CH 175

Episode 175 – Potion Assortment

I went through and earnestly appraised all of the plants in Green Formula. From an onlooker’s point of view, I probably looked like a guy with a screw loose, running my hand over all the plants on the display shelves. But I was having so much fun that I couldn’t help myself from going through each and every one of them, since all of them were so drastically different from one another.

After several hours of appraisal, I found that the higher the price of the plant, the more pronounced the differences were between each one. In other words, if the average level of the plants that could be collected naturally from Mount Cornello was the ‘reasonable level’ for example, then the higher the ‘reasonable level’, the greater the amount of variation.

Supposing there was such a thing as Dungeon-produced Dumbbell Weed, then I was expecting there to be a tremendous variation… But there was understandably no Dumbbell Weed on sale at Green Formula.

For now, let’s add the top three highest-level plant stalks of each species of plant into the shopping cart.

All that was left was to decide what to do with the unappraised plants…

I think I’ll buy all of them except the highly priced ones.

At the moment, there were four types of plants that were too expensive for me to afford: Spring Grass, Endurance Herb, Crack Grass, and Regeneration Herb. Regeneration Herb and Spring Grass cost more than 5 platinum coins apiece, which was 5 times the price of Immunity Herb, the most expensive plant sold at Elf’s Tears.

With that high of a price, I desperately wanted to investigate the details of their effects. But with only 2 platinum coins in my possession at the moment, I definitely couldn’t afford to buy them.

Even before I had made a whole bunch of impulse purchases at the Perfect Circle General Store, the price had already been beyond my reach. All I could do was resign myself to the fact that it wasn’t meant to be just yet.

First, I’ll check out with these plants and see how much I have left.

I could afford what was in my cart because I had been checking the price tags, but I knew that I didn’t have that much leeway left. At first, I thought that I didn’t need to worry about money because I had 4 platinum coins in my possession and could make more money with [Plant Master], but I ended up binge shopping far more than expected. Considering the amount of money that I had left, this was probably the last shop I could visit today.

Regretting for the third time that I had shopped so wastefully at the Perfect Circle General Store, I went through the check-out. The total sum of the plants purchased came out to 8 gold coins, which meant I had about 1 platinum coin and 2 gold coins remaining.

I want to keep 1 platinum coin just in case, so I guess this is as far as my shopping spree goes, I guess.

I picked up the plants after paying for them and went to the potion area. Since there was such a wide variation in the Dungeon-produced plants, I wondered if the potency of potions would also change. I couldn’t appraise potions so I wouldn’t be able to figure out the details of their effects anyway. To be honest, if they did have variations in their potency, I didn’t really want to rely on them in an important situation.

Let’s see… this is the Recovery Potion area, huh?

They were divided properly into Low-grade, Medium-grade, and High-grade, but I still didn’t know if there was variation among them. Well, I’d already verified before that the quality of the potion changed depending on the total combined level of the plants used, so there probably wouldn’t be drastic variation. For the time being, I put a Low-grade Recovery Potion into my shopping basket to investigate its effects and then started searching for unusual potions.

Magic Recovery Potion, Poison Potion, Strength Potion, Explosion Potion. The potions I knew well were lined up before me, well-stocked, and behind them was a scarce but diverse mixture of potions that I wasn’t familiar with.

As I was looking through the various potions, I became particularly interested in the Night Vision Potion. It seemed that if you drank this potion, it would allow you to see in the dark for a fixed amount of time. The Dungeon was pretty dark, and the poor visibility was a big part of what made it tough to clear, so I felt that this potion would be useful.

There were two others that seemed useful as well, namely the Springy Potion and the Agility Potion, both of which could temporarily boost physical abilities but were too expensive for me to afford. On the other hand, the two potions that reduced physical abilities for a set time, the Slow Potion and the Potion of Weakness, also seemed useful, but I couldn’t obtain them for the same reason.

After looking around for a while, the potion that seemed the most useful to me in the end was the Night Vision Potion. The price was a reasonable 8 silver coins, so I decided to buy one.

Trying to memorize what kind of potions were being sold, I paid for the Low-grade Recovery Potion and the Night Vision Potion, then went upstairs. Unlike the neatly arranged display shelves on the first floor, the second floor of Green Formula was cluttered with products like a warehouse. Many of the products were covered in a layer of dust, suggesting that they hadn’t been sold for many years due to their peculiar natures. The reason for that probably had something to do with it being hard to tell what the items were supposed to be used for at a glance, and all of them were being sold at a fairly hefty price.

I slowly wandered around the warehouse-like 2nd floor, casting cursory glances at the items on display while keeping an eye out for a brewing table.