Making a final check on the ingredients, I realize we really have to send someone to stock up, this humidity is awful, it ruins the ingredients immediately, but we can’t ask them to bring them all the way here if we don't buy it in bulks, I end up working myself up having to make the potions before the ingredients get ruined.
Well that's about it, it's around time for brewing the last “potion” of the morning, I start heating up some water, although... it has been quite sometime since this potion stopped being “The alchemist drink.”, what was it?

Around the 200’s explorers traveled to the frozen islands deep south and found some ruins, with one subterranean compartment full of two things: tea and a brown powder, they really did not hesitate and used it right then and there, the tea i mean. But being the idiots they were they also went and used the brown powder without knowing what it was, supposing it was some sort of hot drink since it was in the same place than the tea, well they were not wrong but that's just luck and bad exploring they could have been drinking any sort of poison.

The bitter flavor was a hit they decided to take everything and emptied the ruins. For hundreds of years those were the only 10.000 kilos of coffee ever found.

At the continent the hot drink was a hit too, nobles and merchants were fighting for an audience with the explorers, it sold pretty well and high, with that money the explorers funded more expeditions.

However they never found more, many ruins but never with the coffee, soon they realized that there would be no more, the price raised and the efforts to actually discover what it was became of the utmost importance, alchemists and elementals mages of plant and earth were tasked with the investigation.

In these times alchemy was still primitive, The leading theory in the alchemist circles was that it was a grinding of some sort of mineral, there are all kinds of rocks in the world and earth elementals can even create new ones so maybe this one was one of those since they also tend to be scarce. There were those who believed that it could be a fruit or the wood of some plant, however plant elementals can't really make a plant that they don't know, at the very least they need a seed for the first time.

Hundreds of years passed and around the 500’s the search had died down, coffee still maintained the legendary reputation but it was only on the back mind of anyone, only a few families still had some, at this level they even made rituals surrounding this unique substance that would run out and never be tasted again.

Now this time was pivotal for modern alchemy, the invocation of alchemy demons became possible, the most important being the darkness elemental demon of alchemy, this one demon would take random ingredients offered to him and give you more of an specified ingredient that you didn't knew how to make, you had to also give him at least bit of it, for 200 grams he would give you back 2 or 100 kilos, his rates are always random.

An alchemist, discipline of the one who discovered the invocation was given 300 grams of coffee, enough to buy a whole mansion in the Capital, the merchant who came with the coffee wanted the discipline to try this rumored new technique the discipline did and, for the first time in history coffee new coffee appeared thanks to the demon of elemental darkness.

The alchemist and the merchant acted fast and quietly, they made and sold coffee, made themselves a fortune before anyone could notice what was happening and when they did all hell broke loose, everyone was rushing to learn the recently discovered method to summoning an alchemy demon and getting their hands on even a single grain of the powder to start producing it.

The alchemy demon is a monster of darkness, of the unknown and hidden, their interest is to hide secrets but also to feed on how much someone desires them, by handing out things on their end result, they avoid people learning about the true workings, how to make them. At the time we knew it was a plant product but from which one, that was still a mystery.

The coffee stopped being the nation sweeping luxury now consumed mostly by alchemists and those who had access to them, around this time the name of “Alchemist drink” was coined.

Things looked good however some fool, somewhere broke the darkness demon deal. To work on the ingredient you want, the demon covers the whole table or room in elemental darkness and stays like that for days, supposedly the darkness demon is using, unknown methods to get the substance, it is not reproduced by magic is only that the processes are started from magic, this fool tried to look into it with elemental light magic and the demon cursed his deals to everyone who tried to get coffee, every time he would make the deal he would push the upper limit a bit down until the conversion was 1:1 and then nothing.

This fool, knowing that everyone would be after him decided to stay silent and let everyone keep on doing their deals, ignorant that they were again going to lose their coffee. Since the exchanges were always random and now nobody really put much attention to coffee they didn't notice until no alchemist was getting more than a kilo as an upper limit, thats was when they panicked, there was no point finding the fool, the damage was done, coffee once again was limited and would again eventually run out, even with the deals, so everyone started to stock up on it, the coffee ran out even faster, again, we were at explorations levels and coffee would slowly but surely get expensive and recover his old status.

Then 150 years ago, in 916, a young merchant from a remote tribe in the Allatok archipelago joined a merchant guild in Rhyn and upon rising ranks was given coffee, he had heard of it but never actually had it, except that he had.

He immediately paid huge amounts for a little more and took time off to go back to his old village, where they would regularly make travels to a small island that had these trees with green fruits that had seeds inside of them, the drink made out of these was something he had drank his whole childhood with his family and the tribe but he thought that was just some local delicacy of his people plus his kind was made out of beans he had never seen it into this powder form, he tried different methods to replicate the alchemist drink and finally found that dehydrating and grinding them was the one that came closer to the real thing although he had much more faith in his local variant of using the beans directly, much more bitter with more flavour.

He saved up money, selling small amounts of his selfmade alchemist drink, enough to buy a terrain at the Rhyn interior and started planting the trees in quantities much bigger than what was found in his small island, he then initiated the third coffee revolution and made a huge fortune although his bean coffee was a little too bitter for the upper class accustomed to the mild flavor of the alchemist kind but for those who had never tasted it before it was just right.

Eventually the seed spread out, prices would go down and become much like the tea it was first stored with.

“Noooo, you can’t just come inside a lady’s room hmhmm” She growls in between the pillows. “I didn't know we were having guests, is someone else here?” I put the cup of coffee and two pieces of bread besides her table as she starts to sluggishly rise up.

“Today we are doing the clairvoyance light spell practice, the potions will be messing with all your senses so i need you to be alert starting now till the practice ends. you must not lose yourself in them.”

The current owner of the fort nods as she starts to eat, she pays for all the ingredients so she is my employer, we are also the only ones here so the food is my duty too.

“Ugghagg, couldn't we get the real stuff ‘alchemist’!?” the coffee hit her, not unexpected.
“That’s the real stuff, honestly, you are such a bourgeois ” The coffee is not arbitrary, it will help her be alert in a weaker but non-magical way that will not interfere with the potions.
“We can try a bit of milk next time if you must”
“With milk? that's a thing? ”
“are you a noble or not?” I went overboard.
“Hey! They only alchemist drink i have ever had was the one you made when we were on the road and now at the fort you are giving me this bitter thing”
“Nobody calls it that anymore...” Although i wouldn't mind if it kept the name, at least in this fort “you see, in the south...”