Chapter 11: Lost.

A long day had passed; more and more clients kept coming to the clinic since the day I reattached that guy's arm. If only I remembered his name...

Anyway, the laboratory was calm and silent as I kept doing my things, distilling a very special product that I had decided to recreate from my old world.

Jasmine was there, looking at me working since I had shown highly unusual concentration in my current project, but it was finally complete and it was time to showcase my newest jewel to the world.

"Hey Jasmine, look what I made!" I exclaimed loudly from absolutely nowhere, startling the girl.

She looked at me with narrowed eyes, but I didn't care; I just raised my five-liter volumetric flask filled with a clear, whitish liquid. It wasn't the ideal flask, but I had bigger priorities.

She sighed after calming down, certainly thinking of hitting me for startling her, but she eventually desisted. "What is it?" She asked in resignation.

"This is an energy drink—a magical one!" I exclaimed, but it was evident that she had barely understood anything more than before.

"With this, I will be able to work more and sleep less while at the same time stopping the tiredness from taking over and making me less productive!" I explained.

"Huh."

She clearly wasn't impressed at my creation. I had never been the type to drink coffee; it was too bitter for my tastes, but this?

This was going to be sweet, and I like my drinks sweet.

The raw material was a mixture of indigenous energetic herbs. I had come to know that the local doctors used it as an energetic remedy from an old lady that passed to the clinic. I treated them to extract the most of the useful stuff and then purified and separated the different ingredients with the green tatto on my hand.

All this mystical mumbo-jumbo was definitely useful, I had to admit.

What I had in my hands was pure energetic extract, and from here I was going to pour it into a big water container and add all sorts of good-tasting stuff that I had taken from the herbs.

The herb contained a lot of weird energy stuff; I hoped it was going to do something cool, but there was only one way to know.

But then a realization came to me. I looked at the flask and pondered.

What if I drank it? Pure energy.

This was definitely a bad idea.

But there was also the magic stuff inside; what if it was actually a good idea?

So I poured a little of the thing in a glass—definitely more than I should have—but if I tried too little, then I wouldn't get any effect, right? Especially since my body was strengthened and my metabolism sped up from cultivating.

"Jasmine, this is a bad idea."

"What is?" She asked back, raising an eyebrow in confusion.

How did I pass from being overexcited to being so solemn? She might be wondering, but I just downed the glass and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

"Well, that was disappointing." Then I saw a dark blue dragon trying to eat me.

Colors, many colors

Then I ran away, the dragon chasing me. Where did Jasmine go?

I had no idea.

Why was the dragon changing color, and why did it have feathers now?

Why is it red now and all bird-looking now?

The world kept shifting; the bird stopped being a bird, turning into a looming shadow that seemed to eclipse everything else; millions or years passed in an instant as everything around me turned to dust; I felt a gaze on me.

Then I woke up.

Somewhere.

With the worst hangover of my life.

"I'm never doing that again." I mumbled while holding my head. I noted to myself that next time I made something with that weird, profound energy in it, I was going to try it on someone else.

Maybe Jasmine would be a good test subject; it would be fun to see the little girl freak out after trying hallucinogens.

I sat up and yawned, "You finally calmed down, it seems." I heard a feminine voice say from somewhere that I saw a tree in front of me, so naturally I assumed that it was the tree that was talking. This world was weird; why not a talking tree?

"It's the first time I've met a talking tree; I envy you so much." I replied.

Jasmine hit me on the back of my head, snapping me from my drug-induced stupor.

"This princess thought you woke up, but it seems that you're still in your dream." She said it, her eyes filled with disappointment.

"I'm awake; I'm fine. Thank you for caring for me, mighty master." I chuckled while holding my head.

"Good." She said, but apparently it was time for a more important question: "Why would you envy a tree?"

"Why wouldn't I envy a tree?" I asked back, incredulous that she didn't understand how good it was to be a tree. "First of all, they aren't sentient; they are just there, doing their thing, living the life by basking in the sun, while I have to worry about stuff, work, eat, help people, think, while they just stand there and live more than I will ever be able to, absolute bliss."

The girl looked at me, probably asking herself if I had gone insane and burned my brain from raw chemical-induced hallucinations, and maybe I did burn it, but it was long before that I had been insane.

