Doping Potions

Stepping into the [Alchemist's Emporium], Asher realized that it looked far from what he had ever imagined it to be. The image Asher had in his mind was of dusty old shelves with mystical potions lying on it and an old man with a big white beard - Gandalf, sitting on the counter.

He couldn't have been any more wrong. Th-this looked exactly like a grocery store! There were people navigating their way through the big halls, taking whichever potion they required which were wrapped in neat little boxes. Heck, if I hadn't triple-checked the store's name after exiting the store to verify if I even was in the correct place, I'd have believed it if someone told me this was a grocery store! A grocery store.. one with groceries worth millions and billions.

One of the hidden features of the Divine Body I found out about by using [Divine Eyes] on myself was that I could consume infinitely more resources than anyone else. Simply put, everyone's body had a limit to how many potions they could take for boosting their progress rate or breaking through. If this wasn't the case, the sons and daughters of those rich people from the top guilds would probably have spent tens of billions and already become some big-shot [A] rank by now.

Now, you could say that I could take hundreds of times the potions others could take to increase my progress rate. This decided my course of action for the next 2 months. I'd buy a bunch of potions and take them over that period of time while making preparations for the theory part of the entrance exams. I didn't want to encounter a situation where I aced the practical test but flunked the written one.

While I was the author of the novel, I had always focused more on the fights. Neither would any author write the questions that actually came in an entrance exam, nor would any reader want to read that. As implied from my novel's name 'The Path to Transcending Mortality', I focused more on the journey of Alex in increasing his ranks.

The ranks of Potions went on from, [Rankless] to, [Common], [Uncommon], [Rare], [Advanced], [Legendary], [Mythical], and finally, the potions that while existed couldn't be brewed by Humans at the moment due to the lack of enough time to research the process, namely [Ex] rank. Each potion's rank was also subdivided into Minor, and Major subranks. A minor [Mythical] rank potion was useful for a [SS] rank, and the major was useful for [SSS] ranks. Similarly, a minor [Legendary] rank potion was useful for [S] ranks, and a major one would be beneficial to [SS] ranks. On the other hand, any potion below the [Legendary] rank wouldn't work on Awakeneds [S] ranked or above other than potions that brought about short-term effects such as a healing potion, invisibility potion, etc.

This meant that a major [Advanced] rank potion with long time/permanent effects would work on [A] ranked, while a minor would be effective on [B] ranks and so on. There also existed some higher-ranked potions which could be used by the lower ranks such as the legendary ranked [Transformation] and [Bloodline] potions. Though, these potions were quite rare and most [Legendary] potions would directly kill any lower-ranked Awakened upon consumption.

While Asher's [Divine Body] was resistant to these, at most he could only consume a major [Rare] ranked potion meant for [C] ranked Awakened. Asher proceeded to buy several Major [Rankless] and Minor [Common] potions for himself. With this his purpose in visiting the [Hidden Twilight] was finally achieved.

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{A few hours later}

Asher had reached his home and decided to invest several hundreds of billions of credits to short the stocks of the 8th-ranked Guild, the [Starlight Syndicate]. This was quite a risky move in itself, not in the sense that it could threaten his life but based on the fact that if he didn't play his cards right, and collect the money back at the correct time, he would suffer a huge loss.

Those guilds in the Top-10 all had several "fail-safes" prepared in case they ever suffered a huge loss. Simply putting it, in case an incident ever occurred, which made the stocks of the guilds go down, they'd employ the hidden methods they'd been saving up. These Top-10 guilds had seemingly infinite amounts of money. They were also privy to all kinds of classified secrets. These guilds all had one or two "trump cards" with them such as having researched an entirely new property of mana, which would fast forward the world's development, not just in technology but in all sorts of branches. Once they revealed to the world that they had come up with this research and made it look like they suffered a loss due to trying to experiment/research on that topic, they could easily not only recover the losses they faced but also increase the worth of their stocks at the same time.

Asher would have at most a few hours to get back the money from shorting the stocks. Luckily he didn't have much to do these days except drink potions and study for the upcoming exams.