Chapter 1441 - A Damn Good Alchemy Session (Patreon)

“One would think I’d be rusty after not doing alchemy for over five hundred years,” Jake joked around with himself as he controlled the different energies within the cauldron at the same, if not a superior, level to before his little time-dilated adventure.

Finding himself in such good form really made Jake feel up to the task and kind of hyped up to do some alchemy again, even if it was a long shot that he’d actually succeed in creating what he'd rather ambitiously set out to do. Unfortunately, he was under strict time pressure and had a lot of things to consider before he could even start to make something useful.

Jake had given a lot of thought to what kind of poison to use, and many ideas had already started to take shape. Alchemists were scary as fuck in a war context, and for good reason, but Jake had never specialized in the kinds of poison suitable for war.

He had rarely used any large-scale poison tactics before, such as against the Simivita and birds in the Pantheon of Life Hunting Ground, but even that hadn’t been too effective.

Right now, his best way to poison many foes at once was by using his Wings of the Malefic Viper to pump out poison mist. However, truth be told, that mist kind of sucked, no doubt due to how Jake had never worked on improving it.

The poison mist effect had only ever been passively upgraded when the skill was upgraded, with none of them focusing on it. Instead, he’d tagged on new features such as the escape function and their ability to serve as a pretty solid defensive ability.

Blood of the Malefic Viper did help the poison mist a bit, but he hadn’t focused solely on making his blood as poisonous as possible either. In conclusion, Jake’s poison mist left much to be desired, and while he would have loved to work on upgrading Wings of the Malefic Viper to improve its ability to commit war crimes, only a few months would be far from enough.

Besides, if Jake wanted to make his poison mist stronger, wouldn’t it be a good idea to learn more about how such toxins worked in the first place? There was a good chance that part of his work on an upgrade would involve researching and crafting poison gas, so this could be viewed as taking half a step towards improving Wings anyway.

After a day or so of researching the basics, Jake had already reached a few more conclusions, one of which was that he wouldn’t be able to make a poison capable of killing anything.

Any kind of poison gas or mist Jake unleashed on a large scale simply wouldn’t contain enough toxins to overwhelm the vital energies of several B-grades at once, so unless he was fighting a bunch of C-grades, it was off the table. Usually, when alchemists did make poison mist capable of killing foes, it was in conjunction with other things Jake wasn’t confident in pulling off.

One of those things was the good old trap-formation-plus-poison combo. One would trap foes in a large formation, after which poison would be released on all those inside. The formation also often had the ability to further empower and infuse the poison with energy to keep it effective as long as possible, and needless to say, this kind of setup would take a long time to prepare and create. Far longer than Jake had, and besides, he had no idea how to make formations like that.

Aside from that, large-scale deadly poison attacks came about due to immense amounts being released by far more powerful alchemists than those it was used against, going back to Jake only being confident in making poison gas capable of killing if he faced C-grades.

There was one more kind of poison Jake could use that would work. Perhaps it would even be the most effective kind of poison. A type of poison so insidious that Jake wasn’t even sure it should be classified as a poison in the first place, and dangerous enough that Nevermore needed an entire floor to warn people about it.

He was naturally referring to plagues.

Jake wasn’t going to create a plague.

Putting all morals aside, it would be downright moronic for Jake to use a plague in the World of the Exalted Prima. Plagues were banned in the multiverse, and anyone who used them would be hunted down and killed. Even if Jake did it in a virtual world, he would still out himself as being capable of creating plagues, which in itself would be enough to put him on the shit-list.

While Villy could probably make it so Jake wouldn’t outright get a death sentence, it would still be a complete and utter shitshow if it came out Jake had used a plague, and how wouldn’t it come out? Anyone killed by it would appear in the real world, and given that most had done Nevermore, there was a good chance they would recognize a plague had been used and report that back.

Even in a best-case scenario, it would hurt the Order of the Malefic Viper, and in the worst-case scenario, it would cause several factions to have a falling out with the Order. He also had to consider the Pantheon of Life, who were one of the factions that had especially pushed to ban plagues. Would be a very bad look for their ally to then use them.

