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Nice.

I threatened one of the readers with a forty page treatise on the alchemical process, but you're only getting 3k words, since I'm feeling benevolent.

I will have chapter 270 up on Sunday.

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Chapter Two-Hundred-and-Sixty-Nine

Adam picked up Yenna outside his player house, literally, and flew them back to the southern garden where Builder was close to completing the new building, making it clear her one-hour estimate had been very conservative.

Meilo had stopped her work on the flowerbeds to also watch as the alchemy lab neared completion, and the moment it was finished, Sprite emerged from within Alivida’s tent of all places, bouncing over to his new home with a spring in his step.

The alchemy lab was slightly different from the normal buildings on Interim Island, with a circular floor plan and a pointed roof like a wizard’s hat made of red bricks. Since there were still a lot of players alive, the standard buildings on the island were more playdough than coherent shapes, which made the new addition stand out somewhat.

Lev hadn’t left his spot and was still going through the motions of his dance-like routine nearby, seeming content to keep at it while Adam and Yenna went over to the lab to see what the new addition could do.

Builder cast Adam a thumbs up, or at least that was how he interpreted the way she flashed him one of her claws, and then she was off.

The door to the alchemy hut was a round piece of wood with a brass handle in the centre, and Sprite had already pulled it wide open and was in the middle of going through all the various cupboards available to him within.

Alembics, flasks, burners, a mortar and pestle, something like a hand-cranked centrifuge, and a lot of other bizarre contraptions crowded the interior, which was split into different stations for the various stages of the alchemical process. The first had tools that seemed mainly for drying, emulsifying, blending, chopping, and grinding various reagents. The next had a plethora of vials and flasks with solutions likely meant to mix with the reagents like solvents and bring out their effects, and it also featured various setups for boiling and aerosolising reagents, depending on their material states. The third was clearly meant for mixing and distilling the final products, but there were also some contraptions that Adam couldn’t decipher. The last station seemed to have been designed for testing, as it featured a ventilated space like a fume hood, replete with a splash screen to protect from chemicals that had aggressive reactions.

“It is a paradise!” Sprite exclaimed.

“Since I’ve paid for this expensive little building, I’d like you to make something for me,” Adam said.

“Certainly!”

“I want a shadow elemental core.”

Sprite turned away from a wall of tiny square box shelves full of ingredients to look at Adam with his glowing-white eyes set into his dark body within his blue robes and hood. “You may not have my core.”

“I’m not talking about yours. But you’re an alchemist, so you can surely craft me one, right?”

“It is an unpredictable form of magic, Adam. It may manifest spontaneous life, as this was how I came to be.”

“Sylvia’s former master was able to do it, so why can’t you?” Adam asked.

“I am not saying that I am unable. In truth, I had hoped to experiment with such a thing. It is more a matter of the ethics.”

“Ethics?” Adam asked incredulously. “Since when did you care about that?”

“From your perspective, it would not be strange to make an elemental, but you would likely baulk at making a human,” Sprite remarked. “For me, creating a shadow elemental would raise some ethical concerns, as I imagine you seek the core for your own consumption. I would be crafting a kindred being, only to sacrifice them to you.”

“I need that core,” Adam said firmly. “It might be a matter of life and death. If I die, this dimension turns to ash and everyone along with it, including you, will disappear.”

Yenna put a hand on Adam’s shoulder.

“I understand,” Sprite replied.

“Good,” Adam said. “What do you need?”

“It should be possible to transform a core of one element into another. Normally, you would not be able to find shadow mana in enough quantity to supply the birthing of a shadow core, but fortunately I can contribute that with ease.”

“I don’t have any spare cores,” Adam said.

“I see. Well then, another way should be by using a good amount of mana crystals as the base, or a sufficiently-powerful artefact.”

“By artefact, do you mean a relic? Why would that work?”

“In its essence, an elemental core is condensed mana locked inside a shell. It is a bit more complicated than that, of course, as to make them active you must imbue fledgling life within them, creating elementals such as a slime or myself. Artefacts, relics, whichever name you wish to give them, are formed of carefully moulded mana locked into specific shapes, and they generally possess neutral mana.”

Adam fished out the queen’s pendant he’d been holding on to. “So, you’d be able to use this to make a core, and then charge it with your mana to turn it into a shadow elemental core?”

“In theory!”

Adam sighed. “You’ve never done this before, right?”

“There is a first time for anything,” Sprite replied eagerly, reaching out for the pendant.

Since Adam wasn’t hard-pressed for points, he let the alchemist take the epic relic.

“Ooh, this is a powerful artefact.”

“Try not to break it.”

“Given the quality of the mana within this, it should be quite easy to accomplish the transformation.”

“Can you finish the core today?” Adam asked.

“Certainly.”

“Do I need to pay you anything for it?”

“No, no, experimentation is its own reward.”

“What about potions?” Adam asked.

“If you supply the reagents, I shall only ask for a small fee in return, to cover the cost of flasks and solvents.”

Adam nodded. “That’s something at least. Say, do you know the recipe for ‘Return to Sender’.”

