Double lives are exhausting. Not because of the lies—lies are easy—but because of the commute.
For the next two weeks, my life became a pendulum swinging between heaven and hell. By day, I was Aren, the quiet, C-Rank student of Babel Academy. I attended lectures. I took notes. I ate lunch in the cafeteria while students whispered about the "Chimera Slayers." With Professor Vex suspended pending an internal investigation, the pressure had lifted. The substitute teacher, a sleepy old wizard named Professor Silas, didn't care what we did as long as we didn't blow up the classroom. It was peaceful. Boring. Safe.
But the moment the sun set, the pendulum swung. Zane and I would slip out of the dorms, take the freight elevator down through the smog clouds, and enter the Rust Pit.
Down there, I wasn't a student. I was The Ghost. And business was booming.
The Rust Pit - Warehouse District
"Warehouse 9," Zane read the faded number on the rusted metal door. "This is it?"
"It's perfect," I said, unlocking the heavy padlock with a key I had bought from a shady landlord an hour ago.
We stepped inside. It was a large, abandoned storage unit that used to house textile golems. The windows were high and barred. The walls were thick brick. Soundproof. Smell-proof. It cost us 40 Gold a month. A fortune for a commoner, but a business expense for us.
"We can't keep cooking in a hotel room, Zane," I said, walking to the center of the dusty floor. "The fumes were getting too strong. Here, we can scale up."
Zane dropped a heavy crate of supplies on the floor. The clank of glass echoed. "Scale up?" Zane asked, wiping sweat from his brow. "Aren, you nearly passed out making three vials last time. Your mana capacity is... small. If you try to make ten, you'll die."
He was right. My F-Rank core was my bottleneck. To create Azure Dust, I needed to maintain high pressure and heat while separating the mana from the Nightshade poison. Doing it manually with my own mana was inefficient and dangerous.
"That's why we aren't going to use my mana anymore," I said, pulling a blueprint out of my bag. I unrolled it on a crate. It wasn't a magic circle. It was a mechanical drawing.
"What is this?" Zane squinted at the lines.
"This," I pointed to the central cylinder, "is a Mana Centrifuge."
In this world, alchemists used magic for everything. Need to stir? Magic. Need to heat? Magic. Need to separate? Magic. They had forgotten the power of physics. Centrifugal force could separate densities just as well as a separation spell, provided you spun it fast enough.
"We need to build this," I ordered. "We have the money. We buy the parts. We build a machine that does the hard work for me."
Three Days Later.
The machine was ugly. It looked like a torture device made of copper pipes, gears from a broken steam-wagon, and a massive iron flywheel. But it worked.
"Spin it," I said.
Zane grabbed the iron handle of the flywheel. This was why I needed him. I didn't need a magical engine. I had a Zane. He grunted, his muscles bunching as he cranked the heavy wheel. CREAK... WHIRRR... The gears caught. The central copper chamber began to spin. Faster. And faster. The hum turned into a high-pitched whine.
"Hold it steady at 2000 RPM!" I shouted over the noise.
I poured the liquefied Nightshade mixture into the top funnel. I applied just a tiny amount of my own mana—not to separate the mixture, but just to catalyze the reaction (Skill: Ignite). The machine did the rest. The sheer G-force threw the heavy toxin molecules to the outer wall of the chamber, while the lighter, pure Mana Gel collected in the center.
It was physics. Beautiful, non-magical physics.
Ten minutes later, I opened the tap at the bottom. Pure, glowing blue gel flowed out into a waiting jar like liquid starlight. Not three vials. Fifty vials.
I looked at my hands. They weren't shaking. My mana pool was still half full. I looked at Zane. He was panting slightly from the workout, but he was grinning.
"Fifty vials," Zane counted. "At 50 gold each..."
"Two thousand five hundred gold," I finished the math. "In one night."
We stared at the glowing jar. In the Academy, 2,500 gold was the annual tuition fee for a Noble. We had just made it in a garage with scrap metal and weeds.
"We're rich," Zane whispered.
"No," I corrected, capping the jar. "We are a target. Rask is going to lose his mind when he sees this volume."
