Time passed. Their profits grew, and Rhys purchased the building outright, then started shopping for their next location. In the meantime, he had a few of his underlings build a second cart, then walk the streets with it and record their sales at each location they stopped at. The more they wandered the city, the more they learned about the best places for sales. As expected, anywhere near the mage school did well, but surprisingly, so did the areas near any gate, where the adult mages who worked day in, day out, doing gods knew what for the Empire, could stop out and grab a quick salty snack.

Honey started coming in, and Rhys started selling his weak potion soda. The students took to it like flies to—well, honey, while the adults were a little more reserved to it, unused to cooled beverages or sweet potions.

Rhys frowned, thinking on it, then snapped his fingers as the answer came to him in a flash. Obviously! Adults liked soda, sure, but what did they need? What did they crave more than life itself? Coffee and energy drinks! For adults, flavor was secondary; the chemical effect on the body was far more important. So, he’d plunged back into the sewers, raided the library for potion books, and popped back out to practice stamina potions, concentrating them over and over again until the other mages made him practice outside, because the fumes were too fierce for them to focus anymore, and their hands wouldn’t stop shaking. Lira, a little more delicate to water vapors as a water sprite, insisted he not get too close to her, lest she start buzzing around the building. Using the concentrated stamina potion and the weak healing potion, Rhys developed a second drink with a higher concentration of active ingredients. It was more bitter than his soda, not carbonated, and meant to be served hot, cold, or iced, just like coffee.

Lira eyed the strange, brownish fluid from a distance as he wheeled it out for its first test run. “Are you sure about that? That stuff is downright toxic.”

“I know. Isn’t it great?” Rhys replied enthusiastically. The potion was laden with traces of impurities, of course, but even better, it was the most trashy beverage available outside of cheap beer: an energy drink. Even if his victims—ahem, patrons—didn’t get too badly impurified, they would still get physically and emotionally hooked on the upper… ahem, energy drink. Serving it in the mornings would only cement his power over them, hooking them to using it to wake themselves up. Sure, mages didn’t need to sleep, but plenty did it as a luxury, and even if they didn’t, conditioning their bodies to expect a surge of energy in the morning every day meant he could count on them to have a zombie phase every morning when he rescinded his drinks.

It was the perfect plan. He couldn’t be more excited.

“I’m not sure ‘great’ is the right word,” Lira replied, crossing her arms skeptically. “You’re strengthening the enemy.”

Rhys winked. “Exactly

.”

“I don’t get you,” she muttered, and walked away.

“Sable hasn’t said anything?” Rhys called after her.

Lira shook her head in the distance. “But I’m listening!”

He nodded. With Lira and Sable watching the tunnel, one of them a little more at a distance than the other, he could safely go peddle his new wares. He could still retreat to the shop if they sent an urgent summons and get there within a few minutes, so even in the worst case that the Water Syndicate finally stopped nickel-and-diming them and launched an all-out attack, he wasn’t too far to help. Lira and Sable were capable fighters, and that was totally discounting Mouse and everyone else in the store. All of them together could hold against almost anything in the superior defensive formation of the bottlenecked tunnel for the amount of time he would need to drop everything and run back.

He really doubted that the Water Syndicate was going to stage a front-on attack, even after their first attempted attack which ended in failure. At the end of the day, the Water Syndicate was a criminal enterprise, in the Empire, where the Empress kept calm and civility with an iron fist. If they acted aggressive, they’d get slapped down, just the same as Rhys and his people would if the Empress became aware of them. It benefitted both of them to keep things under wraps, underground, if you would, so he had no reason to expect anything but for them to attack through the tunnel.

True, the more siblings he killed, the more likely they were to launch a more risky full-frontal attack, as he slowly aggravated them more and more… Rhys pursed his lips. That was no good. He hadn’t considered that angle. People driven into a corner could do crazy things, and he was inadvertently driving them into a corner.

Then, maybe next time, we take the initiative, Rhys thought to himself. There was no reason to keep allowing the Water Syndicate to decide when and where their battles were fought. He, too, could control the time and place of battle. All he needed was a little creative questioning, and he was pretty sure he had plenty of levers to pull to make the truth come out, as it were. In fact, he could even go question one of his good farm workers… but that was a stone too far for him. Sure, he could casually ask around, but pressuring or torturing them was right out. Using a little creative aggression on a fighter in the heat of battle to coerce the location of the enemy base out of them was one thing—still reprehensible, but not utterly disgusting. Attacking those who had surrendered out of nowhere? No. That was too far. Even Rhys had to draw the line somewhere, and that was where he drew his. He might be in his villain era, but he wasn’t bad to the bone, and he really didn’t want to do anything he couldn’t proudly tell Bast about later. Now, it was true that ‘proudly tell Bast’ wasn’t much of a line, given Bast’s proclivities and general lack of care about all kinds of violence, but it was still a

line. And it was important to have lines in life.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

He thought all this as he pushed his cart along, heading out to where the fry cart was parked. The first one was still parked in front of the kitchen, but he’d moved the second to a place where lots of adult mages frequented, near the tall, featureless buildings he’d come to realize were this world’s… or maybe the Empire’s, version of office buildings. A few mages stood in line at the fry cart. At this hour, there weren’t too many of them, but there were still more than zero, which was victory to Rhys. He drew up alongside the fry cart, tossing his frontmen a smile, then started hawking his wares.

