The silver lasted three days.

Dante had not expected it to stretch even that far. Endra's coin had bought him a corner room at the Red Wolf, bread and cheese and a bowl of stew, and the unfamiliar luxury of a door he could close. He spent it carefully, and then all at once; by the end of the third day the pouch was light enough that he already knew what he would find when he turned it out over the blanket.

Nothing.

He sat on the narrow bed and did the math that would come to define the month. No money. A room he could afford for another two nights, maybe three if Hector was in a mood to wait. And, spread across the blanket beside the empty pouch, the only things in this world that anyone would give him a coin for: the pieces of the things that had tried to kill him.

Four tusks. Two hides. Two goblin ears and three canine. Three Low-rank Mana Cores, each the size of a walnut, pulsing faintly with residual light.

He took them to the Guild.

Erika was behind the counter as she had been on the day he arrived at Oakhaven — sleeves rolled, hair pulled up, the same pair of wire-framed spectacles pushed high on her nose. When he laid the monster parts on the counter she looked at them, then at him, then at the ledger she was writing in.

"You don't have a license," she said without looking up.

"I know. I figured the Guild still buys raw materials."

"The Guild buys raw materials from licensed members. Non-members can sell to the Guild, but we charge a forty percent fee on the assessed value. That's the deal. It's not negotiable."

He did the math in his head. Three Mana Cores at eighty Korn each, minus the rest of the loot at whatever the Guild would give him, minus forty percent of all of it. Barely enough to eat for a week.

"What if I sell them privately?"

"Then you get whatever price you can negotiate." She glanced up at him, briefly — a teacher checking whether the lesson had landed. "Which, for someone who doesn't know the market and is visibly new to the village, will be substantially less than the Guild would have given you even with the fee. Your choice."

"Can I take them back?"

"You haven't submitted them officially yet. Take them."

He took them.

---

The village market ran along the southern edge of the square, a rough line of stalls selling turnips and eggs and salted meat. Dante walked it feeling less like a seller than a boy with stolen goods.

A butcher gave him twenty Korn for both boar hides. A cutler took the tusks and the canines for a handful more — less for the last canine, which had come out of the goblin in bad shape. Forty Korn, all told, for the parts of two Red Boars and a goblin. Less than half what the Guild would have paid after the fee.

The Mana Cores were harder.

He found a merchant working out of a caravan that had just arrived — older, unhurried, not the one who had turned him away on his first day. The man held one core up to the light, turned it, set it down.

"Twenty," he said. "For all three."

"They're worth eighty apiece."

"They're worth eighty apiece if you're a licensed Hunter selling to the Guild. Here they're worth twenty for the lot. Take it or go."

He took it.

He walked out of the market with eighty Korn and a hard new lesson in how the world prices people without papers.

He spent the money on alchemy supplies, because the supplies were the only thing he owned that could make more money than they cost. Three glass vials from the glassblower Endra had sent him to, at eight Korn each — the man recognized him and charged him the honest price. A small copper measure to replace the one in Endra's kit, which was too small for real work. A sealable jar of clean water from the well-keeper, because the water in Oakhaven ran through enough cattle troughs that you did not want to brew with it unfiltered.

That left him with twelve Korn and a single afternoon of daylight.

---

The next morning he tried to buy boots.

He remembered the moment later the way you remember small humiliations — funny in hindsight, lodged behind the teeth at the time. The cobbler's stall was on the main lane, narrow and tidy. The man barely looked up when Dante asked about the cheapest pair.

"One hundred Korn."

Dante did not say anything. He was not sure his voice would come out right. He stood in the doorway of the stall and looked at the boots — honest leather, double-stitched soles, boots that would keep a boy's feet dry through an Oakhaven winter and the forest mud — and thought about the twelve Korn in his pocket.

Then he thanked the cobbler and walked out.

He stood in the lane for a minute afterward. A farmer's wife passed him with a basket. A dog barked from a yard two doors down. The boots in the window had a stitch pattern he could still see when he closed his eyes.

(Twelve Korn. One hundred. At the rate things are going, it'll take me an eternity to afford anything.)

He walked back to the Red Wolf, sat on the narrow bed in his rented room, and opened the small leather-bound book Endra had left him.

---

He hadn't read it yet. Not properly. He had flipped through it the evening after she vanished, scanning pages while his chest was still tight from the ruin, but the pages hadn't held his attention then. Now — with nothing in his pocket and nothing to eat and the first faint prickle of panic creeping up the back of his neck — he read it properly.

It was a recipe book.

Endra's handwriting filled the pages in three different styles — a careful formal script for headings, a quicker working hand for instructions, and a small margin-hand for notes she had apparently been adding for decades. The first section was Stamina Tonic — the recipe she had walked him through, now written out in full with three variants for different plant availability. The second was Minor Healing Potion, based on a plant called Vitalis. The third was Minor Mana Potion, which required a plant called Amaranthia and a filtration he did not yet know how to perform.

There were other sections too. Salves. Balms. Fever reductions. Wound-packing pastes. Antiseptics. Each with ingredients, measurements, warnings in the margins.

At the front, on the inside cover, a single line in her neat script:

The forest gives, but it keeps accounts. Keep yours honest.

Dante sat with the book open in his lap and understood, for the first time, how much she had actually given him. Not a gift. Not a handout. A trade — something he could do with his hands that would pay for the room and the food and the boots and, eventually, the license. Everything she had taught him in three days, compressed into a book that would be useful for years.

