7 The First Winter
It had been a few months since my first visit to the neighboring village. I later learned it was nicknamed "The End Village" by the people, although it didn't officially have a name. During that period, I visited the place countless times for lots of different reasons.
The first one was trade. The people in the village had products that I couldn't otherwise find in the forest, while I had products from deep in the forest that they couldn't get their hands on.
The main thing I always got was bread, yams, milk, and eggs. Those were all ingredients that I couldn't produce or find for myself. Sometimes I got cabbages too.
What I would trade for them were redberries, apples, limes, chickpeas, and boar meat. Apparently, those redback boars that appeared solely in the End Forest were a rare delicacy, so for me to bring that type of meat for a small village to feast on was a dream come true to them.
The second reason I visited a lot was for training purposes. Ever since Jackson told me I should learn the spell "Inspect Block", I spent a few days trying my best to learn it, but there was no way for me to test if it was working or not.
The spell was meant to block anyone from being able to inspect me and look at my information. It was a recommendation by Jackson since he told me some of my stats could attract the wrong kind of people.
I wanted to go to the village to ask Jackson to inspect me again and test it out, but at that point, going back and forth between the village and my home at the great tree was getting tedious. So, I decided to learn another spell that I had been reading about for a while. It seemed to be the most useful spell I could learn. "Teleport".
It proved to be one of the trickiest spells to master, and it required a lot of MP, even for short travels. That was the main problem with the spell. The further you wanted to go, the more MP you would have to spend.
MP was the energy we used to cast spells. All spells consumed MP depending on the amount of power that was infused into them. It also regenerated naturally with time, but using a lot of it would make you feel dizzy and sometimes just pass out entirely.
I knew that because it happened to me while practicing, and Yoru had to drag my unconscious body back to the house.
After a few days of practice, I was able to teleport to the village from my house without much trouble, but I never had enough MP to make the trip back, so I would stay there one night every time I visited, then teleport back home the next morning.
Needless to say, in terms of time, the spell saved me weeks that I would have spent traveling back and forth.
__________
The winter snow had finally arrived, and the forest was covered in white. Thanks to the cloak that I got from Jackson a while back, I was able to keep myself warm when exploring.
I did manage to learn a new spell called "Body Warmth," which helped me whenever the temperature dropped a bit too much for my cloak to cover.
During this time, most of the fruits and vegetables that I usually gathered were nowhere to be found.
The crops I planted next to the tree were also out for the season. Although redberries were still present, so Yoru and I picked those up.
Redback boars were still going around too, and now that I knew that the villagers loved that type of meat, we kept hunting them to give the village a small gift.
There was one new berry that Yoru found. It looked exactly like the red and green berries, but this one was white. It actually made them a bit hard to see with all the snow around the bushes. When I inspected it, it said this:
<Whiteberry:
Berry that grows exclusively in snowy forests.
Extremely sour with lots of magical properties.
Can be used for potions.>
It was another medicinal berry. However, this one didn't seem to have the same effects as the green ones.
The greenberries had healing properties, meaning that all the potions I brewed with them, along with different herbs, could help people heal their wounds. Honestly, I never got to try one, so I wasn't sure how potent they were.
The one time I tested them, I used a knife to give myself a cut on the palm of my hand, then poured the potion over the wound, and in a few seconds, it was closed.
So, as far as I knew, it could cure small cuts, but I didn't know how it would fare against a stab to the chest, for example.
Whiteberries were different. After Yoru and I picked lots of them, I started experimenting to see what kind of potion it would make.
After a few days, I managed to create a potion using the same base that I used for the greenberries one, except switching the berries, of course.
<MP Potion(+):
Creator: Ichiro
Potion that restores a large amount of Magical Power.>
"Ohhh! It's an MP potion! This could be extremely useful!" I exclaimed after inspecting the potion.
Healing potions were nice too, but I wasn't getting hurt that much for me to warrant their use. However, I was always running out of MP whenever I was training.
"Alright, Yoru, let's go pick up every single whiteberry in this forest!" I said, and Yoru replied with his hearty bark.
I spent days cooped up in my workshop on the second floor of my house and brewed hundreds of potions, then loaded wooden cases with them.
I was planning on selling them to the village. They had a drugstore, but I always felt like their products were lacking. Besides, they had a group of around 15 adventurers staying there protecting them, so the potions could be useful to them and bring some more business to the village.
I had 4 different types of potions, the "MP Potion(+)" and:
<Healing Potion(+):
Creator: Ichiro
Potion that can cure any type of wound, both superficial and internal.
Can cleanse most poisons.>
<Holy Panacea:
Creator: Ichiro
Potion that can cure any type of wound, illness, or ailment effect.
Can cleanse all poisons.>
<MP Potion:
Creator: Ichiro
Potion that restores a medium amount of Magical Power.>
Since my MP potions used whiteberries that only grew during snowy winters, I decided to make a variant using less of it.
The result was a less potent version of the potion, which was perfect to sell to other people since I kind of wanted to hoard the stronger versions for myself.
The "Holy Panacea" was also pretty tricky to make. It used similar ingredients to the "Healing Potion(+)," but it had to be brewed for way longer, and I had to use a ton of MP in the process.
I didn't really have any use for them since my body didn't get sick, and I didn't have a way to test them. Even then, I thought they could be handy if anyone in End Village got a fever, at least.
'It does say in the Inspect window that it can cure ANY type of illness, but it could just be exaggerating. I mean, what if someone was blind? Or what if they had cancer? Is it really strong enough to cure something like that?' I thought.
I didn't know the value of money in the world. I knew that they used coins made of different materials, like gold or silver, but I didn't know what they were worth.
Since most of my trades with the village were in the form of bartering, I never really had the need to use money. However, I knew that if the "Holy Panacea" could really cure strong illnesses, it would sell for a good price.
With all of that in mind, I loaded some cases with potions. The smallest case being the "MP Potion(+)" and cast "Teleport" to the entrance of the village.
