Tori paid one silver coin per piece, spending ten silver coins—most of her savings—to have the village blacksmith make ten iron objects for her.

They included an iron sphere, an iron triangular solid, an iron cube... all sorts of iron objects. They weren’t exactly precise, and she’d paid a bit over the odds, but Tori bought them anyway. She needed to test her hypothesis.

The framework of the elements.

Elements were everywhere. It was only their distribution and concentration that varied from place to place.

Different magical creatures, such as plants like red peppers, could selectively draw one, two, or even several specific elements from the elements found all around them.

What about humans?

As living creatures, humans seemed able to draw on every kind of element. That might be the wrong way to think about it, though. Perhaps humans could only draw on a small portion of all the elements, and those were simply the only kinds humans could recognize and sense...

But that wasn’t important for now.

Tori had realized that she was indeed more efficient at drawing on some elemental affinities than others. If mana was a collection of energy, then its form depended on both the elements and the mana output itself.

That was what talent meant.

Someone who could draw on fire elements quickly was naturally suited to becoming a fire Mage. The same went for water. In Tori’s case, she was fastest at drawing on wind elements, followed by water, then fire. As for earth, light, and darkness, her efficiency with those was pitifully low.

However you looked at it, her talent seemed pretty average.

That made her wonder whether the principle behind advanced Potions was to strengthen your strong points or shore up your weak ones.

More knowledge she couldn’t use for now.

In any case, casting magic required a magical framework—unless all you were doing was combining mana and elements in a very, very simple way and releasing them.

The more powerful the spell, the more complex its elemental framework.

Tori had no intention of challenging the existing magical system. She didn’t understand magic deeply enough. Challenging it without first learning how it actually worked was something only a fool would do.

She guided the elements along the various frameworks she’d designed. She was doing it to familiarize herself with the most basic shapes, so that when she built an elemental framework, she could break it down into the smallest possible pieces and assemble it step by step. It was a way of thinking modern people often used: starting with the details and working up to the whole.

She had no idea whether it would help. With her current level of control over mana and the elements, trying to build a framework to test a Potion was pure fantasy.

Her training from eating red peppers had mainly improved her meditation. Looking back over her recent actions, Tori realized that what she meditated on had actually changed.

When she’d first started meditating, the world she perceived had been mostly gray and hazy. There had been some color, but it was faint and hard to notice unless she looked closely.

As her meditation progressed, and as she learned to enter that state despite the effects of the red peppers, her meditation world became a riot of color. She could also detect the various elements with greater precision and detail. Perhaps she’d reached a deeper level of meditation, even though she hadn’t felt anything like a breakthrough.

This should be a good thing.

Tori felt a little relieved to have made progress in her training, even if she still hadn’t managed to make a proper Potion. If she enrolled in the Magic Academy right now, she figured she wouldn’t fall behind anytime soon—at least not compared to the other students from villages. As for students from towns and cities, she had no idea.

Had Ethan set a time limit for her? Did she have enough time to train? What if too much time passed and Ethan decided to stop investing in her?

Tori couldn’t help feeling anxious. Her instincts told her that if she missed this chance, it would be very hard to find another like it.

She wouldn’t get a second chance with a young master like Ethan, someone with such a special background!

So Tori made an extremely bold decision.

Once again, she adjusted the amounts of the two ingredients according to her own understanding. Then, as she ground and mixed them together, she infused them with a little mana and did her best to construct an elemental framework of her own, hoping to use it to draw out the mana framework within the ingredients.

The two ingredients dissolved quickly, turning into a clear liquid once more.

Only a thin layer of clear liquid remained at the bottom of Tori’s mixing bowl.

She stared at it for a long time, then drank it.

It tasted all right, a little sweet. Probably because of the ice mint. Sweet and spicy wasn’t bad, actually—

She felt it. The elements were running wild. The elements already inside her began to shift because of that tiny amount of liquid, and the medicinal properties of the red pepper and ice mint were affecting her body too. One moment she felt cold, the next hot, and then a wave of nausea rose up inside her.

Meditate!

She forced herself into a meditative state, entering that dreamlike world of color.

Regulate them. The elements were running wild—what could she use to regulate them? She couldn’t use mana. Absolutely not. If she used mana, the rampaging water and fire elements would take control of her, and she’d end up like that mouse the other day. So the Potion itself hadn’t killed the mouse. The mouse had instinctively used the mana in its body, making the mana react with the elements until it killed itself.

