In the span of a few minutes, Alice and Axer proceeded to haggle and argue over the nature and details of her commission.

Namely, that it was going to be an expensive pain in the ass.

"You have got to be kidding me! There's no way in hell it costs that much!" Alicia screamed in protest. "I could probably hit up an auction house and buy two Gold-tiered aether treasures at that price!"

"Woman, you want me to try and repair a scythe that had been knocked down from Gold to Bronze. Now that alone is a massive pain in the ass to pull off for even the most seasoned of weaponsmiths, but this thing is also a mix of two incredibly different attributes that uses materials that hadn't been seen in years," Axer defended himself. "Acquiring the material alone will be a pain in the ass even through the questionably underground channels. Hell, I'm fairly certain some of them might've gone extinct!"

"That still doesn't justify that high of a figure!"

Alicia had brought Alice here to get her recently bestowed aether treasure scythe fixed, and godsdammit, she was going to get that fucking scythe fixed.

Thankfully, Axer was apparently as good of a smith as his grandfather.

Unfortunately, the price to fix the damn thing was much higher than anticipated…at least, Axer was trying to make it that price.

While this argument was happening, Bellona, Alicia, and Harriet were silently sipping their tea and watching this all unfold. Of the trio, Bellona and Alicia were actually painfully aware of the reasoning behind this…excessive price tag…but through entirely different means.

"Should…should we get involved in this?" Harriet asked her friends. "I can sense Alice's aether starting to get really agitated."

"It should be fine," Bellona reassured her as she sipped her tea and read Axer's thoughts.

-I just need to jack up the price of fixing up this scythe by just a tiny bit, then maybe I'll be able to pay off the Redoxa Family before their stupid interest rates kick in,- Axer thought to himself.

-If this little brat doesn't drop his fucking price by a couple thousand, I am going to shove him into his own furnace face first!- Alice justifiably screamed in her head.

As for Alicia, she allowed the duo to continue arguing until she had gotten sick of the all the amateur bartering and begging.

"Enough!" Alicia declared with aether and [Chaos] mixed into her voice. "Axer, I understand you're desperate for cash and thinking marking up the prices on honest work would be a good way to do so, but stop it. Mister Lowblade would've been appalled at such behavior, especially when the materials you quoted only cost about half as much as you said they cost."

"Grk!"

"I KNEW IT!"

"And you, Alice," Alicia snapped while redirecting her ire towards the girl that was technically her senior by several centuries. "You should at least compromise a bit when it comes to the matter of hiring artisans to do their craft. Taking on a job like yours costs more than just money; it costs time and opportunity."

"That's…okay…"

Now that the authority on both mercantile practices and material goods had spoken, both Axer and Alice couldn't help but to cower before her presence.

Alicia looked over the two somewhat pouty fellows and let out a sigh.

Understanding that Axer's behavior was a symptom more so than a cause, Alicia attempted to speak in a more sympathetic tone as she admonished the young man…and provided them with an opportunity to explain themselves.

"Axer, I recall that Master Lowblade had a long list of contacts and allies that were more than able to provide him with all of the materials you just listed off at very good prices. What happened to that? Why are you quoting the prices of an opportunistic scammer in front of me and my friends?"

Axer was silent for an uncontrollably long stretch of tine until he was finally able to answer the question he didn't want to answer in the slightest.

"That...used to be the case," Axer sighed with deep regret. "I don't know what the fuck happened but after grandpa died, all of this friends, the warriors we would contact for materials, started to—"

"Cut you off because they respected your grandfather and not you?" Alice guessed.

"—die off in all sorts of weird ways."

"Oh."

Death by old age and disease was fairly common amongst mortals, but it was an incredibly unlikely cause of death in the case of aether warriors.

A vast majority of aether warriors either died in battle, or died from wounds they suffered from battle. That stated, there were still some other causes of death that didn't involve violence.

Although, they still involved outside factors.

"I know death and violence was something tailed aether warriors constantly, especially the high tiered one," Axer said in a factual manner. "But the rate and way my grandpa's old friends were dying off was...weirdly systematic."

"How so?" Bellona asked in an interested tone.

"It was like...they were targeted based on their personal vitality."

Prior to his death, Lowblade was friends with an Aether Grandmaster at their peak, several Aether Lords of various ranks, and an Aether King who had been friends with Lowblade for decades.

However, these aformentioned friends started dropping like flies after Lowblade's death.

The first to go was that aformentioned Grandmaster.

He was challenged to a duel to the death by long-standing rival and was the favorite to win.

However, during the battle, the Grandmaster had made a sudden mistake that costed him his life and head at the same time.

Axer had known that Grandmaster since they were both young, he had cried for several days after that particular death.

The Aether Lords his grandfather knew started dropping off one by one, all through either battles with particularly dangerous aether beasts or because of a bad call made in a wandering ruin.

Axer made sure to attend to everyone of their funerals to pay for the respects that his grandfather was unable to give.

The last of his grandfather's friends, the Aether King, was...actually alive as far as Axer knew.

The man had gone off into secluded cultivation some years ago and Axer had honestly forgotten about him until just now. However, he still didn't count the man because they were way too distant to be relevant to all of these deaths.

"Okay, the causes of death for all of these warriors seem fairly common," Bellona pointed out. "I mean, it is weird that they all seemed to die so close to each other's deaths, but that could easily be a coincidence. A very cursed coincidence, but still."

It was a known fact that lovers and tight knit friend groups had a tendency to die one after the other should any member of theirs suddenly kick the bucket, but Axer had actually thought about this before.

Which is why he was able to prove that he wasn't going crazy.

"See, I had thought that too, but when I went to their funerals I noticed something was off about the bodies, well two things, but I can only show you one and inform you about the other."

"Oh?"

Axer quickly stood up from the table and moved to grab a series of papers that were actually charcoal drawings.

On each of the papers were pictures of various hands that looked different from one another but all had one similar trait: a strangely shaped bruise that was right in the folds of where the thumb and index finger met.

To Alice, Alicia, and Bellona, nothing about this bruise seemed weird to them.

To Harriet, though, she immediately went from looking sympathetic to looking incredibly focused.

•It can't be...• Harriet muttered in her native tongue.

"Every last one of my grandpa's old friends had this exact same bruise in the exact same spot when they were being buried," Axer explained. "I have no idea if they got injured prior to their deaths, but that bruise showed up without fail every time."

"Okay...that's weird," Alicia admitted. "But what about this second thing you can describe but not show us?"

"Well, this is going to sound weird, but have you ever smelled a rotting corpse before? Or at least, a body that had been processed with embalming fluid?"

"Yes."

"Once."

"Not a fun time."

"Okay, then this might make sense: these bodies didn't smell like either of those things," Axer explained. "For whatever reason, they all smelled like some sour fruits or sour flowers."

"Sour lotus," Harriet suddenly interjected. "What you were smelling was sour lotus."

"Huh?"

"Wait, what?"

"Harriet, why do you know that?" Alicia asked with a serious tone of voice, understanding that if her medically knowledgeable friend knew, than that meant these deaths were anything but accidental.

Harriet didn't even do a preamble, she just went straight to the answer.

"Your grandpa's friends all became victims of [Mandrake Tear] poisoning. In small doses, this stuff is a powerful medicine that can clear out your throat meridians and clean out your blemishes. When overdosed, it causes nausea, lapsed judgement and sometimes death. That bruise and smell show up to the victims of such poisonings."

"Oh..."

"But that's not the worst part."

"It's not?!"