I y on the floor for a while. Five minutes maybe, or ten. Time moves differently when you're on your back on cold stone with cum drying on your face. a goblin club somewhere nearby and a bowl of magical healing fluid sitting between your knees. I stared at the ceiling and let my body finish whatever it was doing and didn't think about anything in particur.

  Eventually I reached down and felt my asshole with two fingers, the way you'd check a healing cut to see if it had closed. Completely normal. No soreness, no tenderness, nothing. The Morning Dew had done its usual thorough job. I filed this away under practical benefits of the situation and sat up.

  I bent forward and cleaned my cock off with my tongue, licking the shaft slowly from base to tip, getting everything that had accumuted during the session. This was, I acknowledged to myself, probably not strictly necessary from a hygiene standpoint. It was however something I was going to do anyway. My cock got hard again immediately, the ring interpreting the attention as an invitation, and I looked down at it and shook my head slightly.

  "We're done," I told it.

  It went back down with the reluctant energy of something that had been told no and didn't fully believe it yet.

  I turned my attention to the bowl.

  It was still warm in my hands when I picked it up off the floor, the Morning Dew holding its temperature in a way that regur fluid wouldn't, the faint luminescence of it catching the afternoon light coming through the window. I'd produced more than I realized during the session. The bowl was full to maybe an inch from the rim, which was more than seven vials worth, it was a better result than I'd projected for my first attempt.

  I set the bowl carefully on the table and arranged the seven vials in a row beside it. Pulled out the funnel. Got everything positioned. This was, I decided, actually satisfying in a way I hadn't anticipated. The simple mechanical pleasure of a process working the way it was supposed to, inputs and outputs behaving logically, a pn executing cleanly.

  I filled the first vial slowly, tilting the bowl against the funnel, watching the Morning Dew flow in warm and luminescent and settle in the gss. Stoppered it. Set it aside. Picked up the second vial.

  The system screen appeared while I was filling the third one.

  It materialized in the middle of my vision with its usual complete indifference to timing or context, floating transparent over the image of me sitting naked at a table with a bowl of my own precum and a funnel, which was perhaps the most appropriate context it had ever appeared in now that I thought about it.

  ? NEW CRAFTING CLASS UNLOCKED

  ───────────────────────────── CUM CRAFTER Crafting Sub-Css Unique───────────────────────────

  Vitalist output may be refined, concentrated, and stabilized for external application and trade.

  CRAFTING SKILLS UNLOCKED

  SKILL — TYPE — DESCRIPTION

  Morning Dew Distiltion — Passive — Collected Morning Dew stabilizes in sealed containers. Potency retained indefinitely. Quality scales with charge level at time of collection.

  Enhanced Yield — Passive — Collection sessions at high charge produce increased volume. Prostate stimution during collection increases yield further.

  Cum Crafter's Intuition — Passive — Instinctive awareness of current batch quality and approximate market value.

  ? NOTE — Crafting sub-css identity and ingredient origin are subject to standard Vitalist disclosure restrictions. Proceed accordingly.

  I stared at it for a moment.

  Cum Crafter. That was my crafting sub-css. The system had watched me sitting naked on a floor filling vials with my own precum using a funnel and a goblin club up my ass...and had decided this warranted an official sub-css with three passive skills and a formal notification. Prostate stimution during collection increases yield further was in there as an official skill description. The system had looked at what I was doing and not only endorsed it, but optimized it.

  I closed the screen and sat with that for a second.

  Then I looked at the three filled vials sitting on the table, the four empty ones waiting, the bowl still half full and thought about Cum Crafter's Intuition sitting warm and new at the back of my awareness. A faint sense of the quality of what I'd produced today, and the number that floated up from it was good. Better than good. Whatever the alchemist's testing machine was going to say about these vials, the answer was going to be impressive.

  I filled the remaining four vials with the quiet satisfaction of someone whose professional instincts had just been officially validated by a magical system notification, stoppered them, and lined all seven up on the table.

  Half the bowl still sitting there.

  I looked at it. A dealer doesn't sample his own wares, I had told myself approximately three hours ago with great professional conviction.

  I picked up the bowl and drank it down.

  It hit warm and immediate, spreading through me from my stomach outward in that familiar wave, every part of me coming up to a frequency slightly above normal, the live wire feeling settling through my limbs and leaving me feeling like I'd slept twelve hours and eaten a full meal and done nothing wrong ever in my life. I licked the bowl clean with my tongue, getting the st of it from the curved gss, and set it down and smiled.

  A dealer can sometimes sample his own supply, I thought. Under certain circumstances. As a quality control measure. It seemed like a reasonable policy revision.

  I dressed, went downstairs and talked the innkeeper out of a small canvas bag for a few copper, and packed my meager belongings into it. The seven vials wrapped carefully in cloth. The bowl. The funnel. The goblin club, which had at this point earned a permanent pce in my inventory whether I liked it or not.

  I slung the bag over my shoulder and went back out into the afternoon.