And no, Jake didn’t really consider if Villy would throw Jake under the bus. At least not in an official capacity.

So, yeah, no plagues. If Jake were ever going to use plagues, he would follow the Viper’s advice and make sure there wouldn’t be any witnesses of his crime.

With plagues not an option for this upcoming war, Jake considered another way to make it more effective at infecting people. One that got remarkably close to how plagues worked at times, but was fundamentally very different. Plus, it was something Jake was already very familiar with:

Curses.

While Jake had distanced himself from using curse energy with his class skills, he still very much wanted to make use of it in his alchemy, and this seemed like a great chance to do so. Curse energy was incredibly good at spreading between living beings and could cause a wide variety of effects. Jake wasn’t necessarily planning on using the effects of curses, though, but primarily their ability to deeply affect living things and being notoriously difficult to cleanse.

One of the reasons he didn’t think curses would be that effective was due to the type of foes he was dealing with. NPCs weren’t exactly emotional creatures, quite the opposite, so would the type of curses that Jake had experience with even work? Would amplifying emotions that weren’t there in the first place even be possible? There were too many unknowns, which was why he stuck to just relying on its concepts to infect things.

As for what kind of effect Jake was going for, he already had a good idea. As mentioned, then it wouldn’t make any sense going for poison gas capable of actually killing things. So, rather than making the army consume a pittance of vital energy, he would go for a toxin that would have an effect even in low doses. That was how it was most often used in wars, anyway.

Killing an entire army with poison gas was hard, but weakening them all a little bit? Now that was doable and would still have an utterly massive effect and could change the entire outcome of a conflict. He also had another type of poison – well, more like a concept – that he wanted to see if he could use. He hadn’t been able to pull it off in C-grade, but now that he had evolved to B-grade and had learned more about the concept through the half-a-Worldcore he’d consumed with Palate of the Malefic Viper, he believed it was time to give it a shot.

He was naturally referring to desolation.

That’s right, Jake wanted to create cursed poison gas of desolation. Surely, that was something he would be able to pull together in just a couple of months. He was only working with three things he had mediocre experience with, even though he had lots of theoretical understanding, so it shouldn’t be that hard, right?

Well, it turns out... it kind of wasn’t. Much to Jake’s surprise, he found himself making rapid progress in the beginning, quickly realizing that he knew a lot more than he thought he did about both curse energy and desolation.

For the curse energy he wanted to infuse into his creation, he used Arcane Curse Manifestation, his rarely used epic-rarity skill Jake got a long time ago. It allowed him to condense curse energy and seal it within stable arcane energy, giving him far more control over it than one would usually have with curses. Plus, he quickly learned that during the creation process, he could very much control which aspects of the curse he wanted amplified and which he didn’t need. While it wasn’t perfect, he quickly made good progress towards isolating the propagation aspects of curses that his deadly gas exhibited.

When it came to desolation, Jake had never really used it for anything before and knew it was considered a high-tier concept, which was one of the reasons why he’d expected it to be hard to use. However, when he managed to get some alchemical ingredients containing the concepts of desolation, he surprisingly found them pretty easy to deal with.

Desolation had the problem that it didn’t really play well with anything. Desolation wanted to make things desolate, nothing more, nothing less. It would seek to consume anything it came into contact with, but there were ways to control it somewhat. One of these ways could inherently be found in the rare alchemical ingredients Jake got via the Order.

Looking at the stack of flowers, he didn’t even want to ask how much they had cost and how tricky they were to harvest, given how they worked.

[Shrouded Tulip of Desolation (Ancient)] – A tulip hiding a seed of desolation within, wishing to conceal itself until the seed is fully grown. Will open its leaves and release desolation on anyone threatening its stem. Has limited alchemical uses.

From the description, one would think that picking these flowers would be borderline impossible, yet Jake had a good stack of them. All of their flowers were closed, and Jake could faintly detect the seed of desolation within, and with his sphere, he could also see the small marble hidden there.