How could any sane person just shoot some random pure extract of magical and chemical energy, meant to be taken in low doses? Maybe I didn't actually know what the doctors of this world would suggest about pure energetic extract.

But, from experience, I would say that it wasn't a good idea. After all, I was pretty sure that I had made love with a bird on fire in one part of the hallucination; that can't be a good sign, especially since it was one of the only things that I remembered.

"It's not my fault; stop looking at me like that!" But she didn't stop; she kept standing there, judging me. "The intrusive thoughts won; I promise I will be more careful next time."

I was lying; I definitely wouldn't be careful, ever.

But she bought it, I hope, because she just chuckled and let go of the matter: "You're a weird person, disciple."

"I hope so; my mother always said that normal people were boring, and I wholeheartedly agree," I said back with a smug smile on my face, as if what I said was some profound secret of the world. "By the way, where are we?"

"I would love to know too, but as I can't spend all my time out in the open, I was forced back into the Sky Poison Pearl; I only came out now, so we are both lost." She mused, pondering our situation.

"This isn't good; I have to go back to work; the old lady will beat me with her cane again!" I joked, not nearly taking the situation as seriously as I should have been. "Oh well, I'm sure we'll find a way back, isn't that right?"

We did not find a way back.

Hours later, after aimless wondering among a sea of trees, Jasmine finally snapped, "Don't you have anything useful inside the Sky Poison Pearl's storage space?"

"Honestly, I keep forgetting to put anything useful in it. I keep saying to myself that I would do it later, but when later comes, I forget to do it." I explained that it was a problem that everybody faced.

She sighed while massaging her forehead in apparent disappointment: "Maybe I shouldn't have drugged myself with hallucinogens, huh? The more you know, "So you don't have anything, nothing at all?"

"I got a few things," I said as I mentally rummaged between all the trash that I just had laying inside of the thing.

A box of unused socks is useless.

The map from months ago was maybe useful, but we were inside a sea of trees, and I wouldn't be able to find anything anyway since the damned map maker didn't put direction indications, only very intricate and detailed drawings of turtles.

I had a bunch of gray pebbles that looked uncannily similar to each other; where did they come from?

Some eggs, so at least I had something to eat, so it was a plus, at least.

Oh, the weird invisible grass; I had forgotten about it.

"I got this; is it useful in any way?" I asked while taking the energy-wrapped blades of grass out of the green world and displaying them in all of their disappearing glory, hoping that the girl knew anything about them.

Her eyes dilated, and she gasped in marvel, "The Star Concealing Grass!" I rolled my eyes at the pretentious name, but kept listening anyway: "It's extremely rare, and according to legend, it has the capability to hide itself from all sources. The Sky Poison Pearl is the only artifact that can turn this simple grass into the legendary Star Concealing Pill, a pill capable of perfectly hiding a person from all senses!"

That was a very detailed explanation, but, "How do you know that?"

"I am a princess; it is only natural for one such as I to know of these things." She explained, smugness evident in her words.

"No, how do you know about the pill thingy? Didn't the green thing appear only once, three thousand years ago, or whatever? How could you know that it can do that?" I specified that, because it honestly made no sense to me, she should at least try to keep her story straight.

"That doesn't matter," she snapped back. "What matters is that you need to refine the Star Concealing Pills as soon as possible; it could be more than enough to save your life from many unexpected situations."

"Ok, mom." I replied, but I had no idea how to do what she asked me to do; maybe it worked in the same way that it did the other times: send the energy through the green realm and touch the grass with it.

It didn't work.

I sent the grass back into the green world and tried again, this time with more intent. I mentally shouted at this piece of sh*t of a green world to do what I wanted it to do; otherwise, I would cut my arm off and...

I worked—nothing that a few threats couldn't savage.

Now, only a small pill remained of what was once an entire blade of grass; all of the impurities that were in the grass, all the earth residues, all the water, and everything else magically disappeared.

I hoped they were actually gone, since the only other alternative was that they were all inside the pill.

Bad thoughts put aside, I looked at the other blade of grass, the last one remaining, and decided that it would be my next test subject.

"Done," I stated, causing a small smile to emerge on the princess' face. "What do I do with it?"

"When you need to disappear, you eat it." She replied with a seriousness that belied the sheer weirdness of what she was telling me.

This whole magical mumbo-jumbo was truly weird.

Then, we went back on the road in the hopes of finding a way back to the city. I had work to do.