Chapter One Hundred And Fifty Eight - I have two brothers

Leon had two brothers. These young men were not actually Leon's blood related brothers, they were Teacher Sagi's older apprentices that were still in school. Technically, if one was to consider all of Teacher Sagi's former apprentices as Leon's brothers, the youth would have found himself the youngest of a family of around forty. However, those men and women had moved on.

The oldest of Leon's two brothers was named Stygar and was a pale skinned man of about twenty four with eyes that were deep set and surrounded by hints of shadows. His hair was long and lifeless and draped partially over his face. He was also quite skinny. He was about a head shorter than Hue, who towered over both his brothers and was broad of shoulder. In fact, he could be easily mistaken as a martial artist at first glance, but he moved as slowly as he thought, so that impression would fade quite rapidly.

Leon had met both before, though they only ever spoke a few words between them, one being gloomy, one being slow and one being somewhat shy. However, both Stygar and Hue were at the Herb Hall when Leon entered with three jade bottles of Burning Blood Pills in hand.

In truth, these fifteen pills Leon had been hard pressed to make. The Cloud Fern and SongMist Moss had to be refined into a tea, the Salamander's Breath had to be divided into chopped stalk and their separated petals and the Rusted Thyme-wort needed to be dried out and crushed into a powder. Then the remaining ingredients were dissolved in the cauldron upon an extremely high heat and before they burned, the tea and poppy petals were added and the cauldron's fire had to quieten to ensure the pot merely simmered. Then and only then could the powder be added to begin the mixtures thickening and lastly as it did so, the stalks were thrown in to dissolve and spiritual energy would then help form the marbled orange pills.

However, Leon quickly realised the trickiness of each step, for that moment in which the tea should be added was but a heartbeat long and twice Leon failed to proceed onward. The first time, the burning scent indicated he'd lost the herbs already and the second time was when the tea exploded the moment it touched the bottom of the cauldron, causing a mess all over his stove and somewhat down him. Fortunately, the tea was lukewarm at that time.

And then there was the powder which if was not fine enough, simply created a clumpy mixture in the cauldron and the contents could not be saved. The other time he failed was completely his own mistake as he forgot to add the stalks at the end, so produced pills that crumbled when he tried to remove them from the cauldron. Leon lost more than half of his ingredients until he managed to get the hang of the pill and as was the nature of the small alchemist, once he had the method firmly in his grasp, he had no more issues churning out pill after pill until he ran out of ingredients.

Thus he had come to Herb Hall to get more and hopefully test whether the he could create variants or whether, as he suspected, he would need to do more to the pill due to the fact it had many more ingredients than a Burning Energy Pill; the Mothtails could not be considered its primary base in this case.

As they saw him, his senior brothers beckoned him over. "Hue and I are going to set up a stall at the festival," Stygar informed him. "It's your choice if you join us, you don't have to bother."

"It's n-n-no b-bother," Leon mentioned. He knew his Master wished for him to do this, he had already hinted so. "What will you t-t-trade?"

"Pills," Hue said simply. Hue was a pure, but uninventive alchemist. He would reproduce pills to a good or high quality without difficulties, he could quote any of the ingredients and methods of pill refinement that he knew of without fail, but he could only focus on this one path. Adding to his knowledge of pills with things like horticulture or medicinal cooking would just confuse him. That said, his pills were in some demand as he very rarely failed to produce what he was asked for.

"And rare potted herbs," Stygar added. He was studying the additional path of farming herbs and had cleverly found ways to raise a few herbs that needed stringent conditions. These were his babies, thus he would be unlikely to part with them, but that did not mean he had no seedlings of less precious herbs to trade with.

"I d-d-don't have any rare h-herbs," Leon pondered, although he supposed raising the five blossom daisies to it's fourth flowering was already quite rare. However, if he tried to dig one up, who knew if it would survive the trauma to flower for the fifth and last time. "I can pr-pr-pr... make some p-pills and p-p-potions, b-but m-mostly healing ones."

"That's good," Hue said, but didn't elaborate, leaving that task to his smaller, older brother.

"What he means is that healing pills are always welcome at festivals," Stygar said, "though you might not get much for them." Leon indicated that he understood. "The Festival is in two weeks, so there's not much time left."

"Our home is there," Hue's conversational leap had both men pausing for a moment and Leon followed the length of his pointing finger to note he was pointing at a large hut, that could be seen barely from the window, standing between two large evergreens.

"Oh, I guess you can visit," Stygar said, figuring out what his large brother wanted to say, "if you really need any help or anything."

"You share a p-place?" Leon asked curiously.

"Yeah," came the reply, but there was nothing else added. The two older brothers then gathered their herbs and went on their way. Leon proceeded to change his pills for herbs, but decided to get bundles in order to make Blood Pills and Still Mind Pills. Then he thought about it a bit more and asked for herbs for certain healing tonics and balms, namely ones he'd seen in Ursam's shop and become curious about. He believed that in this school, they would definitely be sought after.