"Huuu… When that old woman looked at Nii-san, her eyes were so scary!"
Walking down the corridor toward the living room, Carina patted her chest and let out a long breath.
"Of course," El nodded. "She was already sailing the seas more than a hundred years ago."
"O–one hundred years ago?"
"Seriously? Doesn't that mean that old woman is already… over a hundred years old?"
The three girls all froze at his words.
Carina even subconsciously did the math for when normal people usually first go to sea, and almost blurted out loud—Only at the last second did she remember El's warning and quickly covered her own mouth, leaning closer to whisper instead.
"Y-You mean… she really is over a hundred?"
"Yes," El confirmed.
"Hiss…"
All three girls sucked in a sharp breath.
Besides Fishmen, they hadn't seen any other races yet, so hearing about a human living that long shook them to the core.
What shocked them even more was that someone that old wasn't lying in bed unable to move—She was still walking around, working as a doctor, and even doing experiments.
And then they remembered her line:
"Want to know the secret of my eternal youth?"
The secret of eternal youth…Of course they wanted it.
El, watching their thoughts roll across their hearts, could only shake his head helplessly.
They were only a few years old and already worried about their future appearance.Women really were strange creatures.
They eventually made their way to the castle's living room, where the four of them sat, chatting while they waited for Kureha to return.
As far as El's Observation Haki could tell, there was no one else in the entire castle besides her.
As for Chopper—According to "human age," he would only be about five years old right now, and it was still unknown whether he'd even eaten the Hito Hito no Mi yet.
El vaguely remembered that when Chopper was taken in by Kureha in the original story, the king of Drum Island was already Wapol.
Which meant there were still several years to go before that happened—At least, not until after Drum Island's golden age as a medical country had already started to fade.
"…Brat, go down and buy these things."
No one knew how much time had passed when Kureha finally finished whatever experiment she was doing and walked out from the corridor.
Before the four could even stand up to greet her, she pulled a book from under her arm and tossed it toward El while heading straight for the wine cabinet.
She didn't even look at him, yet the book still landed precisely in his arms.
"Yes, Dr. Kureha."
El caught it obediently, then glanced at the three girls.
"I'll go down alone. You three stay here."
"Yes, Nii-san," they answered in unison, nodding.
With the book in hand, El left the castle and took the cable car back down the mountain.
Sitting in the cable car, he opened the book Kureha had given him.
The pages were densely filled with names and sketches of various medicinal herbs he couldn't recognize, along with some materials he couldn't even be sure were herbs.
But El wasn't worried at all.
Now that he had left the three girls behind, if there was anything he didn't understand, he could just read someone else's memories.
After reaching the base station, he went straight to the bank to withdraw some cash, then headed for the largest pharmacy in town.
He handed the book to the clerk behind the counter, quietly monitoring the man's thoughts to guard against being cheated.
Fortunately, this was still Drum Island—a giant medical hub.
Almost every kind of material listed in the book could be purchased locally, and even this "normal" pharmacy had 100% genuine stock.
Obviously, the suppliers knew exactly what kind of place this was.With so many sharp-eyed doctors roaming around, trying to sell fakes here was a thousand times harder than on an ordinary island.
About half an hour later, everything written in the book had been gathered, wrapped up separately, and placed into a backpack for him.
After paying over 30 million Belly, El gave the clerk a long look, then left the pharmacy with the bag.
The pharmacy was never truly empty—customers came and went in waves.But eventually, there was a brief moment when it quieted down.
Whoosh—bang!
An afterimage, too fast for the naked eye to catch, flashed in from the doorway and appeared behind the clerk as if teleporting.
With a single knife-hand strike, El knocked the man unconscious in an instant.
He placed his palm lightly on the clerk's head and began reading his memories.
By the time he was done digesting them, El would no longer be a complete layman when it came to herbs and medicinal materials—He'd be at least as knowledgeable as the clerk he'd just knocked out.
He didn't linger.
Before the man even had a chance to wake up, El had already turned into an afterimage again and left the pharmacy.
It wasn't until he was seated in the cable car on the way back up that he fully processed those memories.
He filtered out the useless daily-life trivia and kept only the knowledge related to herbs and pharmacy, slowly turning that into his own.
"…Pretty fast. Come with me."
When El returned with the backpack full of ingredients, Kureha—cheeks faintly flushed from drinking—threw him a look of praise, then stood up and led him back to her laboratory.
What followed was Dr. Kureha, in a half-drunken state, personally demonstrating how to manufacture the nutritional supplement.
Watching her work, El once again felt that his decision to abandon Crocus and come directly to her had been absolutely correct.
She was, without question, a master of pharmacy.
He'd only come to ask for her guidance two hours ago, yet by the time she walked out of the lab she'd already finished designing the formula.
And now she was refining it on the spot.
The speed was simply incredible.
But what shocked him even more was what came next.
"…All right. Drink it."
Kureha had boiled down a large pile of herbs and mysterious materials into a thick green liquid, which she poured into a bottle before handing it to him.
Her tone gave nothing away, so an outsider would never have known whether this was a finished product or a failed prototype.
Of course… that only applied to other people.
"Thank you, Senior."
While watching her work, El had quietly been reading her inner thoughts the whole time.
Knowing exactly what she thought of this batch, he raised the bottle without hesitation—And drank it down in one go.
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