He only had to glance at the bubbling flask and the surrounding ingredients to see that this was an attempt to make drugs that weren't so different from the Midnight that the Beggars had been cooking up for a while. Their guilty expressions didn't help much with that.

Alchemical Mixture (10 doses): Poison 8 (toxic), strength 3 (raging), euphoria 1 (elated), endurance -1 (lethargic), intelligence -3 (simple). Orcs blood had a fifty percent chance of causing violent nausea.

"I-I—" the first man stammered.

"We were just… uh… uhmmmm…" the second guy said in a voice that was only slightly less shaky.

"You're Heisenburgle's lab assistant, right?" Lucas asked, walking past them to look at what they were concocting. "I think I've seen you once or twice, right?"

"Th-that's us," one of them agreed.

Lucas didn't see which one. He was too busy trying to see if there was anything here worth saving. He concentrated on the mixture and looked around to see if he could find any glowing catalysts to settle this poison out before they actually tried to drink it.

"You know if you drink it like that, it's going to make you really sick, right?" Lucas said, trying to play it off as he walked past them so no one was tempted to do anything stupid. "Trust me, that's not the kind of trip you want."

"Well, uhmmm, we w-were just doing research and—" one of them mumbled.

"And just where did the idea for this research come from?" Lucas asked. It didn't look like they were trying to copy his Blue recipe. The ingredients were too off-brand for that.

"One of the men in the dungeon was ranting about catalyzing poisonous compounds to create illicit substances," the second man confessed, obviously waiting for the hammer to fall.

"Well, I take it you both know that Heisenburgle isn't the type for creative experimentation," Lucas said, crossing his arms across his chest and giving them a stern look.

Neither spoke then. They just looked at him with pleading eyes, silently begging him not to rat them out.

Lucas let the tense moment linger before he smiled and said, "Fortunately for you, I love to experiment, and I can't exactly hate on the idea of someone else making drugs, now can I?"

"But we aren't—" the first one started to protest before the shorter young man smartly elbowed him in the ribs.

"You're not, huh?" Lucas laughed as he walked past them. "Well, as long as you're not, then I'm sure there's nothing to worry about. Just don't let Heisenburgle catch you not doing anything, and I'm sure it will all be okay."

As he spoke, his hand moved in front of a row of ingredients on the weakly earth-aligned shelf while labels flicked across his gaze. There were several options that seemed compatible, but the text provided him no special insight into how it would react. In the end, he settled for Ent Blossom Pollen and grabbed it before returning to their boiling mixture. Then, after evaluating the variables, attributes, and temperature, he lowered the heat a little and then added the catalyst.

Ent Blossom Pollen (stale): Catalyst(earth aligned), +3 endurance (steady), More effective in potions of a sylvan or elven nature.

Didn't even purify the shit to leach the poison out first, Lucas thought with a sigh as he watched the potion flash with sparkles of purple and red while the new ingredient mixed. They're just asking for some nasty side effects.

The two assistants watched him silently, but Lucas ignored them. Instead, he shook his head because even after fixing it, he still didn't like how jank it was.

Narcotic potion of Lesser Rage (10 doses): Euphoria 3 (excitable), poison 2 (numbness), strength 3 (raging), endurance -1 (fleeting), intelligence -2 (brain fog). Duration: twenty minutes. More prone to angry outbursts than usual for the next hour.

You have created a Narcotic Potion of Lesser Rage and gained 56 experience!

"Great," Lucas sighed, shaking his head at the message. "Roid rage in a can."

"Excuse me?" the taller of the two asked.

"Nothing," Lucas said. "This definitely isn't good shit, and we really should throw it away…"

He didn't need to look over to his shoulder to know that their expressions had fallen. Truthfully, he didn't plan to throw it away anyway. He needed all the favors he could get, and having a couple low-level lab rats in his debt was something that would come in handy eventually.

So, instead of making good on his threat, he analyzed the mixture with his Empowered Alchemy ability.

Pure: 4% mana - Removes side effects.

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Potent: 6% mana - Increases euphoria by 20%.

Strong: 3% mana - increases strength by 50%.

Berserk: 2% mana - doubles the likelihood of experiencing a rage event.

Abundant: 10% mana - Increase yields by 33%.

Who in the hell would want to make the potion even angrier? Lucas thought as he selected the first option to remove the likelihood that either of these guys was going to go apeshit.

"Alright," Lucas sighed, cracking his knuckles after he took the inky red potion off the burner and set it on the cooling rack. "Not my best work, but I think it will work."

"Is it poisonous?" one of the young men asked.

"Everything you can make with alchemy is poisonous, especially the drugs," Lucas snapped, annoyed by the question. "the guy you were listening to in the dungeons was probably talking about using goblin bile, right?"

"Yeah, but Heisenburgle… he keeps all that stuff under lock and key for your experiments, and we had some old orc blood we were going to throw out, so we thought that maybe…"

"Mixing stuff and random can be fun, but you put the wrong poisons together, and it's going to get you killed," he sighed.

