I Returned To Kill Monsters, And Created The Worst One

Chapter 4 — A Place Called Azhareth

Elara Veyne

I discovered that freedom charged rent too.

It wasn’t exactly the grand revelation I expected after spending most of my first life wishing only that someone would open a door, but there was a certain justice to it. For years, I had imagined freedom as something enormous, almost sacred. In practice, it came with bills, expensive food, clothes that needed mending, and a landlady who knocked on my door every Thursday to remind me that the room was not a charity.

Even so, I liked it.

My first home after the Church was on the third floor of a narrow boarding house, on a street far enough from Sacred Crown Avenue that the rent wasn’t absurd and close enough to the stations for me to find work.

The room had a narrow bed, a table that wobbled if I rested both arms on it, a small stove powered by a mana crystal so old that it had to be threatened twice before it worked, and a window facing the roof of the building next door.

It was ugly.

It was cramped.

It was mine.

The first thing I did after paying the rent was close the door, turn the key, and stand there staring at it in my hand.

I stayed like that for a while.

Maybe longer than was reasonable.

Then I put the key in my pocket and went to buy bread, because apparently even freedom didn’t work on an empty stomach.

Over the following weeks, I accepted practically any job that didn’t require a long-term contract. In the mornings, I sometimes helped at an apothecary organizing boxes and preparing simple ingredients. On other days, I cleared tables at a teahouse near Veyrhold Central Station. I also spent a few afternoons copying inventory records for a merchant who had discovered that hiring someone temporarily cost less than keeping a permanent employee.

It wasn’t a particularly inspiring business philosophy.

I respected it.

I kept training at night, after the other residents of the boarding house had gone to sleep. Praying while I practiced alchemical preparation so I wouldn’t set my room on fire.

I could already control my blessing much better than three years earlier. I could increase the potency of a mixture without producing any visible glow and had learned to stop before my body demanded the price. There were still limits. If I pushed too hard, I felt pressure behind my eyes, my hands started to tremble, and the metallic taste appeared in my mouth.

I knew very well what came next.

Blood.

Weakness.

Sometimes unconsciousness.

That was precisely why an ordinary conversation on a rainy afternoon ended up changing my plans.

I was cleaning a table at the teahouse when three merchants came in complaining about the delay of a freight train. Judging by the number of rings, expensive fabrics, and impatience, I guessed they were not men accustomed to waiting.

They chose a table near the window.

I kept cleaning.

Listening to people while pretending not to listen was one of the few skills from my first life that didn’t require mana.

“They said the shipment will arrive in fifteen days,” the oldest one commented.

“They said that last month.”

“The problem isn’t the transportation. Azhareth reduced exports again.”

My hand stopped over the table.

The man kept talking.

“If they reduce them any further, the price of Nythrium will double before winter.”

Nythrium.

I looked at the cloth between my fingers.

I knew that word.

Not immediately. It was like trying to reach something hidden behind years of memories, but then it came.

A small black box.

Three seals.

Gideon opening it in the laboratory.

I must have been around twenty at the time. Maybe older. The days inside the Caldris estate had started to look the same long before that.

Inside the box was a nearly transparent crystal fragment crossed by golden lines.

“Use this,” Gideon had ordered.

I asked what it was.

He looked at me with that patient expression he used when he considered a question particularly stupid.

“Something too expensive for you to waste.”

I had used the crystal while preparing a regeneration potion commissioned for some important officer. Normally, a blessing of that intensity would leave blood running from my nose before I even finished.

That time, nothing happened.

I was exhausted.

My legs trembled.

But I didn’t faint.

I didn’t bleed.

I spent days trying to figure out what was inside that stone.

Gideon never allowed me to touch another one.

I returned my attention to the merchants’ table.

“With the succession situation, don’t expect stability,” another man said. “No one knows how much longer the prince has.”

“I heard they brought in another foreign doctor.”

“I also heard he left after a week.”

The third man laughed.

“Every month some genius appears swearing he’ll cure the Veiled Prince. If they all got paid for trying, Azhareth would have run out of gold before it ran out of Nythrium.”

They changed the subject.

I didn’t.

I finished cleaning without remembering doing it.

For the rest of my shift, the word stayed in my head.

Nythrium.

When I finally left, I went straight to the nearest public library.

Azhareth was much farther away than I expected.

I opened three different maps just to make sure the first one wasn’t trying to discourage me personally.

The Kingdom of Azhareth lay at the far southeastern end of the trade routes most commonly used by Aldervane. Small compared to the great empires of the continent, but surrounded by desert territories, mountains, and a coastal strip that gave it access to some of the most important maritime routes in that part of the world.

And, according to every book I found, it possessed one thing practically everyone wanted.

Nythra.