The real way to regulate them was with the elements...

Water and fire were naturally opposed, yet connected. She could only hope the theory of the Five Elements applied here.

Tori desperately suppressed the mana in her body while continuously sorting out the fire and water elements within her. She let them clash, but also kept them apart.

As she pulled them back and forth, her condition gradually improved. The fire and water elements slowly became more obedient, turning into power that belonged to her.

With a thought, she joined the mana in her body with the fire elements. A palm-sized flame appeared in her hand, then drained her mana dry.

The fire elements from a moment ago returned to nature.

Was this... some kind of power-up Potion?

Tori couldn’t help thinking so. The process hadn’t gone perfectly. She meditated to restore her mana, then tried drawing on the elements again.

It was hard to say whether her efficiency at drawing on fire elements had improved. Maybe it had, but Tori couldn’t tell. It felt no different from before she drank the Potion. Besides, that kind of magic wasn’t much use to her right now. In the end, magic still needed mana to support it.

If she didn’t have enough energy stored in her body, none of the rest mattered.

What good was a huge burst of power if it only lasted an instant?

She’d heard there was a kind of shrimp in her old world... Never mind. There was no need to go into the species from her old world.

She needed a Miniature Meditation Potion so badly. Still, she was much stronger now than when she’d first arrived in this world, and only a month had passed. In theory, she didn’t need to rush.

And she’d realized while drinking the Potion that the elemental framework had little to do with it. As far as she understood, the Potion’s effects weren’t determined by the elemental framework at all. It was definitely about the quantity—and the ingredients themselves.

That was why the recipe mattered so much. A deep understanding of the Potion Maker profession was what would pave the way to advanced Potions.

She sighed. But that wasn’t important right now. She needed to make her liquor. She’d brew something strong and give it to Ethan as a present. Who knew if he’d appreciate the gesture?

After all, she had no idea if that lethal Potion, made by grinding together red pepper and ice mint, would count as passing Ethan’s test. Making some high-quality liquor might help keep him patient a little longer.

Xilika listened as her daughter talked about things she couldn’t really understand. She didn’t feel like asking anymore. Tori would just say it was written in the village chief’s notebook, and Xilika couldn’t make head or tail of that thing anyway.

The mother and daughter busied themselves boiling water and heating the liquor Tori had brewed for distillation. Then Tori dipped a wooden stick into the finished product and tasted it. Satisfied that it was fine, she poured it into the wooden containers she’d made earlier. They weren’t ideal, of course, but there wasn’t much else they could do for now.

The village had its limitations. It wasn’t that they couldn’t afford glassware, but it was pretty expensive.

Otherwise, Tori would’ve asked someone to put together a set of lab equipment for her first—test tubes, beakers, and things like that. But she didn’t have any.

Then Tori had the village men try the low-alcohol liquor she’d brewed at first.

They gave it a good review. It could turn into a decent business, after all. The village didn’t usually have any liquor for sale. They had to go to town to buy it.

So Xilika picked up an extra job: becoming the proprietress of the village’s only distillery.

It was something Xilika herself had never expected.

Even the village chief was a little stunned. “My notebook does say that some places might brew liquor from grain... But Tori actually made it herself? I’d only heard about it from my teacher. That’s incredible.”

Tori brushed it off, saying that an adventurer who’d bought her rat poison had told her about it, including how to brew it. She could share the method with everyone in the village.

Some people were tempted, but in the end, almost no one actually tried it.

Besides, Tori’s liquor wasn’t expensive.

It was an extra source of income. Growing red peppers took a lot of care, but it was still manageable. Xilika was happy to sell liquor.

Then Tori hired a village cart to take her to town.

She paid two silver coins. With the specially brewed high-proof liquor packed up, she planned to pay young Master Ethan a visit and give him a present. When you owed someone a gesture, you had to make one... To be honest, before she was reincarnated, she’d hated this kind of thing most of all. But if she wanted to make money, there was no shame in it.

She went to the inn where Ethan was staying. Unfortunately, he wasn’t there.

She asked the owner to carry the liquor to Ethan’s room and paid him twenty copper coins for the trouble. The owner was happy to earn the money.

“You can wait a while, miss. That guest told me before that if anyone came looking for him, they should wait in his room. He’s been out taking care of something lately.”

Tori readily agreed. This was a perfect chance to look around Ethan’s living quarters and get a rough idea of his habits.