“I do,” Sprite replied. “We do not have the reagents for it on the island, however. Perhaps the moth in the garden can aid with procurement.”

The little elemental had already pulled out a wood stool to stand on, and was examining the epic relic on one of the workstations with much interest. Adam wanted to ask more about potions, but he figured it could wait until he returned later to retrieve the core.

As Adam left the alchemy lab with Yenna in tow, she seemed to have something to say, but he already knew what it would be.

“I needed to push him,” Adam explained, justifying how he had made Sprite ignore his own existential concerns. “That core can change everything.”

“It is important that you do not forget what makes you who you are,” she said. “So long as you are aware that your actions warrant reflection and reconsideration, I do not need to remind you.”

“I know,” he replied.

Adam scratched his chin.

“Things got pretty fucked up in the last loop,” he admitted. “I did some things that in hindsight I wish I hadn’t.”

“The Absolutes warp reality with their existence,” Yenna said. “We are not wholly in charge of ourselves within their grasp, but still, we must seek to deny them complete control.”

“One thing is for sure, I’m not letting anyone put their ‘gifts’ inside me again.”

“You may be forced to make sacrifices in the future,” she said.

Adam grabbed her and unfurled his wings. “Then I’d better make good use of my freedom while I still have it.”

With a flap, he flung them back across the island to land in the centre.

Yenna had only just barely broken from his grasp when she was frozen in time by Luvicidix’s arrival.

“Back again so soon,” the moth remarked.

“I’m buying the first tier of the luck upgrade,” Adam told her.

“Good idea,” she replied.

< < Meta Upgrade Unlocked > >

< Luck — Increase Luck by 5 >

“I’d like to see what the next tier costs,” he told her.

“Of course!”

With a wave of her black-banded arm, the next step in the upgrade list appeared.

< < Meta Upgrade For Sale > >

< Luck — Increase Luck by 10 — 10,000 Points >

This is going to end up super expensive by the end, but it’s definitely worth it.

Adam said farewell to Luvicidix for the third time today and returned to the garden where he made sure to hand Phoebe’s soul seed to Meilo.

“Do you know the ingredients to the Return to Sender potion?” Adam asked her, once she’d planted the seed.

“Would you like me to procure them for you?” the glass moth asked.

“You can do that?” he replied.

“I can,” she confirmed. “I would require a day to allow them to bloom in my garden.”

That’d be good timing.

“I would appreciate if you took the time to have more planters added,” Meilo said. “Given the wealth of seeds you are bringing here, and the space required for all of Sprite’s requested plants, I may quickly run out of available soil.”

Adam nodded. “I’ll get it done after the next stage,” he told her.

“Thank you.”

Adam continued past Alivida’s tent and found Lev still going through the methodical steps of his meditative dance.

“Are you ready to show me where I can improve my technique?” he asked the deathguard.

Lev calmly finished his dance before turning to face Adam.

Then he signed a brief message with his hands.

[He suggests that you go somewhere without too many bystanders and a lot of open space.]

“Did he really sign all that?” Adam asked.

[I inferred most of it,] Parvillo admitted. [Even when speaking with his hands, he is not very talkative. I believe you would not find his actual words to be very useful.]

“What did he actually say?” Adam asked, curiously.

[“Go quiet place.”]

Adam laughed. “Let’s go to the tavern, it has open space around it we can use.”

“I will return to the market,” Yenna said.

“You’re not coming to watch?” Adam asked.

“You will probably not want an audience for what is about to happen to you,” she replied ominously.

Adam spared a glance at Lev.

I wonder what she meant by that.

“Come on,” he told the mute.

***

Adam picked himself up off the ground, surprised by just how quickly the deathguard had turned his movements against him.

Lev possessed an ability that blanketed the entire area in a strange sort of magical bubble. Inside it, everything was cast in a greyscale hue, which was a bit disorienting at first. Interestingly, the magic within slowed Adam down so that he and Lev were moving at the exact same speeds.

I wonder if there are enemies in later stages who possess this type of magic, but it might be useful to copy this spell with the Mirror Mask if I encounter a foe I’m struggling to keep up with.

There was also no damage inflicted when Lev caught one of Adam’s punches with his hands, and the result was that Adam felt like he was completely stripped of his System-granted power, forcing him to actually use his head to take down the deathguard.

So far, it wasn’t working out well.

Lev was an expert in twisting Adam’s swings into overextensions that allowed him to be tossed or tripped with ease as his centre of gravity became unbalanced. And he didn’t hold back on the counter-attacks either, punching Adam in ways that, despite the pain-numbing effect of his slime form, rattled his body and sent rolling waves of power through him, while also knocking aside his arms, screwing up his stance, and just generally making Adam feel like a complete amateur when it came to hand-to-hand combat.

However, Lev quickly switched from beating Adam up to showing him how to fix his stance and properly utilise his body during swings and kicks, without leaving himself quite as open to interference and deflection.