The Iron Pit - Rask's Office
Rask didn't lose his mind. He lost his composure. When I placed the crate containing fifty vials of Azure Dust on his desk, the crime lord stood up so fast his chair fell over.
"Fifty?" Rask choked. "You cooked fifty in a week? Who are you working with? Which Guild?"
"Just me," I said, leaning back in the chair, my face hidden by the hood. "And my assistant."
Rask picked up a vial. The blue light reflected in his greedy eyes. Demand for Azure Dust had skyrocketed. The "Blue Fire" was becoming a legend in the underground fight clubs. Mages were addicted to the rush of power it gave. "I can sell these," Rask muttered. "I can sell these before sunrise. The Red Hammer gang is terrified. Their fighters are refusing to enter the ring against anyone using the Dust."
"Good," I said. "Then the price stays at 50."
Rask looked at me. "Kid... Ghost. Listen. This amount of product... it attracts attention. Not just from gangs. But from the City Watch." He leaned in. "And from the Merchant Guilds. You are disrupting the potion market. The big players upstairs... the Nobles... they track sales. When legal potion sales drop by 10% in the Lower District, someone notices."
I thought of Cian Aurelius. This was the plan. I wanted him to notice. I wanted to be a thorn in his side that he couldn't pull out.
"Let them notice," I said. "If they want to stop us, they have to find us first."
"You're cocky," Rask grunted. He opened his safe and began stacking gold bars on the table. Payment. Real, heavy, gold bullion.
"One more thing," Rask said, sliding the gold toward me. "I have a problem. And since we are partners, it's your problem too."
"I'm a supplier, Rask. Not a mercenary."
"It's about the supply lines," Rask growled. "My runners. Two of them were jumped last night. Someone knew they were carrying the empty vials back to you."
My eyes narrowed. "Who?"
"The Red Hammers," Rask spat. "They know I have a new supplier. They want to know who you are. They didn't take the money. They tortured the runners asking for a name. Asking for a location."
Zane stepped forward, the floorboards creaking under his weight. "Did they talk?" Zane asked.
"They didn't know anything to tell," Rask shrugged. "But the Hammers are hunting. If they find your lab..."
"They won't," I said, standing up and sweeping the gold into my bag. "But thanks for the warning."
I turned to leave. "Ghost," Rask called out. I looked back. "If you deal with the Hammers... I'll increase your cut to 60 gold per vial."
I paused. A turf war. I didn't want to fight a gang. But if they were hunting me, I had no choice. "I'll think about it."
The Golden Scales - Private Office
Miles above the Rust Pit, in a room smelling of lavender and old paper, Cian Aurelius stared at a ledger. He adjusted his gold-rimmed spectacles. "Explain this," he said softly.
His chief accountant, a nervous man in a velvet suit, wiped sweat from his bald head. "M-Master Cian. It's an anomaly. Sales of standard Low-Grade Mana Potions in the Lower District have dropped by 18% in the last two weeks."
"Eighteen percent," Cian repeated. "That is a loss of four thousand gold marks. Why? Are the poor suddenly deciding to stop using magic?"
"No, sir. Intelligence suggests... a competitor."
Cian looked up. His eyes were sharp, cold blue. "A competitor? The Alchemist Guild has a monopoly. No one else has the license to mass-produce."
"It's... illegal, sir," the accountant stammered. "Street name is 'Azure Dust'. It's a gel. Highly potent. Highly addictive. And cheap."
Cian tapped his finger on the mahogany desk. "A black market narcotic disrupting my supply chain?" He stood up and walked to the window, looking down at the smog-covered Lower District. He hated that place. It was dirty. Unregulated. Chaotic. And now, it was stealing from him.
"Who is making it?" Cian asked.
"Rumors say a new player. They call him The Ghost."
"The Ghost," Cian mused. "How dramatic." He turned back to his desk. "Send word to the City Watch Captain. Tell him I am increasing my donation to the force this month. I want a crackdown on the Lower District. Find this 'Ghost'. Burn his lab. And bring me the ashes."
"Yes, Master Cian."
Cian sat down and opened a new file. To him, this wasn't a war. It was just pest control.