From the explanation Jake read of how the flower worked, it would slowly accumulate energy and make the marble grow until it reached a sufficient size, after which the tulip and core would become one, creating a Desolate Tulip – a legendary rarity flower that usually killed everything nearby when it bloomed. If this flower survived sufficiently long, it could even become quite a powerful monster, often born as A-grade.

Of course, Jake just had the small versions with the marbles inside, which was more than enough for him. It wasn’t just the small seed of desolation Jake was interested in either, but also the flower itself and its properties. As mentioned, desolation usually sought to affect everything around it, yet the tulip could restrain it and even hide all traces of desolation, making it look like a regular flower.

Jake didn’t need the ability to hide, but the concepts controlling the desolation were very useful and something Jake sought to take inspiration from. He wanted to make the desolation within the poison very docile right up until the moment he didn’t want it to be. Dormant, so to speak. Ready to be activated at a moment’s notice, not unlike Jake’s Dragonsbane, which he admittedly also took inspiration from. A certain amount would have to accumulate before it was worth activating, lest its effects be too weak.

He considered many ways to hide the effect of the desolation and ultimately settled on a method. It would be impossible to hide the poison gas in its entirety, as quite frankly it was pretty obvious when poison gas was used. He also knew he couldn’t hide all its effects, so Jake went with a rather sneaky method of hiding the dormant desolation within the curse.

The curse energy and its effects would be extremely obvious, making everyone think that was what the gas was supposed to do. Not trying to hide all aspects of the curse was honestly also easier on Jake’s part, and curses tended to be rather loud and noticeable in the first place, so this worked nicely.

Of course, getting what he wanted took time and resources, but fortunately, he was the special boy of the Order of the Malefic Viper, which meant he had an endless supply of valuable ingredients to waste. He ate way too many of the tulips and other ingredients he used, and experimented recklessly, with no regard for cost or efficiency, caring only about results and saving time.

Sagacity of the Malefic Viper certainly also helped, as it allowed Jake to craft poison in powder form as if he had a dedicated crafting skill to do so. He even used Invocation of the Malefic Viper to speed things up further, empowering his Malefic Viper Legacy Skills, such as using it on Palate of the Malefic Viper while eating some tulips, finding it made the Records-absorbing aspect far more powerful, though the temporary weakening of the skill afterward did suck.

He also found that Primeval Alchemist’s Purification proved especially useful, as it allowed him to really isolate the aspects of the ingredients he wanted to use. It was an aspect he hadn’t even considered, but by removing all unwanted properties and amplifying only what he wanted, he could study these effects far more effectively by separating them.

This did once again waste a lot of resources and ingredients, but hey, Jake didn’t care about that kind of thing, and based on the Viper’s encouraging slap on his shoulder when he teleported by and dropped off more ingredients for Jake to burn up, the Primordial didn’t give a flying fuck either. Villy only seemed to care about Jake making progress, and would probably have given far more if Jake had asked for it, but no need to be more wasteful than he was already being.

A damn good alchemy session like this was honestly refreshing after spending so long in time dilation, and Jake felt like he was really doing something every day. It also felt damn good to make rapid progress and make use of the knowledge he’d slowly accumulated over many years regarding curses and the concept of desolation, and overall, he was having a damn good time. Admittedly, his powerful, high-rarity skills also helped him plenty, but that just added to the enjoyment as it was fun to make use of all the skills he had and experiment with them.

Perhaps his positive mind state played a role in his progress and helped him find success faster, because despite Jake kind of not thinking he would actually succeed in time, with four days to go before it was time to return to the Seat of the Exalted Prima, he found success.

It was weird, as Jake felt a little conflicted despite his success, because that meant the most fun part of this alchemy session was over. From now on, all he would do was mass-produce his newest poison in preparation for the World of the Exalted Prima, which was a lot less fun.

Granted, it did help a little that the result was better than expected, though the crafting process was still kind of difficult, which helped retain some of the enjoyment.

Though Jake did have to admit that when he looked at the system message that had confirmed his success, the name of his creation left much to be desired.

You have successfully crafted [Weak Cursed Dust of Shrouded Desolation (Epic)] – A new kind of creation has been made. Bonus experience earned