Tim's POV
I went to the Adventurers' Guild, in what little free time I had.
The woman at the registration looked middle-aged, as she looked at me as I walked in, and began the standard intake with professional efficiency.
Name. Age. Please.
"Tim, 18 years old, miss" I said, when she reached the party question.
She looked up from the form. "Solo registration is permitted but unusual," she said. "Most applicants find the group structure more practical for early quest completion."
"I prefer to work alone," I said.
She made a note with the neutrality of someone who had heard this before and asked again. "Party name?"
"Murder Hobo," I said.
[author: Murder hobo is form DnD, which inspired Overlord]
She stopped writing.
She looked at me.
She looked at the form.
She looked losted for words.
"Murder," she said. "Hobo."
"Yes."
A silence of perhaps fifteen seconds, in which she appeared to conduct some internal deliberation. Then she wrote it down anyways, the copper plate was issued. I wear it around my neck, turned, and examined the quest board.
The quest board at copper rank was what I had expected, a collection of tasks that ranged from the genuinely simple to down right annoying, priced accordingly, posted by merchants and farmers and guild suppliers who needed work done without wanting to pay real workers.
The herb collection quest was posted on a pale yellow sheet in the lower left corner of the board, which meant it had been up for several days without takers, Three copper coins for a standard collection of common medicinal herbs, verified by weight and condition at submission.
I took it because it was available and headed to the feilds.
The herbs were not difficult to find.
They had never been difficult to find, for me specifically, which was a fact I had the druid perception, which I will fully exploited. The green language didn't simply convey the conditions of nearby plants, it conveyed their presence. Standing in the field outside the city walls, the herbs on the collection list were as visible to me as landmarks, their specific signatures distinct from the surrounding vegetation.
It took me ten minutes, a nice walk really.
I walked back to the guild, submitted the herbs, received three copper coins, and stood in the guild's main room thinking about what I had just done...than it hit me.
I could find any plant. Any plant that existed within range of the extended perception, I could find any and all plants, without searching, simply by knowing where the plants told me.
I could find really *rare* herbs.
The rarest herbs in this world were rare because they were difficult to locate and difficult to cultivate, the location problem requiring either luck or extensive wilderness experience, and the cultivation problem having defeated most attempts because the plants in question had specific and finicky requirements that trial-and-error gardening couldn't reliably identify.
I could hear what the plants needed. I could find them wherever they grew. I could cultivate them with the druid perception providing continuous feedback on their condition.
I left the guild and went directly to the Pharmacists' Guild.
The Pharmacists' Guild was a smaller and quieter institution than the Adventurers' Guild. The reception staff directed me to their reference library without excessive interrogation, they apparently received a steady traffic of people researching ingredients, and a young man asking for their herb reference catalogue was unremarkable.
The catalogue was thorough. More thorough than I had expected, actually, the guild had been systematically compiling botanical and pharmacological information for decades, and the reference materials reflected that accumulated effort.
I spent two hours with it, making notes in the cipher shorthand of my private notebook, working through the rare and ultra-rare classifications as I build my shopping list.
The criteria I was looking for were specific: high market value, difficult conventional cultivation, and super damn rare.
I identified eleven candidates in the first pass.
Crossed off three that required climate conditions too far from E-Rantel's range for greenhouse management to bridge. Crossed off one more that had symbiotic requirements I couldn't replicate in a controlled environment. Left with seven.
Seven plants, each worth substantially more per weight than anything currently in my fruits in the garden. Each theoretically uncultivatable at scale. Each, to my specific capability set, potentially as manageable.
I returned the catalogue, thanked the staff like polite boy, and went looking for the plants.
The location process took two weeks, working in the early mornings before the healing practice began and the late evenings after it ended, ranging further from the city than my usual circuits and letting the perception run ahead of me through the wilderness like a net.
I found all seven.
They were where difficult-to-find plants tended to be, in places that required effort to reach, in conditions that were hostile to casual searching, in the specific ecological niches that their were so picky. The perception found each one with alittle hardwork on my end, the plants announcing themself to me, when I got in reach of them.
I harvested them carefully, and leaving the root system and enough of the plant to continue and regenerate. I took seeds where seeds when they were available. I brought them back in the conditions the plants themselves had told me they preferred, which varied considerably and which I managed with a collection of containers that probably looked eccentric to an outside observer.
The guild paid me gooood.
The first sale, the rarest of the seven, a herb used in the production of high-grade restorative potions that the guild maintained a standing purchase agreement for at a fixed high price, produced more gold from a single transaction than two weeks of continuous healing generated.
I stood in the Pharmacists' Guild receipt room and looked at the gold coins and felt the satisfaction of easy money.
The greenhouse was the necessary next step, and I commissioned it with clear specification of requirements, construction by craftsmen who I paid very well and given precise instructions.
It went up in late summer, finished at fall, a glass-and-timber structure attached to the orphanage's south wall that caught maximum light and whose interior temperature I could manage through a combination of the building's design and the *Clean* spell's secondary applications that I had been developing for years.
Inside it, in carefully maintained conditions that I adjusted daily based on what the plants themselves communicated, seven varieties of rare herbs grew with a vigour that their wild counterparts, struggling in suboptimal conditions could not achieve.
I noticed the watchers in by late October.
They appeared gradually, first one person lingering near the greenhouse with the casual loitering of someone who had accidentally found an interesting view *very sneaky my guy* then two came, then a small cluster that varied in composition but maintained a consistent interest in my garden's activities. They were mostly from the merchant and apothecary communities, identifiable by their clothing and their professional attention to my methods.
They thought they could do, what I was doing by watching.
They were observing the physical actions, the watering, the pruning, the specific handling techniques I used during cultivation. They could not hear my conversation with my herbs. The herbs talked continuously, and I was responding to a stream of information that was invisible to everyone watching from outside.
They would try to replicate my methods sure. Some of them would get partway there through good conventional practice. None of them would produce what I can produced, because the game was rigged, you fools.
The financial of the orphanage shifted with the herb income.
The healing practice remained, I had no intention of stopping it, the half-price service being both a genuine need in the city and a continued statement of FUCK YOU to the church cartel that I saw no reason to retract. But it was no longer the single load-bearing pillar it had been. The herb income covered operating costs with huge margin remaining, which meant the healing income could be done mostly for fun.
I had alot of free time now.
Now there were unscheduled hours in the day, and I filled them with the copper-rank quest board.
Not from financial need, mostly to rank up for fun, as it might help later.
The guild staff had noticed by now that Murder Hobo completed quests very quickly, which was either the profile of someone selecting only the easiest tasks or someone for whom the tasks were easier than they should be, as they desided to rank Tim up to iron rank.
Tim's stats.
LeveL: [45]
Durid: [2/5] [Updated]