(Arin's POV)
Euphoria is a dangerous drug. When the first drop of liquid gold dripped from the tap of that monster plant, it felt as though all my life's problems evaporated just like that. No more debts, no more threats from Karl Benzzi, and no more constraining fate.
There was only... pure, burning greed.
"Edna! Prepare another syringe!" I shouted, my eyes fixed on the row of wild Titan Pitcher Plants still sleeping behind us. "We have twenty plants in this sector! If one plant produces five liters a week, twenty plants mean one hundred liters! That is ten thousand bottles a month! We will bathe in gold!"
My hand quickly snatched the tray containing empty syringes. Adrenaline flooded my brain, masking the dizziness from the previous blood draw. I felt I could turn this entire forest into a money factory in a single night.
"Quick, Doc! While the night is still long!" I urged while rolling up the sleeve of my bandaged left arm. "Take my blood again! We inject them all tonight!"
SLAP!
A hard slap landed on the back of my hand. The syringe slipped from my grip and fell into the muddy ground.
I jolted in surprise, turning with wide eyes. "What the—"
"Shut up and sit down, you fool!" snapped Doctor Edna.
Her face showed none of the joy mine did. Behind her thick glasses, her eyes radiated the cold anger of a medical professional watching a patient attempt suicide.
"You think your body is a refillable water gallon?!" Edna grabbed my wrist, pressing the radial artery roughly to count my racing heartbeat. "You just donated nearly a liter of blood for this experiment, Arin. That is the maximum safe limit for a human of your size."
"But I have regeneration!" I argued stubbornly. "Grizzly Serum makes my bone marrow work twice as fast!"
"And that still takes time!" cut Edna sharply. She took a magic calculator from her coat pocket, tapping numbers aggressively. "Let's calculate, Mr. Genius Businessman. To modify one plant so it doesn't reject the mushroom, we need at least five hundred milliliters of your blood containing concentrated serum. You want to modify a hundred plants? That requires fifty liters of blood!"
Edna shoved the red-glowing calculator screen in front of my face.
"An adult human only has about five liters of blood in their body. You want mass production? You will die dry before the tenth plant is successfully modified! Do you want to be a successful businessman or a dried corpse we find pale as death tomorrow morning? We cannot squeeze you to death just to meet the Duke's quota!"
Edna's words hit me harder than her physical slap.
That cold logic extinguished my fire of euphoria instantly. I fell silent, staring at my bandaged arm. The dizziness I had ignored suddenly attacked, making my vision slightly blurry. My knees wobbled, and I was forced to sit on a protruding tree root.
"Damn..." I mumbled, massaging my throbbing temples. "You are right, this is a scalability problem. I forgot the main raw material factor is my own life."
I stared desperately toward the dark forest. Hundreds of monster plants stood there, waiting to be transformed. Unlimited wealth potential lay before my eyes, but I did not have enough blood "capital" to claim it.
"So what now?" I asked desperately. "We can only produce five liters a week with this one plant? That is not enough to supply one city market, let alone a kingdom."
"Kee hee hee..."
A hoarse and crazy laugh sounded from behind the plant we had just modified.
Ghislain Bassil appeared, his wrinkled face illuminated by the green mana light from his staff. He was caressing the leaves of our "Patient Zero" plant lovingly, as if it were his lover.
"You think too rigidly," sneered Ghislain, his face eyes and tentacle eye blinking alternately staring at me. "Your blood, Arin... is indeed the key. But in biology, we do not always need to create a new key for every door. We can... duplicate it."
I looked up. "What do you mean?"
"Cuttings. Grafting. Budding," said Ghislain while picking a young leaf from the plant that had successfully mutated with my blood. "This plant... its tissue now contains your blood's genetic code. Its 'adaptive' nature is already embedded in its cells."
Ghislain walked toward the wild plant next to it still sleeping due to Dormancy magic.
"We do not need to inject the new plant with your blood again," continued Ghislain. He attached the leaf he picked to the stem of the wild plant. "We just need to cut a part of the tissue from this 'Mother', then graft it onto the wild plant. That adaptive nature will infect like a virus, spreading and taking over its new host."
Ghislain's eyes shone crazily.
"We will make this plant eat its own siblings to evolve. That way, you only need to give a little blood as a connecting catalyst, not as the main ingredient."
I was stunned. The idea was... horrific, cannibalistic, but utterly brilliant.
"Bio-Magical Grafting..." I whispered. "We make the first plant the Queen, and spread her genetics to the entire colony."
"Exactly!" Ghislain laughed, raising his scalpel high. "You do not need to die of blood loss, Kid. You just need to be a regular donor like a dairy cow once a week. The rest? Let nature prey on each other!"
I looked at Edna. The doctor seemed to think for a moment, then nodded slowly. "Medically... it makes sense. Rejection risk remains, but far smaller than re-injecting from zero."
I took a deep breath, feeling the spirit that had dimmed return.
"Do it, Professor," I ordered, a wide grin returning to my face. "Make them eat each other. We build our army tonight."
(Two Weeks Later - Academy Northern Sector Forest)
If anyone asked what a productive hell looked like, I would tell them to come here.
The Northern Sector Forest, once wild and dark, had now transformed into something completely different. It was no longer a forest, but a living, breathing, pulsing Biopunk factory.
Bamboo pipes preserved with magic crisscrossed everywhere like giant blood vessels, connecting one plant to another. Hundreds of Titan Pitcher Plants lined up neatly along the artificial river flow, their bodies glowing dimly in the forest darkness.