“Delicious coffee! Get a perk in the morning. Tired? Sleepy? Have a delicious pick-me-up in a cup! Hot or cold, it’s delicious either way! Morning coffee!”

It wasn’t coffee, and it was honestly disrespectful to coffee to call it coffee, but there was nothing he could do about that. He hadn’t seen any coffee beans, and while the world was large and it had tomatoes, so it probably had coffee somewhere, it probably had them somewhere far away from here. In any case, the absence of coffee beans was actually an advantage. Some enterprising young fellow would have certainly discovered them and created some kind of potion or brew out of them if they were in the area, but since there were no coffee beans to be found, these people would be totally taken aback by the idea of an energizing drink.

Well, not totally taken aback. Stamina potions were a thing, after all. His real pioneering move here wasn’t developing something new, but marketing it differently. Just like a certain fruit-based technology company, he had nothing to share that other companies hadn’t already developed, and the specs on his potion were honestly pretty watered down and weaker than actual stamina potions. But, just like a certain fruit-based technology company, he was selling it as something new and exciting, something that was truly groundbreaking: it was a drink, not a potion. You didn’t take it when you were deficient, you took it when you wanted a boost and a refreshing sip. All he had left to do was get people hooked on the brand, then raise the price, so they were locked into drinking his not-coffee and had to pay the higher price for his lower-quality goods.

It's not exactly like the tech world. I can’t exactly lock them in, Rhys knew, since with tech, one could deliberately build an entire ecosystem that deliberately didn’t work with anything else, then sell it as ‘better,’ somehow—he’d never bought into that particular scam, and didn’t understand why anyone did, when he was looking in from outside. With drinks, on the other hand, all he needed was for one person to unlock a formula somewhat like his and sell it at a lower price, and he’d lose a significant percentage of sales. Sure, people would still buy into the scam; people went out of their way to purchase Starmucks, after all, when all that coffee had going for it was the ‘prestige,’ but he wouldn’t get the same degree of lock-in one could with technology. Rather, once competition showed up, he’d have to head directly into the 1930’s, and do all the competition things outlawed in his world, like, for example, taking massive losses to offer a product at an unsustainable price, knowing that once all the other businesses went bankrupt and he dominated the market, he could raise prices again to make up for it. It wasn’t good for the Empire’s economy, writ large… but that was just a bonus, as far as Rhys was concerned.

A haggard-looking mage stumbled over and handed Rhys some coins. He traded them for a trash-paper mug, and the man sipped it, eyes rimmed by dark bags, his face pale. As the stamina drink rushed into him, he took a deep breath. The dark bags receded some, and color came back to his face. He looked at the cup, then at Rhys, and nodded in appreciation before staggering off.

Rhys smiled, then looked down at his hands. What was that? A skill had activated without his acknowledgement, one he had never expected to activate outward at all: Less is More. It had flared when the man had sipped the stamina potion, and Rhys had briefly sensed the stamina drink growing more potent for the split second of that first sip. Less is More can activate on others? He hadn’t expected that. Wait, but then… did that mean he could use less poison to inflict more damage? Fewer impurities to cause greater gunk? No, he’d already known that—but doing it without having to attack? Until now, he’d actively drank something, or actively stabbed someone, then used Less is More. But this… he simply handed a man a cup, and the skill still pumped up the stamina-boosting effect of the drink. Rhys rubbed his forehead as the full magnitude of this new discovery hit him. Inflicting Less is More on others was incredible. He could kill with a trickle of weak poison in a cup of drink that his opponent would think was too weak to harm them, and save lives with a single swallow of potion administered close to him, without him even visibly intervening. As the next customer approached, Rhys paid close attention to Less is More, pasting a big smile on his face. How far could he affect them from? How much could he affect them? How well could he target this new external skill? As the mages slurped down their stamina drinks, Rhys almost forgot to collect their coins, he was so focused on the activations of Less is More.

Almost. He still collected his gold. Gold was more important than anything else, except maybe overthrowing the Empire, and even that could be accomplished with enough gold. He was just trashy enough to know he could purchase his happiness, if by happiness he meant the downfall of the Empire.