In its raw state, the mineral was extracted from mountain ranges and deep mines. Once refined, it became Nythrium, used to store mana, stabilize enchantments, power arcane weapons, and improve the performance of magical devices.

I read the same part twice.

Stabilize mana.

My hand tightened on the page.

That explained what I had felt years earlier.

The crystal hadn’t only increased the strength of the potion.

It had reduced the price my blessing demanded from me.

I kept reading.

The more I discovered, the worse my finances looked.

Azhareth tightly controlled extraction and export. Much of the mines belonged directly to the Crown or to families connected to it. The refined mineral was expensive even under normal conditions and, in recent years, prices had risen considerably.

I also found references to the royal family.

The prince’s name appeared frequently.

Kian Varesh, Crown Prince of Azhareth.

The information was vague. Gravely ill for years. Rarely seen in public. Some duties gradually transferred to other members of the royal family.

No detailed description.

No explanation for the illness.

I wasn’t especially interested in the man.

The kingdom, on the other hand, had just become very interesting.

If Nythrium could do for me what I remembered, then it wasn’t merely a rare commodity. It was a way to use my own ability without slowly killing myself.

And if I intended to face the Caldris someday, needing all the strength I possessed seemed like a reasonable place to start.

I looked for travel routes.

That was when I started to suspect the universe had something personal against me.

There was no direct train from Veyrhold to Namarra. First, I would have to take the arcane railway to a port city in the south. From there, board a mana ship that crossed two trade routes before reaching the eastern trading post. After that, there were two options: an overland caravan, cheaper and much slower, or an arcane aerostat that crossed part of the desert regions.

I stared at the illustration of the aerostat.

It looked like a ship someone had decided to hang beneath an enormous balloon reinforced with crystals.

The idea of getting inside it seemed questionable.

The price seemed worse.

I picked up a fare table.

I added it up.

I did the calculation again.

I added it up once more because I refused to believe the first answer.

The result stayed the same.

The entire trip cost almost four times everything I had managed to save in three years.

And that didn’t include lodging, food, or enough money to keep me from arriving in another kingdom completely penniless.

I closed my eyes.

Working at my current pace, I might be able to pay for the trip in two years.

Two years wasn’t impossible.

But I hadn’t come back from the dead to spend half my youth clearing tables.

I closed the book.

I needed another way.

That night, I spread my savings across the table in my room.

Small coins.

A few trade notes.

Two payment certificates I still needed to exchange.

It was more money than I had possessed at any point in my first life.

And it still wasn’t enough.

I stared at it while the stove behind me made an unpleasant noise.

Then I looked at the empty vials I had bought for training.

It took me a few seconds to realize the obvious.

“I’m an idiot.”

Maybe it was comforting to know that death didn’t fix every flaw.

I had spent years making the Caldris rich.

I knew how to prepare potions that trained alchemists took decades to master. My blessing could turn mediocre ingredients into excellent mixtures, and I knew dozens of formulas that didn’t even appear in the more common books.

Money wasn’t exactly the problem.

The problem was making money without drawing attention.

If I started selling extraordinary potions in Veyrhold, it wouldn’t take long before some curious merchant wanted to know who was producing them.

Then another.

Then someone connected to the Caldris Consortium.

That was an excellent way to make money and an even better way to put Gideon back in my path.

I needed to be careful.

A perfect potion drew attention.

A good potion, sold at a reasonable price, simply sold.

I picked up one of the vials.

I could prepare mild regeneratives. Fever reducers. Potions for muscle recovery. Small mana restoratives. Simple antidotes.

Nothing rare.

Nothing impressive.

I only needed to do something I had never done in my first life.

Produce below my capacity.

I smiled.

I had spent three years training for exactly that.

The next day, I would start looking for places where alchemical goods circulated without too many questions. I wouldn’t sell under my name. I wouldn’t produce large batches. I wouldn’t show my ability to anyone and, above all, I wouldn’t let any potion be good enough to become a topic of conversation.

I pulled the map closer.

Azhareth was on the other side of almost everything I knew.

The name looked small on paper.

The distance didn’t.

I ran my finger along the route to Namarra and thought again about that fragment of Nythrium Gideon had allowed me to use only once.

If that kingdom truly possessed the source of it, then perhaps there was the first thing capable of turning my revenge into something more than a promise.

It still wasn’t a plan.

But it was interesting.

I closed the atlas and looked at the coins scattered across the table.

The fare cost almost four times everything I owned.

I looked at the vials.

For years, the Caldris had built a fortune from what came out of my hands.

Maybe it was time I kept a small share of the profits.

Azhareth might be two months away.

It didn’t matter.

If the beginning of the Caldris’ downfall was on the other side of the continent, then I only needed to figure out how much it cost to get there.

This time, at least, the journey would be my choice.