The three of them spent several more minutes talking after that. Mostly, Lucas admonished them for being stupid, and they found new ways to apologize for being stupid, but in the end, he gave them the drugs they were obviously so eager to try out. That came with a warning, though. "I did this favor for you two, but not out of the Goodness of my heart. Remember that because one day, I'm going to need a favor from you."

They promised they'd remember with more than a little fear in their eyes, and he sent them on their way with nothing but a shake of his head as he watched them run up the stairs. "I probably could have handled that better, he thought as he hopped up and sat down on a workbench, but whatever," he told himself. "I've got shit to do."

Lucas dug his notes out of his pocket, and after he reviewed them, he started to set the reagents down in a row. He didn't pay much attention to which ones would be used together. For now, he was just looking for the best raw materials he could find from the strong and weak earth-aligned ingredients.

His goal for today was a simple one. He was going to make a number of potions with relatively small boosts, and then he was going to crash out. Then tomorrow, he could test them and find out how much difference there really was in a plus one versus a plus three strength. It was a simple plan, but he was sure he'd find a way to fuck it up.

"How many?" he asked himself. "How strong? I have no idea. I guess we'll find out together."

Lucas smirked as he started to lay out the glassware and group the various reagents into different batches. He almost hoped someone was listening to him and resolved to make as little sense as possible, just in case they were.

The weakest potions he was able to make with single ingredients. Those weren't a problem. It was only slightly harder to find those without any serious side effects, given all the options he had. Really, they were hardly potions at all; they were just pinches of powder in boiling water.

Even if they were simple recipes, though, it was nice to be working on something that didn't involve drugs or death for once. It had been a long time since he'd made something that wasn't a healing potion or addictive, and he took care to make the simple potions as well as he could.

The first potion he made was basically just acorn water. It was the only reagent he could find with +1 strength and no undesirable side effects. Heisenburgle tended to stock his labs with rare and powerful ingredients, so Lucas supposed he should have been more grateful for that.

His system labeled it a Tincture of Lesser Strength as it awarded him a paltry amount of experience, which made sense, but not all of the potions after that did. He made three different Potions of Lesser Strength, a Potion of Dwarf's Blood, and two Potions of Strength that didn't even look similar as he went along, vial by vial. As he went he was peppered with little pop ups noting progress in this achievement, or a small increase in experience. He ignored those, and focused on the work at hand.

He was in the zone, and only had eyes for the potions in front of him. So far, the strangest one was that the Potion of Dwarf's blood didn't even have anything dwarf related in it. Eventually, Lucas decided that they used that adjective because of the high amount of endurance compared to strength, but really, he had no way to know for sure.

For those lesser potions, he didn't use any Empowered Alchemy. He wasn't even tempted to. The point was to make them weak, and he'd already chosen ingredients that were largely free from side effects, so there was no point. He did look at the options, though, and each time, he saw nothing out of the ordinary before he moved on to the more complex recipes.

Really, even the stronger boosts weren't all that tricky. While you couldn't mix just any two ingredients together, there were lots of things that were compatible. It was only when he tried for higher numbers that things became more complicated. Powdered minotaur horn was plenty strong on its own, but while it could be mixed with ground iron root or crushed behemoth teeth, it couldn't be mixed with both of them at the same time.

Minotaur Horn (powdered): +6 strength (unstoppable), +3 endurance (tireless), -2 intelligence (slow-witted). Strongly earth-aligned. +50% more likely to take offense/show serious stubbornness for the duration.

Iron Root (ground): +4 endurance (grounded), +4 strength (implacable), -2 agility (rooted). Strongly earth-aligned.

Behemoth Teeth (crushed): +4 Endurance (tough), +4 strength (animalistic), -1 intelligence (low cunning). Weakly earth-aligned. Potions made with this ingredient can cause the imbiber to take on monstrous features, including size changes, hair increases, and other bestial effects.

Each of those were strong ingredients, but they could only go so far. In the end, the most he managed to get before applying magic to the equation was a Potion of Greater Strength, with a mixture of ground iron root, crushed behemoth teeth, and black slime residue. That was +11, but no sooner had he done with that then he made a second batch, using the last of the Behemoth Teeth so that he could use his Empowered Alchemy to see how much stronger he could make the potion.

Behemoth Teeth (crushed): +4 Endurance (tough), +4 strength (animalistic), -1 intelligence (low cunning). Weakly earth-aligned. Potions made with this ingredient can cause the imbiber to take on monstrous features, including size changes, hair increases, and other bestial effects.

Monstrous potion of Greater Strength (1 dose): +11 Strength (monstrous), +4 endurance (bestial), +2 poison (inflammatory), -2 intelligence (primitive). Duration: 5 minutes. Strongly earth-aligned. This potion has several obvious effects, including swollen veins and a minor size increase.

+11 strength, even for just five minutes, was nothing to sneeze at, but all the rest of what he'd done had been a warm-up for this. Now, Lucas wanted to see how he could really move the needle.

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