Call me cruel or whatever but when you spend seventy plus years thinking of living beings as moving and breathing vitality bags you get detached from life in general. I don’t mistreat Gurry because I find some sort of sick enjoyment out of it. The reason I do so is to instill a sense of fear in him. I need to become worse than my dear father in his mind. This way he will rather displease father than me.  

 

I need to put the fear of me in him deep enough that he will subconsciously think of me as his true master. The reason I need to do this is to acquire the materials I want. If I were to ask for poison without doing this beforehand he would for sure inform father, something I do not want. 

 

It took the better part of two years for my plan to come to fruition. The first year was spent mostly making myself the boogeyman in Gurry’s mind. I actually think the poor thing is suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, not like I care. The second year was spent with me giving him orders on what and where to gather. As useful as house elves might be, they aren’t omniscient. With the materials I needed being mostly mundane I had to give exact instructions as well as a few drawings so the elf wouldn’t bring me useless junk.

 

I must thank Lucy for letting me keep the good doctor’s spatial bag property. It is extremely useful as things I put inside don’t deteriorate. The fact I can access it with any form of container is even better. Unfortunately for me it's not infinite. I tested it and the space inside is one cubic meter. I do wonder if I will be able to use the expansion charm on it somehow, thoughts for the future. 

 

Another important thing to mention is the fact that my hunts have been going perfectly. Two years of steady hunting have netted me with seven years of life expectancy. I know it is not a lot but it is twice and a bit more than what I had before. More than enough to get into Hogwarts and the all you can eat buffet known as the forbidden forest. 

 

“Wonder how much would a unicorn give me?” Was I scared about the curse resulting from killing an unicorn? Hell no, from the few records I have managed to get my little hands on the curse is nothing more than a bunch of baloney. There was no physical effect from the said curse and everyone afflicted with it had killed themselves. 

 

“Bet it’s something stupid like: Knowing you were the one to end such a majestic creature is a curse in itself” In other words weak minded fools that could not handle taking a life. Not to mention I would not kill the thing, I would just drain it of its life blood until it could barely walk. 

 

There is no need for me to kill them, I get nothing from it; no, it would actually be a detriment. Less unicorns around would be less blood bags for me to bite into. Not only that but I have also found out I can’t take the vitality stored in the flesh from eating it. I tried and it was very uncomfortable to stuff a raw squirrel in my mouth. I gained absolutely nothing from it aside from its usual nutritional value. 

 

That is another interesting thing. Vampires are undead, at least the normal kind are. I am not an undead though, all my bodily functions are still there and I still need to eat food if I want to keep my vitality usage to a minimum. I have no trouble with the sun or garlic and I am pretty sure a stake to the heart would kill me if not removed quickly enough for my enhanced regeneration to do its thing. Over all, I may be a vampiric being but I am not a vampire, weird init. 

 

Where was I? Right! Potions, thanks to Gurry’s efforts I got to make them throughout last year. I decided to go with three: the first is the muscle enhancing one, it increases muscle density and volume though I reduced the later effect. I don’t want to have a massive muscular body, thank you very much. I will be satisfied with a toned one. Little problem, from the info in my mind the power of the muscles would be enough to break your bones. That’s where the second potion comes in.

 

The second potion is a bone hardening one. How it works is by having our flimsy calcium based bones be reinforced with a kind of bio metal. The benefit is your bones will be extra hard to break, the downside is their increase in weight. These two potions are a set, take one without the other and you are asking for trouble. 

 

Finally, the third potion is a nerve agent. The nasty thing is supposed to destroy the nerves in charge of transmitting the pain signals as well as destroying the part of the parietal lobe charged with handling pain and self preservation. This one is one of the most important potions in the zombie making cocktail. 

 

I of course modified the last potion since I didn’t want to lose my entire sense of pain or self preservation, I just wanted it to become dull enough to ignore pain even if I was dying. As for self preservation, with my enhanced regeneration I didn’t need to worry about most wounds. 

 

Another modification to the thing was adding some of the effects of another of the doctor’s concoctions. This one has a few variations and is charged with regenerating the brain. The variations I chose were for growing the temporal lobe. Since I couldn't specify what I wanted with these ones I just went for the most useful one. My hope was that my temporal lobe would take the space and enhance my memory and senses. 

 

I of course tested the things on some critters beforehand. I may be insane but not enough to try them on myself first before knowing they would do what I wanted them to. This is also why it took me a year before I decided to take them myself. Lots of tweaking, many critters dead, the works. 

 

“Alright, let's do this!” I quickly took out my chemistry set out of my toy trunk. Well, more accurately I took it out of my pocket dimension using the toy trunk as the access point but who cares about semantics anyway. 