After only a little bit of instruction, Adam was able to stay on his feet and put his entire body to work, rather than just his arms. Although he’d taken boxing lessons regularly before the Trials snatched him away with everyone else, Adam felt like a total novice before the stoic elphin deathguard, who had clearly devoted his entire life to mastering combat.

I wonder who would win in a fight between him and Tisa, Adam wondered, only for his momentary distraction to lead to him catching a punch to the face, cracking his head back and making his body wobble.

Lev stepped forward, like they were following a choreographed dance, putting his foot right behind Adam’s left to trip him, but Adam swung his leg wide, while shifting his balance to his upper body as he placed his left hand on the ground and went briefly horizontal.

With a jump, Lev cleared Adam’s sweeping leg, before blocking his incoming punch with his elbow and raised right leg, immediately stepping down onto Adam’s knee, pushing his leg in the wrong direction and forcing his head forward as his body buckled.

Lev’s fist met Adam’s mask, knocking him back, only for another leg to kick Adam’s other foot out from under him, collapsing him to the ground.

“You’d have broken my leg if I wasn’t made of slime,” Adam remarked, glad to note that his knee joint immediately rebounded back to its normal shape, since there weren’t any actual bones keeping it in place.

The deathguard extended a hand to Adam, which he accepted. Then he forced Adam to repeat the motions, while he adjusted his body to ensure the attack couldn’t be exploited.

They continued to practise in this way for hours, until the darkness became so deep that it made Lev’s greyscale bubble seem bright by comparison.

Adam hadn’t been able to knock down or trip up his teacher even once during their training session, but he felt that he’d improved his kickboxing technique by leaps and bounds in the brief time they’d been at it. And although punching with his right hand was Adam’s main source of damage, due to Frankie tripling his power, he realised that he had started to neglect his left arms and legs, despite the fact that the damage they could inflict would still be enough to take down most opponents. As such, the main takeaway that Adam ended up with was that to be an effective fighter was less about raw damage and more about flexibility and responsiveness.

Lev dispelled his nullifying bubble and Adam thanked him for his instruction. Then the deathguard made a sign with his hands.

[He says that you should return tomorrow for your next lesson.]

“And what did he actually say?” Adam asked.

[“Tomorrow”.]

Adam repeated the sign to Lev. “Tomorrow,” he said.

[You have roughly two hours remaining before the day comes to an end,] Parvillo told him.

Adam decided to first visit his player house and try out some of his new relics against the target dummy.

When he used the deathguard’s cold gaze to nullify the magic inside a slime, it immediately perished, its acidic flesh evaporating and leaving behind an inert core that turned to dust when Adam tried to pick it up.

Crazy to think that this could’ve happened to me if I hadn’t been careful.

He also toyed with the spider ring’s web attack, which was a simple but effective snare that he was certain would count as a trap for his Giggling Trapper evolution to earn him points. Interestingly, his Ghost evolution ensured that the web that emerged was copied by two ghostly clones, which left behind phantom webs and greatly boosted its effectiveness. Additionally, the clones from his thrown bear traps also stuck to these phantom webs, which allowed him to make quite a powerful barrier that would be dangerous for any foe to touch.

It might be the best way to deal with the Tower Crawler as well, since the tower is the ideal place to set up this kind of trap.

But the main threat will be the other players, since I have no idea what is going to be thrown at me.

Adam had a few ideas for how to deal with the other players at the start of stage six, but to make sure his plan worked, he made Parvillo shape his player house into a pit resembling the ritual site at the heart of the city, before going through a few different ways of trying to keep them all contained within.

Once he was done and had about an hour left of the day, he had landed on a strategy that he felt had a high chance of success, even if it was pretty overkill and would destroy the elphin city in the process.

I should probably pay Builder to make me a dummy that can attack, so that it’s possible for me to properly test out my ideas for traps and damage combos.

Adam sprinted to Sprite’s hut and went inside, where he found the little evil genius in the middle of brewing some kind of potion. On the workstation for preparing samples and reagents was the branch from the elphin’s great tree, and it had been mushed, dried, chopped, grated, and processed in dozen more ways, with each of these samples then placed in many different vials with solvents, boiling and distilling setups, and the hand-crank centrifuge.

“Did you finish the core?” Adam asked.

Sprite looked up from his mixing station where he was combining two colourless liquids into a flask with a chunk of unprocessed wood from the branch.

“It is finished,” he confirmed, pointing to a flask on a table just to the right of where Adam stood in the doorway.

Adam frowned as he saw that the shadow-filled flask had two glowing-white eyes staring up at him. Only a cork stopper kept it from going anywhere.

“Worry not, I have not named it yet, such that the pain of loss may be lessened. However, I will require you to bring me enough materials to craft another, or perhaps several, as I would be quite a lot more industrious with helpers.”

Adam lifted the flask with his stone hand and looked at the two eyes within its darkness.

“Sorry, little buddy,” he said and crushed the glass, seizing the core within his hand.

< < Collectible Relic > >

< Shadow Elemental Core (Epic) — The tiny soul of a curious and sapient Shadow Elemental >

Without thinking too much about it, Adam shoved the core into his body.

Then his body immediately turned into shadow.

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