Farrow's mind was filled with questions, but this situation was clearly a huge boon for the Gilded Rose. It intimidated the other factions, made negotiations smoother, and even though everyone knew it wasn't the Gilded Rose's own experts who did it, they still pretended otherwise—acting as if it was the Gilded Rose punishing those two unlucky fools.
No one would ask about it directly; everyone stayed silent, believing whatever version of the truth suited them...
The negotiations went fairly well. Using the Azure Mana Elixir, several mage factions signed exchange contracts—trading the elixir for special materials the other side possessed in abundance. Most of these resources came from other planes, only accessible to those who controlled those realms.
But not everything went smoothly. Some factions demanded such harsh terms that Farrow had no choice but to walk away.
Though he knew in his heart that the Azure Mana Elixir's cost was almost negligible—the main expense came from Monster Plane materials. Aside from that, the cost of a single bottle was less than a thousand purple gold coins, mostly due to the alchemists' cut...
But you couldn't set a precedent here. Many of the materials to be exchanged were just as cheap in the other side's plane as Monster Plane herbs were in ours—practically worthless there, but rare and expensive in Northend World. The price was entirely up to them, just like the Azure Mana Elixir's price was dictated by the Gilded Rose.
Farrow looked at the list in his hand—five meters long and over two meters wide, packed with all kinds of required materials. When he channeled mana into it, a phantom image would appear, showing what each material looked like and its specific properties.
There were thousands of materials on the list, but now, using the Azure Mana Elixir for exchange, he could only get a little over a hundred. Many of these were items that the negotiating factions didn't even have. Each material was precious, but seeing the quantities needed made Farrow's head ache.
Refined metals that usually appeared at auction in lots of just a few kilograms—this list required thirty thousand kilograms...
Ten kilograms of Floating Crimson Gold Ore would already be enough to serve as the raw material for a True Spirit Magic Artifact—a truly extravagant amount. But this list demands two hundred thousand kilograms...
When Farrow first saw this list, his eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. If not for the fact that several items had already been marked as completed, he wouldn’t have dared to even imagine it. The hardest item was Eternal Dark Gold—three million kilograms of refined Eternal Dark Gold...
There’s not a place in the entire Northend World that could produce that much Eternal Dark Gold. Yet the list already shows it as completed.
Farrow held the list, calculating the materials already being exchanged. If things went smoothly, it would take a few years just to scrape together the bare minimum required. But most of the materials—they’d only managed to gather a few scattered pieces so far, which was barely better than nothing.
Staring at the specially marked items on the list, Farrow could feel a headache coming on.
That greedy, scheming vampire—he only had some Graviton Crystals. Their family’s plane had the largest reserves of the stuff, and aside from being difficult to mine, it was practically the cheapest material around. Yet that idiot actually demanded a thousand kilograms of Graviton Crystal for a single bottle of Azure Mana Elixir.
Damn it, a thousand kilograms of Graviton Crystal isn’t even the size of a human head. A single batch easily weighs hundreds of thousands of kilograms, and the list calls for eight million batches. If we relied solely on exchanging Azure Mana Elixir, it would take a thousand years to get enough. These idiots—do they really expect the Gilded Rose to deliver a thousand years’ worth of Azure Mana Elixir in exchange for what’s basically rocks to them?
It’s infuriating. But without Graviton Crystal, it really is a problem. Lord Merlin insists that Graviton Crystal is one of the essential materials for the first batch. Among all the mage factions, it seems only that idiot’s family controls a plane with Graviton Crystal.
Are we really supposed to mine it from the Earth Elemental Plane? Mining there is impossible to bring anything back, and aside from someone like Hubert, whose body is absurdly strong, who else could even manage it? Don’t make me laugh...
Azure Mana Elixir is in desperately short supply, but Farrow is still troubled. In theory, the Azure Mana Elixir should greatly strengthen the mages of those factions, even accelerating their conquest of other planes. All that’s needed is some material exchange—they shouldn’t refuse. But some people are greedier than vampires. No, greedier than devils...