  The alchemist looked up when I came through the door and his expression did something complicated. I had been in his shop that morning. It was now early afternoon. I was back already with a bag over my shoulder and what I hoped was the confident bearing of a businessman rather than the energy of someone who had spent the intervening hours doing something deeply unusual in a rented room.

  "Good afternoon," I said.

  He said nothing. Just looked at me with those permanent squinty eyes.

  I sighed inwardly. "I have some healing potions I'd like to sell. I think you'll find them very good." I said this with more confidence than I felt, because the alternative was leading with uncertainty, and uncertainty did not seem like a strong opening position for a negotiation.

  He looked at me for a long moment. "You have potions to sell me," he said. Not a question exactly. More the tone of a man who had heard many things in his shop and was deciding where this one ranked.

  "I do."

  I reached into the bag and pulled out one of the vials and set it on the counter between us.

  The Morning Dew caught the mp light immediately. Warm gold, faintly luminescent, the glow of it subtle but unmistakable in the dim shop. It looked like something that cost a lot of money. It looked like something that had no business being produced by a nineteen year old from Ohio, with his dick and a goblin club, which was the entire foundation of my business model.

  The alchemist's eyes went wide.

  He caught himself. Reached under the counter and produced a small device I didn't have a name for. It was a stand with some kind of measuring apparatus attached, something that hummed faintly when he set the vial into it. He looked at the readout and his expression did the specific thing of a man receiving information that surprised him significantly and deciding very quickly not to show it. The surprise sted maybe two seconds before he got his face under control. Professional. Practiced. Almost convincing.

  "Not bad," he said, in the tone of someone describing something that was considerably more than not bad. "I'll give you five silver each."

  I looked at him. I thought about the way his eyes had gone wide before he caught himself. I thought about the readout on his little machine and what it must have told him to produce that specific involuntary reaction in a man who handled unusual substances for a living. I thought about Cum Crafter's Intuition sitting in the back of my awareness telling me quietly and with complete confidence that what I'd produced today was exceptional.

  "I saw your face," I said. "Forty silver each."

  He looked at me with new eyes. Reassessing. The shabby clothes, the youth and the zero apparent credentials getting re-filed somewhere less dismissive.

  We went back and forth for a while. He came up, I came down, we both held positions and retreated from them with the specific energy of two people who didn't entirely know what they were doing but weren't going to admit it. He knew the product was exceptional. I knew I had no idea what the market looked like. We met somewhere in the middle.

  Twenty silver each. More if they performed as the testing suggested they would.

  He counted out the coins with the careful movements of someone parting with money they'd rather keep and slid them across the counter. One gold piece and forty silver.

  Then I had another thought.

  "I'm going to need more vials," I said. "Fifty more. And something to carry them in."

  He looked at me for a moment with the expression of a man recalibrating his assessment of the shabby boy standing in his shop. Then he turned and began pulling things from shelves, fifty slender vials in sets of ten. Then a ft wooden carrying case with individual slots, lined with cloth, the kind of thing designed to keep gss from knocking together in a bag. He set it all on the counter and named a price. I paid it without haggling because I'd used up my negotiating energy on the potions and also because the case was genuinely well made and I wanted it.

  "I'll be back soon," I said.

  He nodded once. The closest thing to warmth he'd managed since I walked in.

  I picked up the case and my coins and went back out into the afternoon.

  One gold and forty silver, minus what I'd paid for the vials and case. Still more money than I'd had at any point in my nineteen years of existence, including the summer I'd worked on a neighbor's farm for actual wages. I walked down the street with the wooden case under my arm and the coins heavy in my pocket and tried to maintain a normal expression.

  Richer than an astronaut, I thought.

  The clothes situation needed addressing. I had been wearing the same stolen linen trousers since I stole them days ago. my shirt was in a simir condition. I had been mostly getting away with it because the city was busy and nobody was looking that closely. But I had gold in my pocket now and walking around in shabby clothes felt like wearing a sign that said please don't take me seriously. I had a business to run and a professional reputation to establish. I needed to at least look like someone who had his life together even if the specifics of how he had his life together were not avaible for disclosure.

  I found a tailor two streets over by the simple method of walking until I saw one. The shop had bolts of fabric in the window and a woman inside who looked at me with the immediate professional assessment of someone whose job was to look at people and identify what they needed.

  She looked at my trousers first. Then at my shirt. Then she looked at my face with the careful neutral expression of a person being very polite about something.

  "I need clothes," I said. "Everything. Something that fits properly and doesn't look like I stole it from a rger person."

  She didn't ask about the goblin club under my arm. I appreciated that.

  I walked out an hour ter in dark trousers that fit correctly and a pin linen shirt that wasn't stolen. Boots that came up over the ankle and had been resoled recently. Simple, clean, well made. The kind of clothes that said I have some money and I'm not trying to impress anyone about it, which was exactly the impression I was going for.

  I looked down at myself on the street outside the tailor and felt, for the first time since I woke up in that forest, like a person who roughly had their situation under control.

  The ring pulsed warmly at my base.

  "Yeah," I said quietly, to my own crotch, on a public street, like a completely normal person. "I know."