A Pretty Good Idea

"Yo, Alex!" I called out as I left the house.

It was the first time I'd left my workstation since I first entered it and I was waaay overdue for a shower. But before then, I thought it'd be nice to see how my fellow slave companion was doing and maybe pitch in with some help. He'd been nice enough to make me some food every day, so it was only right that I repaid the favor.

"Quarth?!" Alex called out. He was caked up in dirt and sweat — worse than I was — on a field to the left side of the house. With a hoe in hand and a bag of seeds to his side, it was obvious what his current work consisted of.

"Hey man, I just got done finished making all these pills. Boost them up for me will you, and I'll see if I can help you out on the field. Deal?"

When he nodded, I handed him a sack filled with the bottled pills I'd made over the last couple of days. As he went about amplifying the Quality of the pills, I walked over to the bag of seeds he had left on the floor and picked them up.

"Hmm…" I hummed as I considered the ways I could leverage my broken Creed to expedite the sowing process.

[Title: Botany Incarnate effect triggered.]

[New Skill Alert!

Name: Plant Magic: Autonomous Dissemination

Grade: F

Description: The use of this Skill consumes magic to plant an assortment of seeds with imbued Magic that allows them to penetrate deep enough into the ground and simulate their ideal growing environment.]

"Hahaha," I laughed as I held up the bag of seeds and watched them shoot out by the hundreds.

"Ack!" My laughter died when I felt a sharp pain from overdrawing my Magic less than a minute later. Still, in just that short amount of time, I'd planted half the seeds remaining in the bag.

"Wow…" Alex slumped as he said, "that would have taken me like an hour to get done." He handed me the now-amplified pills.

"Yeah? And I would have taken weeks if not months to make my pills this pure without your help," I said as I patted his back.

Seriously, from what I'd learned from the texts on Alchemy back in my workstation, it normally took even the best Alchemists months to make any meaningful progress; and that was just at the very start! The further one's mastery of Alchemy rose, the longer it would take to get the slightest bit better.

"Thanks…" He said, but I could tell his heart wasn't in it.

"Come on," I patted his shoulder again. "It's getting late, so why don't we eat dinner and rest a bit before turning in for the day?"

…

"You know—" I took a bite out of the pasta Alex had cooked, "—Your Creed makes you almost literally capable of printing money."

"Uh… What?" Alex looked at me oddly; an understandable reaction given I'd literally said it out of nowhere. Though, he really should have at least understood where I was coming from if he read all the notes I'd left for him.

"Let me spit some numbers at you," I pointed my fork at him. "The average price of a Poor Quality Lowest Grade Pill is 100 Zencopper. Compared to the average price of a Mediocre Quality Pill of the same Grade, 200 Zencopper… Just by using your [Amplification] Skill, you've doubled the value of the pill."

A thought struck me like lightning, "Couldn't you just go to the local town, buy a haul of shit pills, and resell the reforged ones? Then," Alex recoiled at the insane expression currently plastered on my face, "you could just buy the monthly provision stipulations and skip out on having to personally cultivate things yourself."

"Of course," caution forced me to calm down, "It might be for the best if we act our part as harmless slaves. For whatever reason, the Emperor and his council seem to think they know the limits of our Creeds. If they were to learn the truth, the hateful lot of them would probably increase their demands and milk us for all our worth."

"So… What do you think we should do?" He asked.

He'd been mostly just listening and attending to my every request, so I was about to continue rambling on. But the ingrained submissiveness of his behavior irked me into asking him the same question, "What do "you" think we should do?"

Maybe if I forced him to think for himself every so often, he'd grow a spine and stop seeming so helpless.

"Oh, um… Me?" He asked as if there were anyone else for me to even talk to. He recoiled at my deadpanning silence and said, "Well… if it's like you said, maybe we could work to just barely meet expectations or maybe slightly surpass them to not draw any close attention. Or, um… We could also hide our true abilities under the guise of quantity over quality."

"Hmm? What do you mean by this… guise?" His phrasing confused me.

"Well, on our ride over from the capital, through one of my talks with the carriage driver, he told me that all forms of slavery were legal in this world. So, we could just populate our house with slaves and say that they are the reason we are so much more impressive than the Emperor thought of us originally."

"That's..." A shadow was cast upon my face as I looked down and started trembling, "Fucking genius!" And it worked brilliantly with my original plan, too.

"Ok, so this is what we'll do..." As I explicitly detailed our plan to Alex, he mostly nodded while occasionally flashing uncertain looks my way.

Thus, it was decided that I would continue to make pills for us to sell for the rest of the week before we would pay a visit to the nearby town the next day to pick up some… necessities. We couldn't afford to risk exposing our true abilities by selling the quality pills Alex had reforged and, apart from slaves, we also needed to pick up some other things to make the most use of the reforged pills Alex and I were going to consume.