Warehouse 9 - The Next Night
We had the gold. We had the machine. But now, we had enemies. Zane was polishing his new armor. We had spent some of the profit on gear. He now wore a set of Black-Iron Plate, matte and heavy, designed to absorb impact. It made him look less like a student and more like a walking fortress. I had bought books. Advanced alchemy, mechanical engineering, and spell theory.
"Rask said the Hammers are hunting us," Zane said, examining a scratch on his new gauntlet. "We should hit them first."
"We are two people, Zane. They are a gang of fifty," I said, calibrating the centrifuge. "We don't hit them with swords. We hit them with..."
Suddenly, the Ring of Whispers on my finger vibrated. [Warning: Hostile Intent Detected.] [Proximity: 20 meters. Outside.]
I froze. "Zane. Kill the light."
Zane smashed the mana-lamp instantly. The warehouse plunged into darkness. "How did they find us?" Zane whispered, drawing the Iron-Breaker.
"They didn't follow the runners," I realized, cursing my own stupidity. "They followed the smell." Even with the centrifuge, the smell of burning Nightshade was distinct. If they had a Beast-Tamer with a hound...
BOOM. The heavy metal door of the warehouse buckled. Someone was hitting it with a battering ram. BOOM. "OPEN UP! RED HAMMERS!" a voice shouted from outside. "WE KNOW YOU'RE IN THERE, ALCHEMIST!"
I looked at the centrifuge. It was bolted to the floor. We couldn't move it. If they came in, they would destroy the machine. They would take the gold. And they would kill us.
I looked at Zane. In the darkness, his eyes were glowing faintly—a side effect of the Berserker Archetype waking up. "Zane," I said, my voice steady. "Test the new armor."
"Orders?"
"Total incapacitation. No witnesses let go."
CRASH. The door flew off its hinges. Five men rushed in, holding torches and axes. "Get the—"
They stopped. In the center of the dark warehouse, standing between them and the machine, was a shadow. A seven-foot-tall shadow clad in black iron, holding a sword that was too big to be real.
"Hello," Zane rumbled.
The lead bandit raised his torch. The light flickered on Zane's black metal mask. "What the hell is that?"
"That," I said from the shadows of the catwalk above, "is the Rent Collector."
Zane moved. He didn't need technique. He was a train wreck in human form. He swung the Iron-Breaker. The flat of the blade hit the first bandit. The man didn't just fly; he launched. He hit the brick wall ten meters away and stuck there for a second before sliding down.
"Mage! Kill the big one!" the leader screamed.
A bandit in the back began to chant a fire spell. I was ready. I held a small mirror in my hand. [Spell: Light Beam] I reflected a beam of light from the bandit's own torch directly into his eyes. "AH!" The mage blinded himself, his spell fizzling out.
Zane capitalized on the distraction. He charged. Shoulder check. A bandit's ribs shattered. Backhand. Another bandit spun in the air.
It wasn't a fight. It was a massacre. The Red Hammers were street thugs. Zane was a weapon forged in the Novel's toughest backstory. Within thirty seconds, five men were on the floor, groaning or unconscious.
Zane stood over the leader, his boot on the man's chest. The leader coughed blood. "You... you're dead. The Hammer... will bring the whole crew..."
I jumped down from the catwalk, landing softly beside Zane. I was wearing my hood and a porcelain mask I had bought—a simple white face with a black tear painted on it. The face of The Ghost.
"Tell your boss," I said, leaning down, my voice distorted by the mask, "that I am not Rask's pet. I am a businessman." I took a vial of Azure Dust from my pocket and tucked it into the bandit's shirt. "The first sample is free. If the Red Hammers want power... they can buy it from me. Just like Rask."
Zane looked at me, surprised. "We're dealing with them too?"
"Monopoly is good, Zane," I whispered. "But a bidding war is better. If both gangs buy from us... neither will attack us."
I looked at the groaning bandit. "Go. Tell your master that The Ghost is open for business. But next time you break my door... the price goes up."
As the bandits limped away, terrified and broken, I looked at the broken door. The secret was out. We were on the map now. Cian was hunting us from above. The gangs were fighting for us from below.
"We need a better door," Zane noted, sheathing his sword.
"We need a fortress," I corrected. "Pack the machine, Zane. We're moving. The game just got harder."