CHAPTER 74: GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS

"That’s strange..." Vivil muttered as she brought her hand so close to her face, I almost started to worry whether she wouldn’t just smash the precious seed directly into her eye.

’Does she have eyesight problems or something?’ I thought, only to breathe a small sigh of relief when she finally lowered her hand, while still keeping it perfectly flat and still so as not to let the seed fall off.

In the mess of her workshop, if it were to slip and fall, looking for it would be a nightmare.

"What’s strange?" Selia asked, crossing her arms over her chest. "If that’s one of the methods you use on nobles to hike up the price..." her voice grew colder.

"No, that’s not it," Vivil shook her head, sending the messy ball of her curved, brown hair to fly all over the place. "It’s just that I’ve never seen this kind of a seed before."

She then breathed out before moving over to her desk...

And then swiping all of the papers off it with her left hand. Then, with her right hand perfectly still, she rummaged through the mess of her workshop before she finally found what she was looking for.

It was a simple-looking device that only revealed its insane complexity upon a closer inspection.

During a first glance, it looked like some sort of bottom half of a decorative egg on a small pedestal and a cushion at the top, good for nothing more than displaying some small pieces of expensive jewelry in it.

It was only when I took a closer look that I realized that nothing about this device was simple.

The cushion wasn’t made from some sort of expensive silk but several dozen layers of extremely thin mesh akin to what I would expect in an extremely fine mosquito net. The half-sphere wasn’t simple either, consisting of several hundred scales stacked upon each other to give the item its shape.

And from the looks of things... just by pulling one of those scales from the whole, the entire thing was quite damn likely to collapse!

This observation was already interesting in its own right... Only for Vivil to make it all the more weird when she just crudely slammed the device on her table before, with extreme gentleness, placing it down upon the meshy cushion.

"Are you alright with the price spiking quite a lot?" she asked without even turning her head away from the device, her eyes burning with mad desire that only made her look like a crazed scientist even more than before.

"How..." I attempted to ask, only for Selia to step forward and raise her hand to my mouth, covering it up before I could even finish. "Yes," she said instead, not even sparing me a single glance, with her eyes locked in on the herbalist woman.

"Good," Vivil didn’t pay any attention to either of us, her hands already operating that weird, half-egg-like device of hers.

Standing aside and just watching in silence, I could swear that she started to chant some ancient, forbidden spells while weaving the strings of fate itself around that device.

Whether she was really using magic, though? Honestly, I couldn’t really tell.

What I could tell, however, was that the device soon started to shine with a faint, bluish light that continued to grow stronger and more intense with each passing second.

The process continued for quite a while. Yet, the more intense the light of the device grew, the slower Vivil’s hands and mouth moved, as if whatever she was doing to the device was accelerating just the space around her closer and closer to the speed of light, making her appear slower than she was in reality...

Or rather, making a bubble of space around her where time flew slower than it did for everyone outside of said bubble.

"What is going on?" Slightly worried, more about the herbalist than about the seed at this point, I asked... Only for Selia’s hand to move right back to my mouth.

"Shush," she whispered, her eyes locked in on her friend, "she needs silence."

And so, we waited.

Seconds turned into minutes. And right when minutes would start turning into hours, Vivil’s movements stopped completely, ceasing into a single frame of existence as if the time within her bubble completely bugged out.

Then, the bubble burst. And in a single instant, I could somehow see Vivil execute nearly an hour-long process of both creating a spell and then instantly weaving it into the device with her fingers, all the while having her eyes locked in on the seed.

Poof!

The whole image vanished, just like the weird bubble around the herbalist.

Her face changed, from one of interest and focus to one of extreme exhaustion only accented by the fat beads of sweat rolling down her forehead.

"It’s just like I thought," she whimpered, suddenly struggling to grab a proper breath like an asthmatic during an attack. "I’ve never seen that kind of a seed before," she admitted while shaking her head. "But that’s not what you are here for, am I right?" she then added, turning her eyes towards the two of us, as if only now acknowledging our presence.

"Yeah," I nodded my head. "I want to know what it would take to have this seed grow into a proper plant. The methods, the caretaking process, even the instructions on how to judge just the right time to harvest its beans," I explained what I required.

Given the amount of money I was going to drop on this single visit, I could very well demand a proper service, couldn’t I?

"Good news, you don’t really need to care about it all that much," Vivil revealed only to then hang back in her chair and then turn her eyes up to the ceiling of her workshop. "The bad news is, it’s nigh impossible to get it to grow in this world," she added, only to gently pluck the seed out of her device and then, with extreme levels of care, pass it back into my hands. "This plant doesn’t seem to be native to this world," she revealed as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. "It comes from somewhere without a single speck of mana in the air, doesn’t it?"