He closed the book and put it in the inventory beside the dried flowers and his mother's note.

It was still morning. He walked out of the Red Wolf and into the forest.

---

The first herb he found on his own was growing in a place he almost walked past.

It was near the stream — the same stream he had drunk from during his first walk through these woods. The ground was soft and damp, thick with the pale moss he had used for his poultice weeks ago. And growing at the base of a rotting log, in the half-light too deep in the shade for the sun to reach directly, there was something he had not seen before. Dark green leaves, slightly waxy — easy to walk over a hundred times without bending down.

But when he knelt and reached for one, he felt it before he touched it.

Warmth.

Not from the leaf. From somewhere below it, radiating upward through the stem into the air above, as if a small animal were asleep under the soil with its body pressed against the roots. A faint pulse of heat that seemed to find the wound in his side and lean toward it — as if the plant could feel the damaged tissue through the air and was already trying to do something about it.

He plucked the leaf. The warmth traveled up his fingers, through his palm, into his wrist. Gentle. Deliberate. A hand placed on a bruise — not pressing, just present. The reddish veins on the leaf's surface pulsed once, like a heartbeat settling after exertion.

(What are you?)

[That is Vitalis. One of the foundational curative herbs. The warmth is its natural resonance with damaged tissue — it produces compounds that accelerate cell regeneration on contact. In potion form, the effect is amplified and stabilized.]

(Healing potions.)

[Yes. And Endra's book lists it as the primary ingredient.]

He gathered more — carefully, leaf by leaf, leaving at least half the cluster intact. Never take the last one of anything. By the time he stood up, he had enough for three potions, and the warmth had spread up his forearm like a gentle sunburn that did not hurt.

The second herb found him.

He had been walking for another hour, deeper into the forest, when the canopy thinned and a single shaft of gold light came down through the trees and landed in a circle on the forest floor. He stepped into it — because the light was warm and his body was tired and sometimes you step into light because it is there — and his boot came down on something that pushed back.

A jolt.

Not pain. Something closer to being plugged into a socket he had not known existed. A surge of raw energy that entered through the sole of his boot and traveled up his leg and hit his chest like a second heartbeat. Sharp, clean, awake. The fatigue in his shoulders evaporated in a single breath. His eyes went wide. His fingers tingled.

He looked down. Small yellow petals, almost luminescent, growing between the roots of the nearest tree. The petals not crushed under his boot were glowing — a warm gold that did not need the sunlight to be seen.

[Cardiacea. The petals release compounds that stimulate vigor and reduce muscular fatigue on contact. Raw, the effect lasts minutes. Stabilized in a tonic through heat and binding agents, it lasts hours.]

(Endra's recipe. This is the ingredient she used.)

He gathered the petals like small pieces of gold — which, he was beginning to understand, was exactly what they were.

The third herb did not want to be found.

He searched for three days before ALICE's mapping identified a concentration of ambient mana near the old stone wall deep in the forest — the collapsed ruin he had passed during Endra's gathering trip. The air there was different. Heavier. It pressed against his skin with a barely perceptible weight, a building storm that never quite arrived.

The root was buried under a stone. Dark. Knobbly. Ugly — in the way mushrooms are ugly, a thing that does not need to be pretty because it serves a function no pretty thing could serve.

He gripped it. Pulled.

The moment it came free, his teeth ached. Each one individually, as if someone had tapped a tuning fork against each tooth in rapid succession. A vibration traveled from his hand up through his arm and settled behind his eyes as a low-grade headache.

[Amaranthia. A mana-reactive root. The vibration is a resonance response — it contains a high concentration of mana-binding compounds that oscillate in proximity to ambient mana. The headache will pass in approximately twenty minutes.]

He held the ugly root in his palm. It vibrated, a phone on silent. He wrapped it, put it in the inventory, and walked back toward the village with his teeth still aching.

---

The first batch of Stamina Tonics came out amber and clear and faintly glowing, and the next morning he set them on the Red Wolf's bar like a boy turning in homework.

"What's this?" said Hector.

The innkeeper was a massive man — black beard grown to intimidate creditors, arms that had moved barrels for thirty years, eyebrows that registered displeasure like weather fronts.

"Stamina tonics. Twenty-five Korn each."

Hector picked one up, uncorked it, sniffed. The eyebrows went up.

"This is good."

"I know."

"Where'd you learn?"

"A friend taught me."

A long look. A recalculation. Then:

"I'll take two. And if anyone asks, I don't know where you made them."

Business started.

---

By the second week, people were knocking on the tavern door asking for the herb boy.

He hadn't picked the name. It found him — one morning a farmer's wife waved him down in the square and asked if he had any tonics for her husband's back, and by the afternoon half the village was using the nickname as if they had always used it.

The potions moved faster than he could brew them. Farmers with infected cuts who couldn't afford the Church's healing fees. Hunters who wanted endurance before a job. A traveling merchant who bought six at once for his caravan crew and asked about a monthly supply.

The money was still slow. Each vial was twenty-five or thirty Korn, and the forest only gave him so many herbs a day. But each copper coin was one coin closer to the license, and the math was no longer abstract. It had a shape now. It had a number, and the number got smaller every week.

For the first time since the cave, Dante had something that resembled a life.

It would not last the month. But he did not know that yet.