks every step as if handling explosives. Another takes longer than he should to fit each vial into the crate, but no one complains.
The first batch doesn’t need to be fast. It needs to be born without disaster.
Unlike Scales, the LDP doesn’t depend on the system interface to work. It’s alchemical absorption of stabilized OXI, not a direct command to Ocean’s Law. That means Drowneds can use it too. Carefully. With no system to organize each drop for them, excess is still excess, and Thirstfall isn’t a world known for protecting people from their own choices. In a reality where someone can be devoured the moment they step out of a safe zone, regulating medicine feels like a joke told at the wrong time.
"How much can we make today?" I ask.
Oliver looks at the shift board, then at the boiler. "If nobody drops anything, if the second boiler keeps its steam rhythm, and if the rookies stop asking me infinite questions I already answered, maybe four hundred. With luck, half the thousand-unit target."
"Good start."
"It’s half."
"Half on day one is a start."
He doesn’t look convinced, but he accepts it, because there are still twenty people watching him like his opinion sets their wages.
I let the production run a few more minutes. The sound of vials being fitted into crates has a small, almost humble rhythm, but to me it sounds like something else. Not just glass. Logistics. A battle hospital. A healer with enough OXI for one more surgery. A Drowned drinking something that needs no system to work. An advantage my first life never had.
When the first crate is ready, I take the twenty vials.
"Now you need to see where the money came from."
Veric narrows his eyes. "Red Squid?"
"No. Dragging everyone to Red Squid just for a demonstration would be asking Thomas Vale to get creative."
Rhayne hands the vial back to Zhang Xi with an almost visible reluctance. "Then where?"
"Somewhere with a duct dirty enough to prove my point, and an owner annoying enough to advertise it if he likes it."
Oliver frowns. "Simon?"
"Simon."
Simon’s chemistry-and-alchemy shop sits on a street that always seems damp, even when it doesn’t rain, which means the ducts get dirty fast. When we walk in, Simon is behind the counter, sorting powders into small envelopes with patience, not for customers, but because he loves money.
He lifts his eyes to me, and to everyone trailing behind me.
"Sands," he says. "If you came to sell a miracle, the charlatan shelf is in the back."
I set the crate on the counter. "Brought twenty."
Simon looks at the crate. Then at me. "Twenty frauds?"
"Twenty miracles and a promise kept. This is the LDP. Do whatever you want. Sell it, raffle it, give it away to important clients, pour it on your head if you’re feeling artistic. Just advertise it, and give me a direct line of credit and raw-material supply."
He pulls out a vial, holds it to the light, and removes the cork with a care that pretends to be disinterest. Simon is a Drowned, and that matters. He can’t simply eat Scales like a Diver and wait for the system to do the rest. For him, every promise of OXI comes with a lie, a poison, or a hidden price.
He smells it. "Smells like candy."
"Thank you."
"It wasn’t a compliment."
"I know it was. Don’t be shy." freewebnovel.cσ๓
Simon takes a tiny sip.
The sarcasm dies on his face like a candle thrown into the sea. He stands still, eyes fixed on the vial. Then he looks down at his own chest, as if expecting some bad reaction to rise from it. Nothing comes. Only clean OXI spreading with no rejection, no acid weight, no taste of cheap survival that most potions carry.
"Holy shit," he says.
Rhayne puts a hand over her mouth to hide her laugh.
"Technical assessment?" I ask.
He clears his throat, recovering his posture. "Technical enough." Simon then closes the vial with more care than he opened it. "You could get rich off this."
"I know."
"No, Sands. Actually rich. The kind that starts collecting enemies who wear expensive perfume."
Simon stares at me for a few seconds and realizes I’m not joking. Maybe for the first time since I walked into his shop, the sarcasm can’t find its way back right away.
"A new era of Thirstfall is beginning," I say.
The words come out bigger than I intended. Maybe because they’re true. Inside, I think of the first tide collapse. The routes that broke. The hospitals with no OXI. The guilds choosing who deserved to be saved. If the LDP and the rune are enough to change a part of that story, even a small part, then maybe the second life isn’t just repetition with more preparation.
"In exchange," I continue, before the silence turns too solemn, "I want to clean the shop’s air ducts."
Simon blinks. "You want to do what?" frёeωebɳovel.com
"Clean your ducts."
"That’s disgusting, hard, and dangerous."
"For someone who makes a potion this good, don’t you think I’ve got a card up my sleeve?"
He looks at the vial, then at me. Curiosity beats resistance, exactly as I expected.
"If you blow up my machine room, I’m charging you."
"Fair."
The machine room is small, cramped, and hot. The main engine feeds a few OXI-powered devices; Simon’s shop is more chemistry than industry. Even so, the duct carries some accumulated residue. Nothing like the monsters of the Red Squid Slums, but dirty enough for a demonstration.
Simon stays in the doorway. Everyone else comes in with me.
"Watch the anchor points," I tell Zhang Xi.
She steps closer without touching anything.
I build the rune slowly, slower than I would alone. Thin paper, three anchors, conductive blood, stabilization curves, flow correction. Zhang Xi follows every motion as if reading a prayer written in a foreign language. Rhayne looks fascinated, and Veric stares at the duct like he’s already calculating how much money sits inside every building in Frost.
When I activate it, the air in the room pulls inward for a second.
The sludge trembles on the duct walls, loses its pasty shape, and begins condensing into small bright particles, sucked into the rune. The bad smell vanishes first. Then comes the dry sound of impurity letting go of metal. The duct clears in irregular lines, not perfect, but clean enough to breathe without making a face.
The system responds.
[You received 8 Shards.]
Eight Shards drop into my hand, already waiting beneath the drawn rune. Little, compared to the Plates of Red Squid. A lot, for a small shop that hadn’t paid a single Scale for the service.
Veric lets out a low whistle. "So that was it."
"That was a sample."
Zhang Xi looks at the clean duct, then at the Shards in my hand. The smile from the LDP doesn’t return. What surfaces now is more serious, almost sad.
"I was wrong about you, Dryden Sands."
"About which part?"
"You won’t just do things differently this time." She lifts her eyes to me. "You’re going to change the world."
Her voice drops, almost a whisper.
"And that is extremely dangerous."
