After managing to stand and put his mask back on, Xander followed Ella off the roof and back down into her shop. Still wrestling with his emotions, he decided that the best way to avoid them was to indulge in a mystery. Since being reincarnated, he hadn’t ever gotten tired the way that he was now, though come to think of it, he was sure that he had slept through several seasons right at the start. Remembering how hard it had been to wake up in the embrace of his oak reminded him that he could actually ask the old tree.

  Looking inside to his magical core, he found the familiar (if faint) connection that vanished into the distance in the direction of his dungeon. Imbuing it with mana, he sent out a message. he asked, and received a reply a moment later.

   came back the familiar mental voice, rich with warm amusement.

   he protested.

  

  Xander scrunched up his face a bit, unable to think of a rebuttal to the oak’s words as he followed Ella through what must be her personal loft above the shop. He tried not to invade her privacy by looking around too much, but he couldn’t help a few quick peeks. It was an open floor plan with simple furniture but he did a double take when he realized it was quite a bit larger than the shop below.

   he hedged distractedly, before gathering his thoughts.

  There was a pause as Caretaker thought, during which time they made it down the stairs and back into Ella’s shop. “Feel free to take a look around, everything is labeled. If you have any questions, I’ll be right over here.” She smiled at him, and Xander had to put down his rebellious feelings once again. he grumped

   Caretaker asked, and Xander rolled his eyes. Nodding to Ella to acknowledge her statement, he found that trying to have multiple conversations at the same time while exhausted was sub-optimal. He moved to one of the wall racks of potions and began to read the wooden placards, waiting for an answer from his oak.

  

  

  Caretaker snorted in his mind

  Pausing, Xander considered that, and thought back to elementary school. His eidetic memory helpfully brought to mind the images and words from all his text books with a fidelity that he would never have been able to manage as a mere human. After some brief consideration, he face-palmed with a long groan.

  Knowledge from schooling a world away reminded him of four major things that sustained plants. Nutrient rich soil, carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight. Wrapping himself up tightly in clothing to hide his skin neatly cut off all of those with a degree of efficiency that he would have been hard pressed to engineer. Even the lung that this body used to ‘breathe’ was small and primarily used to talk, not to gather and circulate air, and thus providing limited utility.

  

   Caretaker chuckled back before getting more serious.

  

  

  

  

  Xander let out a long and heartfelt groan. “Is everything okay Miss?” Ella asked, and Xander realized that even after all she had done for him, he still hadn’t given the shopkeeper his name. Perhaps it was better that he didn’t. If she found out that he was the new Dungeon Lord, things could start going badly very quickly. Better to use the fake name he had come up with before leaving the dungeon..

  “Yes, I’m alright, thank you for asking. And you can call me Autumn.” It seemed like a fitting name for a dryad without being too girly, and it was easily his favorite season. Ella just nodded, and Xander went back to ignoring item labels.

  Apparently Ma’Ha’Zhaneus was still listening, because it replied in a soothing tone.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  

   the oak pointed out.

  Xander winced, and couldn’t help but look back at Ella, who just smiled back at him, unaware of his conversation and thoughts of course.

   Caretaker replied with amusement evident in its voice.

  Xander stuck a mental tongue out at the oak, unsure if the image would show over the link, but the chuckles in the back of his mind told him it did. Turning his attention back to the items available, he started actually reading the labels and was surprised at the wide variety of options available. The small barrels of candy in the center held Healing Taffy, Cleansing Caramels, Lungfull Lemon Drops, Headache Honey Suckers, and several other varieties that all seemed health related.

  “Hey Ella, can I ask what might sound like a silly question?” he asked without turning around. He didn’t want to be caught staring again after all.

  “Of course, I don’t mind,” she replied.

  “Why are all the healing items candy? I mean I’ve had a healing taffy before, but I was too distracted to notice. Shouldn’t they be potions?”

  “Errr… making them into potions would be weirder?” Ella sounded confused at the idea. “I mean most medicines you want to take effect gradually, if the magic took effect all at once the consequences would range from very painful to detrimental.”

  “Really? But I have a healing spell and it recovers my HP quite rapidly.”

  “Oh you have healing magic? I didn’t know that about… you” the shopkeeper said, carefully not calling him out as a dryad even though there was no one else in here at the moment. “You probably don’t need the healing taffy then, but the difference is your intent. A spell that you are controlling shapes itself to your needs, but an item like this can’t do that. The safest way to make the magic work is by giving a kind of improved regeneration. And besides, do you really want to be carrying around potions that can easily spill or be broken in a fight?”

  Xander had to admit that Ella had some good points, and he could also see how cutting out the need for even more glass bottles would make them cheaper to produce too. Speaking of which, he looked at the price tag to see what the candy would cost. Most of them were listed as 1G6.