 

First I needed to prepare the materials I would need so I took my time separating the skin and bulb of a few collared earthstars. Next I needed to take the petals from some poppy flowers as well as some seeds. Some copper rust powder as well as zinc rust powder. There were some other ingredients I had to prepare before starting as well. 

 

With everything ready I started by dumping the poppy petals into a hundred milliliters of water which I placed on top of a burner. While that heated up I got a mortar and started grinding down the bulb of the collared earthstar while carefully adding copper rust until I had added a total of twenty grams. Setting that aside I began to do the same with the skin and zinc rust.  

 

A while later the water began to boil meaning I needed to start adding the two pastes in equal quantity. Following that I started to grind down the poppy seeds while adding some small doses of mineral oil. I continued working with razor sharp focus until I had finished the three potions I wanted.

 

“Well, bottoms up I guess.” I murmured to myself before drinking the first potion, the muscle enhancing one. If I had to describe the taste then think of drinking cheap wine mixed with chocolate chip ice cream with some lime juice added in.   

 

“I thought this would taste way worse taking into account what goes into making this.” I couldn’t help but smack my lips a bit. Don’t get me wrong, it tasted very weird but overall it could have been way worse. 

 

“Wonder when it will start takin- AURHG” I couldn’t even finish speaking before I started dry heaving. I also began having a cold sweat as I felt like my veins had been injected with liquid nitrogen. Not only that but if I got a pound every time I felt my muscles dancing beneath my skin I would have two pounds. It’s not much but it's horrifying that it has happened twice. 

 

I could do nothing else aside from shake and softly whimper while I waited for the potion to do its thing. I was thankful for my foresight since I told Gurry to not bother me no matter what for the next four hours which is the amount of time it should take for all three potions to do their thing. 

 

“Screw it, there is nothing in my knowledge against taking all three at the same time.” Thinking that I decided to take the other two. If I was going to suffer might as well make it worse for a shorter time than prolonging it at a diminished intensity.

 

Drinking the other two made my suffering worse. I expected it but the bone breaking pain and skull splitting headache made me want to commit sudoku right there and then. For those that failed their memeology class it means I want to kill myself thankyou very much. 

 

“I mush ba lushin et ef im tolken te en amijinire oudince~” Hehe, my voice was going funny. I really wanted to pass out but when some of the pain you were feeling came directly from your brain it made things a bit difficult. 

 

“Brian shuldn hav pin risiptrs” Why was my brain hurting to begin with! The brain has no pain receptors! 

 

I spent the next two hours in pain wondering if Arthur Pendragon is a guy or a girl. That has nothing to do with anything? Give a girl some slack, some of my brain was mushed up while another was growing in its place. 

 

At least somewhere along the way the pain began to dull until it was nothing more than a whisper at the back of my mind. By then I knew that the process was mostly over though I didn’t feel like moving at all. Not to mention I hadn’t finished with my considerations on the gender of the king? Queen? Ruler of Camelot. 

 

“I should probably get up now.” The pain had finally completely disappeared meaning the procedure was finished. I needed to test the results and see if I had fucked up somewhere along the way. 

 

“Before that though.” I looked into my vitality reserves and I was quite displeased to say the least. 

 

“Fuck me with a cactus up the ass.” Yeah, I was displeased indeed. Why you might ask? Well, my reserves had gone down the gutter. if my calculations were correct I only had six months left. 

 

“Guess changing your bones, muscles, and regenerating part of your brain is costly… tehe~” Well, at least I hadn’t killed myself. It was an oversight on my part to forget about the cost such a heavy bodily modification would entail but it was worth it. 

 

The reason why I wanted to take these potions as soon as possible was simply because of how my self defense glyph arrangement originally worked. In simple gaming lingo, it worked as a base stat multiplier buff.

 

Let's say my strength lets me dead lift fifty kilos. When active at full force I would be able to lift two hundred kilos. Now if I increase that initial fifty kilos to let's say, two-hundred fifty kilos then with the glyphs it would jump to a ton. However, the little incident two years back made that buff even stronger! Instead of the four time max multiplier it’s now five! I know I know it’s not that much but it is still better than nothing… NOT! 

 

Even though it lets me use a five time multiplier now instead of a four time it also consumes a lot more vitality than before! In my past life I wouldn’t have given a fuck with how much vitality I could farm but now? Yeah every drop of the thing is like a peerless treasure to me. 

 

Aside from that I discovered another thing that spells trouble for my future. Ya know how my vitality and magic is now intertwined? Well, I discovered that whenever I use my vitality some of my magic is also used. This is good because it is probably reducing the vitality cost, HOWEVER, what about the other way around? Will I use some of my vitality whenever I use my magic? 

 

“One does not know what they have until they lose it. I have fallen from wealth to the slums of life but I shall recover and reach for the heavens!” Sorry, I went a bit Wuxia there but can you blame me? It's my literal life we are talking about here!