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Chapter 191- Baby Steps
🕑 Added 2025-01-23 01:42:46 +0000 UTCBy the time Arthur was finishing up with his final set of ingredients, he'd managed to get the strength boost from 15% all the way up to 19%, a smidgen shy of raising the base elixir's standard effect by 100%. It was an incredible achievement and one he could attribute to his increasing skill with alchemy and familiarity with the recipe instead of laying all his success at the hands of his special blood.
His blood only improved what was already there, and he'd used the exact same ingredients for every strengthening elixir he'd created. For once, Arthur's success was entirely his own, and he was more proud of that fact than he'd be comfortable admitting. He'd be the first to admit that much of his power was unearned and came about by mere happenstance; his soul affinity had set him down an unlikely road and opened doors for him he'd been in the right time and place to walk through.
His improved alchemy, however, was all his own achievement, and Arthur was quickly starting to realise how much his formerly fractured soul had hindered his magic. Arthur's willpower was quite high, which certainly helped things along, but if he wasn't getting ahead of himself, he'd go as far as to say he was quite talented at alchemy. How much stronger would my class skills have been if I had this kind of control before level 100? Arthur immediately shut down that line of thinking. Reminiscing about what could have been was a road that led nowhere good. Be glad I'm still alive and with such a powerful class to boot.
Every time his eyes fell on the three glass vials displayed at the centre of his table, he couldn't help but grin. 15%, 17%, and 19%, a very noticeable improvement between every iteration of his creation. When Arthur did the math, though, he realised he was still producing amateurish results- an extremely talented amateur, yes- but an amateur nonetheless. How did I manage to forget about how much my bowl was helping? At least three percent of his elixir's potency had to be attributed to its miraculous effects, which meant that while his alchemy had improved between each elixir production, it wasn't as drastically as he'd hoped initially.
Improvement was growth, though, and a thousand baby steps, ten thousand even, would take him to realms he didn't even know existed. While the System had told him that his Apokalyptic elixirs were a novel product, their effects weren't exactly unheard of, so he had to keep the pricing relatively tame. He eventually settled at 2,500 credits each, with the strongest one a little higher at 2,750. They sold out in less than twenty seconds, and after deducting the cost of fees, Arthur was left with 6,587.5 credits. He'd more than doubled the cost of his ingredients, and all it had cost him was fifteen hundred ether and a few drops of his blood.
Arthur was briefly tempted to hole up for a week and become an elixir-producing factory. Considering it only took him six minutes to produce one- Arthur quickly did the maths- he would make over three million credits in just seven days. Unfortunately, Arthur wasn't ready to make that kind of commitment, nor was he so desperate for cash, but it was nice knowing the option was there.
Now that he had finished his first experiments, Arthur finally allowed himself to read through the primer he'd bought on alchemy. Having cost less than ten thousand credits, it didn't contain any ground-breaking pieces of information or grand alchemy secrets, but he did learn a little bit more about the history of the ancient craft. Alchemy had been around since before civilisation began, and it was the profession least affected by the creation of the System, right up there with smithing and array craft.
Alchemy is the art of creation, our attempts at treading into the realms of the divine. It makes sense then, that the skills first learnt and taught were the methods of refinement, to take something mundane and elevate it to the extraordinary, a skill known today as the mark of a master alchemist. Extraction, surprisingly, did not show up until much later in alchemy's history, though historians dispute exactly where such skills were first developed. Like all history that dates back billions of years, most of what we know today was obtained through the efforts of Rememberancers and extrapolated from analysing the development of primitive societies.
That was some interesting trivia but not really conductive to becoming a greater alchemist. The primer did at least contain a few beginner exercises and the recipes for five common potions and one rare elixir. He still didn't know what the difference was between the two, only that all elixirs were classified as potions but all potions weren't elixirs. Semantics, really, not something Arthur needed to worry too much about.
The first exercise was incredibly simple and helped improve your ether control as a whole, not just your abilities as an alchemist. Arthur went to his kitchen and retrieved two glasses of water from the sink. One of them he infused with a thousand ether, and the other he left as is. The exercise was simple. He needed to extract the ether from the charged cup and transfer it to the ordinary water. Once you became proficient with that, you increased the difficulty by setting certain targets and trying to transfer exact percentages of ether over.
Arthur started with level one and realised he had a long way to go. On his first attempt, Arthur was only able to extract seven hundred and thirty-two ether from the thousand and lost another three hundred during the transfer process. In the end, Arthur was left with two glasses, one containing two hundred and sixty-eight ether and the other four hundred and thirty-two. It wasn't really a failure- you couldn't fail an exercise where the aim of the game was improvement- but Arthur wasn't happy with the result. That was probably why he spent the next half an hour agonising over the water.
For the first fifteen minutes or so, Arthur saw a steady rate of improvement, but then mental fatigue started to creep in, and his results suffered. Arthur persisted anyway; he couldn't count on being in perfect condition every time he manipulated ether. His latest attempt, however, told him it was probably time to call it quits. He'd managed to extract a mere four hundred and ninety-three points out of a thousand, but on the transference process, he lost concentration for a single second. With a crackling fizzle, all the ether under his control dissipated into the air, warming the temperature by a few degrees before fading away.
In total, Arthur had spent over sixty thousand health on the exercise, and all he'd gained was a throbbing headache and a dull pain in his muscles to pay for his troubles. Still, Arthur was certain he'd find his next potion creation a far easier process. Sighing wearily, Arthur went through the motions of his day, preparing a nice meal with the remnants of a horned chicken he'd hunted a few days ago. Cooking had always been therapeutic for him, something he'd been doing for as long as he could remember, no matter how good or bad his life had been at the time.