At the mouth of every plant, a clear Cleaning Slime lump pulsed rhythmically, filtering dirty forest air into sterile oxygen for fermentation inside.
The sound in this place was a strange orchestra of steam hissing, fluid trickling through bamboo pipes, and static mana humming from temperature control crystals.
"MOVE! MOVE! HOT WATER!"
Karim's shout broke my concentration.
The former Royal Knight ran hurriedly carrying a giant wooden barrel full of boiling water on his shoulder. His iron armor had long been discarded, replaced by a sleeveless shirt soaked in sweat. His muscles usually used to slash Orc heads were now used for factory laborer work.
"Karim! Temperature in Sector C dropped two degrees! Water root number 45!" shouted Ghislain from a tree branch, where he monitored the factory's overall mana circuit with his tentacle eye.
"Damn it! I am a Sword Instructor! Why am I a plant waterer?!" grumbled Karim, but his legs ran fast toward the intended plant. He poured the hot water into the trench around the plant roots to keep the fermentation temperature optimal in the middle of the cold night.
I stood near the central tent, overseeing this organized chaos while drinking an iron supplement that tasted like licking rusty nails.
"Urgh," I grimaced, swallowing the thick red liquid. "It tastes worse every day."
"Do not complain. Your hemoglobin is still at the lower limit of normal," replied Edna without turning.
She sat at a rough wooden table full of piles of glass bottles. Her hands moved with lightning speed, sealing bottles filled with golden liquid with corks, then dipping them in liquid wax.
"We ran out of sterile glass bottles, Arin," reported Edna, her voice sounding panicked. "The stock I ordered from the city is gone. Production today exploded beyond expectations. The grafted plants grew faster than predicted."
I looked toward the pile of holding barrels. Three large barrels were already full of raw antibiotic liquid not yet packaged. If left too long, the medicine would oxidize and spoil.
"Use anything!" I exclaimed. "Used potion bottles, jam jars, anything that can be sterilized with fire magic! Do not let that 'gold' spill!"
"You think I didn't try?!" Edna threw an empty cork at me. "I already raided the school laboratory trash bins, Arin! We need a bottle supplier, not a scavenger!"
"Arin!" Karim returned, panting. He put down the empty barrel roughly. "Firewood for boiling water is running low too. And small monsters are starting to come because of this fermentation smell. I need a break from being a laborer to be a security guard again! My hands are calloused from chopping wood, not holding a sword!"
I massaged the bridge of my nose. My head spun seven times around.
This was a problem not written in business books: Crisis of Success.
Our production was extremely successful. Ghislain's grafting method worked like magic. This forest now produced hundreds of liters of antibiotics every day.
But we were only four people.
Me, the brain who was anemic from donating blood routinely every week to maintain the genetic stability of the mother plant. Edna, the doctor doubling as packaging factory worker. Karim, the knight doubling as porter, woodcutter, and security guard. And Ghislain, the mad foreman who hadn't slept for three days because he was too engrossed in mating plants.
We were overwhelmed. We were unknowingly drowning in our own success.
"We need manpower," I muttered, staring at the pile of unlabeled bottles. "And we need better logistics. These bamboo pipes are starting to leak."
"And we need your blood," added Edna cruelly, handing over a new syringe. "Alpha Mother Plant in Sector A is starting to show signs of rejection to new grafts. She needs a booster from your original blood now."
I stared at the needle with a blank gaze. My face was pale; the dark circles under my eyes were probably as deep as a well.
"Again?" I asked weakly.
"You want this factory to explode because the mother plant goes berserk and eats all the grafted plants?" threatened Edna.
I sighed resignedly, then offered my left arm already full of needle puncture marks.
"Just take it," I said resignedly. "Who needs blood if they have money, right?"
Edna stabbed the needle in. Dark red blood flowed into the tube. I felt my world spin slightly.
"Arin," called Karim suddenly, his voice tense. His hand had shifted to the sword hilt at his waist.
"What else? Out of wood?" I asked with eyes closed.
"No. We have guests."
I opened my eyes instantly. "Guests? At this hour? Who? Alchemist spies?"
"Worse," answered Karim stiffly. He pointed toward the path faintly visible in the forest darkness.
From behind the night mist, two figures walked closer. They did not sneak like thieves. They walked with sure and elegant steps, as if this forest mud were a palace red carpet.
One wore a dark blue velvet traveling cloak with a hood covering part of the face. The other wore an academy uniform covered by a thick white fur coat.
Elena Rhyms. And beside her... Her grandmother, Selena Rhyms.
My heart, weak from lack of blood earlier, suddenly raced fast in panic.
"Hide that Goblin carcass!" hissed Ghislain from the tree, panicking trying to cover our pile of "fertilizer" with banana leaves.
"Too late, Professor," I whispered, standing unsteadily. "The main investor has come for inspection."
Selena stopped at the edge of the production area. She lowered her hood, letting her silvery blonde hair shine under the moonlight.
Her golden eyes swept the scene before her.
She saw the messy bamboo pipes. She saw Karim sweaty and dirty like a construction worker. She saw Edna smeared with sealing wax. She saw Ghislain hanging from a tree like a crazy monkey.
And finally, she stared at me. Arin, pale, thin, with a syringe still stuck in the arm being drained of blood.
Silence.
The sour smell of fermentation and the stench of carcass fertilizer wafted in the air, a stark contrast to the Headmistress's expensive perfume.
Selena lifted a silk handkerchief to her nose, her brow furrowed deeply. Her expression was hard to read, between disgust, shock, and... amazement?
"By God..." mumbled Selena softly, her voice breaking the silence of the forest factory.