  “Hey… another quick question, but we didn’t do a lot of trading in the forest where I grew up,” Xander said. “Ummm… I know sort of what the coins mean, but I only have G3 through G5 coins, how many of those would I need to pay for one of these taffies?”

  “Oh, that’s simple enough. Each coin is worth 3 of the next lower coin. So you would need 3G5 to pay for the 1G6 taffy,” Ella said brightly, happy to answer the question. Xander grumped to himself. He wasn’t exactly sure why the prevalence of the number irritated him, but it kept cropping up everywhere. Ella continued on after a pause, “Well except for when you go up coin ranks. To get an F rank coin you need 27 G10’s.”

  “Huh? That seems like a random number…” Xander muttered. “Why so many though?”

  “Each rank of dungeon is a significant step up in difficulty, just like each rank of adventurer is much more powerful than the last. So it keeps things balanced. 27 is a nice number though, wouldn’t you say?”

  Xander finally looked up at her quizzically, something about the number nagging him, but he couldn’t figure out what. Ella just shrugged. “Everyone has their favorite numbers, but 27 does come up in some of my recipes. Actually, most of the batches of those candies take 27 grams of sugar, come to think of it.”

  He had never been a math guy, and the number was an itch he couldn’t seem to scratch, so he just shrugged and tried to put it out of his mind, moving on to look at the skill disks. Racks of vertical spindles held a number of crystalline disks that were roughly the size of an old CD, though twice as thick and with irregular edges. What surprised him the most was the selection however. There were only a few skills that could be considered combat oriented, most of the rest were mundane in nature. The largest spindle was for ‘Identify’, but there were also disks for cooking, cleaning, animal husbandry, basket weaving, and midwifery among others.

  The prices varied widely as well, from as low as 1G2 for Knitting to as high as 5G10 for Basic Berserk. Xander whistled a bit at those prices. “I wonder if anyone can even afford some of these prices,” he muttered under his breath. He had grabbed what he had thought was a significant chunk of change to bring with him, but he couldn’t afford any of the more expensive potions by several tiers of coin. Shaking his head at the expense, he was about to move on to the potion selection when he began noticing his lethargy increasing once more.

   It wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been earlier, but he figured he only had maybe an hour at most before he would pass out again. He needed to speed this up and get to the inn. He browsed the rest of the potions quickly, just to get a feel for what they offered. It became apparent that the potions were all for increasing various affinities or for boosting stats. Certainly could be helpful in a pinch, especially if you knew what you would be fighting, but again the price tags made Xander wonder just how viable they were as single use items.

  When he asked Ella about them, she just smiled. “It depends on the adventurer really, but I don’t sell bulk quantities of my goods. Most people have to save up, and only purchase items either when they are in a time crunch or are otherwise in a bad spot.”

  “How long do these things last?” Xander asked, wondering if he should really be buying anything after all.

  “The short answer is that it depends on the person using them. There are many factors, but I’ll give you a few examples. If you have any amount of experience with the skill in question, the enhancement will last longer. If you have a high resilience or regeneration stat, the healing candies can absorb faster. There are many more interactions like that for pretty much every kind of magical consumable. The general rule though is around two to five minutes for the candies, one to three hours for the potions, and between a couple days and a couple weeks for the skills.”

  “Yeesh, the prices seem even more exorbitant if the skills go away that fast…” Xander replied, then saw Ella’s expression and waved his hands as if to ward off her disappointment. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that I thought you did a bad job or anything,” he said hastily, “In fact it's pretty cool that this is all possible in the first place.” Smiling to reassure her, he belatedly realized that his mask was hiding his expression again.

  With a shake of his head, Xander quickly picked out an Agility Boost potion and a Parkour skill disk to try since he could afford both of them on roughly half his budget. “I’ve never been very athletic or acrobatic, so it might be fun to give these a try,” he explained feeling a bit foolish, especially when she lifted her good eyebrow in relieved amusement. He felt himself staring at her unique scars once more, but she didn’t notice as she took the offered coins and tucked them away underneath the counter somewhere.

  “Is that all for today then?” Ella asked with another smile.

  “Yeah, I think so… I just need to go lay down for a bit I think. But if I’m ever out this way again, I’ll definitely come back.”

  “Good! Just try to get some more sleep okay?” she said with a playful wink.

  “Yeah, yeah… heh… I’ll do that.”

  “Safe travels, Miss Autumn” Ella said with a wave as he headed out.

  “Thanks, you too!” he said, then winced and held in a groan at his distracted reply. He sighed to himself and hurried out of the shop in embarrassment to go find the inn and try to recover from this disaster.