After lunch, he went about deep cleaning the cottage, mostly by hand and occasionally with Purify if the job was too difficult. It was only when he was halfway through organising his clothes that Arthur was forced to face reality.
He was bored to death.
Ever since Iris and Ayesha had been forced to leave Earth, and the bounty placed on his head, Arthur had tried his best to lay low. That meant no hunting powerful monsters by going to dimensional breaches at the red and black tiers, not that the ones that could provide him a good fight were regular occurrences. From all the images and information televised globally, Arthur guessed there were two, maybe three monsters that were worth his time.
There was nothing remotely close to Wovan's level; creatures operating at that kind of power tended to avoid travelling through a dimensional tear that would lead them to a slow and painful end through ether starvation. Without his hyper-efficient trait and the fact that he supplemented his ether reserves with his massive health pool, Arthur would have been forced to spend a fortune just to maintain his existence on Earth.
Unfortunately, with his self-inflicted vacation, nothing to fight and no good company, Arthur was ready to watch paint dry. Gaming no longer held the same charm with the System's presence in his life, and it wasn't something he'd never been a big fan of it even before he knew magic was real. Reading was still something he enjoyed, but finding a good series to really sink his teeth into was proving to be a chore. Either they were too boring, or they were good enough that Arthur ended up bringing his mental stats to bear and finished them in minutes.
The system store was of course there with its near-infinite selection of books from across the multiverse, but Arthur knew Pandora's box when he saw it. Opening that door would potentially leave him with a month-long reading marathon and zero credits to his name. And besides, who wanted to read about fantasy when he could create his own, with real magic at his fingertips and a whole universe before him. At least when this bounty's gone, Arthur cursed.
Arthur managed to keep himself entertained with mundane chores for another half an hour before he decided it wasn't for him. He'd tried his hand at relaxation, doing absolutely nothing of note during his weeklong vacation, but he'd quickly passed from the territory of resting to mind-numbing boredom.
Thankfully, he had something to do, a task he'd been putting off for a while now. More importantly, though, it was something that would definitively increase his power. His last fight against Frankenstein had told him where he was lacking. Most of his problems in that department stemmed from the fact that out of his entire arsenal of deadly abilities, he always resorted to spamming Poisoned Fang of The Hydra and his Armaments of The Soul. Sure, he could use the excuse that he was new to his class and all the abilities it afforded him, but that excuse was growing old very quickly.
I've had this class since the end of The Locus of Power, and it's been what... two weeks since then? I swear it feels like it's been so much longer. He'd been caught up in one fight after another, ambushed straight away by a bunch of mercenary aliens, followed by Bloodbeasts, and finally Frankenstein. That reminds me, I never got round to dealing with Aaron West. He was the bastard that sicked the aliens on me and Alyssia. Learning that he was the juiciest steak that the universe had seen in the last thousand years was just the cherry on top. If things went well, he'd be able to start hunting in invasion worlds by the time the week was out. That left him six days to do something he'd been putting off for quite a while now.
Arthur pulled the space gem he'd received from Frankenstein out of his storage ring and placed it on the table. Next came Wovan's monster core. As always, he was tempted to consume it the moment it appeared in his senses, but Arthur held himself back. He had the beginnings of a plan already on that front, one that he was certain was taboo of the highest order. He'd have to talk about it with Iris and see if it was feasible, but his gut told him it would work. If things go how I want, I'll be a pentafold mage by the time I hit level 200 and with an affinity as rare as soul magic. Maybe rarer.
That was all for later, though, for when he was finally allowed to delve the Invasion worlds freely. Right now, it was time to increase his power in a more novel way. Arthur pulled up the description of the one skill he hadn't been able to understand. Things had cleared up a lot since then.
Splinters of the Soul (Legendary, Ritual)- Break a part of your soul and create something new. Your creation will be a part of your soul but will be influenced by the qualities of the ingredients that go into it.
Ritual Items: 1,000 litres of soul ether-infused liquid, 1x monster core, 100 tier 3 ether stones, 1x framework material for body composition, miscellaneous ingredients of great strength.
Three creatures can be created before reaching level 200.
Permanent 3% decrease in highest stat/creature formed
1% of Soul Splinters stats will be added to your own
The skill cost an exorbitant amount of resources, far more than Arthur could currently afford. That didn't matter. It was high time he started to tap into the power sources he'd left unused for so long. The universe sought to hunt him down; sapient kind wanted him dead and refined into a potent elixir simply for his state as an Originator.
Arthur looked down at Wovan's monster core. It had been a formidable foe in life; he would make it a harbinger of the end in death. If Arthur had his way, Wovan would return a monster that far surpassed an apocalypse beast, a creature that even he would be unable to beat. It was time to create a spider that could kill an elder dragon.
Book two's launch has gone far better than I ever hoped for. Honestly, the support from my readers has blown me away. Thank you everyone for all the help. It means the world to me.
Standardised AN ahead.
Etherious: Powers Price has gone live. As a self published author doing everything myself, my novels success lies entirely on my shoulders. As such, the first day of a books launch is by far the most important time that determines how well my book will do.
The first book did incredibly well, far better than I could have expected or even hoped for. I only hope that the same happens for my second release. The better my novel does, the higher the likelihood that I can get an audiobook released.
A rating or review goes a long way, especially on Goodreads, on my first book or the second. Thank you everyone for your continued support. It means the world to me.
Link for 1st book: Here
Link for 2nd book: Here
