"W-What is this?" It felt like his head would burst as Inala witnessed the scene transpiring before him in a fluster.
He had been brought to a place resembling a colosseum, with the ground inside being concave. Unlike the rest of Halmahera, the circuit lines in the concave portion were exposed.
Inala stared at the translucent mineral, with a mild hue of brown that looked like glass that had become slightly dirty. His mind shuddered at the scale of the mineral before his eyes.
The circuit lines were divided into three categories: primary, secondary, and tertiary.
The primary circuit lines were a metre wide, semi-cylindrical in shape, with the curved portion embedded in the ground while the flat surface was exposed. These lines carried the bulk of the power contained in the Prana Circuit.
Inala was stunned by its size, because the width, added by the curvature, was extremely specific to one parameter: At lengths of it similar to the Brimgan Founder’s height, the amount of the mineral accurately represented the mass contained in his Human Avatar.
The Brimgan Founder reached 177 centimetres in height. Therefore, every 177 centimetres of the primary circuit line had the same mass and volume as the Brimgan Founder’s Human Avatar form.
Basically, it implied that being carried in every 177-centimetre-long section of the primary circuit was the same amount of Prana that a peak Body Stage Brimgan Founder possessed.
The secondary circuit lines were ten centimetres wide, and for every 177 centimetres, occupied exactly a tenth of the Brimgan Founder’s Human Avatar by mass and volume.
The tertiary circuit lines were one centimetre wide, and for every 177 centimetres, occupied one-hundredth of the Brimgan Founder’s Human Avatar by mass and volume.
Mineral—Vachra!
It wasn’t a naturally occurring mineral, but the first artificial mineral that was created. Its creation process was needlessly troublesome, its integration into a Human Avatar ridiculously difficult, and its influence issues were ridiculously endless.
That was Vachra, the mineral that stood at the peak of the Gold Grade, and one the Brimgan Founder dubbed the God of Minerals.
Sumatra Gold was termed the King of minerals, since it contained the key to the Mystic Grade. Knowing this very well, since the Mystic Tentacle of his era was his friend, the Brimgan Founder called Vachra the God of Minerals.
To create it, the key was Elixir.
Elixirs were categorised into Low, Mid, High, and Supreme. A Low-Grade Elixir grants up to 100 units of Prana, a Mid-Grade Elixir grants up to 400 units, a High-Grade Elixir grants up to 800 units, and beyond that was the territory of a Supreme Grade Elixir.
This categorisation wasn’t based on some definite principle. Someone in the history made the division and then people followed suit until it became common sense.
The best Low-Grade Elixir and the worse Mid-Grade Elixir would grant the same units of Prana. Quality-wise, there wouldn’t be any difference either, since this wasn’t like the division between the grades of Pranic Beasts.
Elixirs were basically Parute Fruits turned into liquid form meant for longer preservation. The higher the quality, the stronger the supplementary substances used to stabilise and preserve its properties. This implied a higher time required for the body to recover from using it.
Consuming two Low-Grade Elixirs simultaneously was useless. Only the first Elixir would develop the Spirit Container. The second would only replenish lost Prana.
This restriction came about due to the fact the Spirit Container needed to stabilise itself from forcefully building itself thanks to the power of the Elixir. Therefore, the stronger the Elixir, the faster and higher the Spirit Container is built, requiring for a longer healing duration.
Only after that healing period was over could the cultivator consume another Elixir. The healing necessity came after the development. Therefore, if one desired faster development, they were better off consuming a stronger Elixir.
That would raise their strength the highest, allowing them to tide through whatever situation necessitated such an increase in strength. Once the crisis was over, they would only have to spend the rest of their time healing. In contrast, if they were to consume a weaker Elixir, they wouldn’t get that much strength, and their healing time wouldn’t be over fast enough to consume another Elixir before the crisis struck.
It was basically a concept of time management and the means to efficiently raise one’s strength in times of crisis.
One could ask: weren’t Elixirs just liquids? Why couldn’t one down two Elixirs’ worth in one gulp?
When an Elixir is created, it would be tested. A cultivator would drink it, drop by drop and sense the changes to his Spirit Container. The potency of the Elixir would stop eventually, where the Spirit Container won’t be built anymore.
The strain was too much, and it would need to heal for a while, before it could consume another Elixir. The amount of Elixir fluid ingested by the cultivator until that point was what was stored in an Elixir bottle.
And the amount of units of Prana built into his Spirit Container would be noted, which would help in classifying the Elixir’s grade.
Basically, the limits came from the Spirit Container itself.
High-grade Elixirs were extremely rare, produced only in the wealthiest of Kingdoms and Empires. Supreme Elixirs were absurdly rare
And theoretically, a Supreme Elixir could at most increase Prana by 1000 units. Beyond that, the preservatives used became too high, increasing the quantity of the Elixir, and also raising the strain on the Spirit Container beyond its tolerance capacity.
Beyond this point, the volume of Elixir fluid increased too much, making its consumption difficult. The strain on the Spirit Container was so high it consumed more of the Elixir’s building capability to heal itself, which resulted in the overall units of Prana gained being less than a Supreme Elixir.
Beyond 1000 units, an Elixir was no longer efficient or worth the production costs and consumption risks.
However, that was conventional knowledge.
There existed an Elixir not in fluid form, but as a plasma. This was achieved by executing three processes simultaneously—ejection, plasma, and storage.
The refining process was simply: collect a pile of Parute Fruits, maintain them at atmospheric pressure, and then subject them to water pressure at a depth surpassing a dozen kilometres in the next instant.
The sheer pressure would turn the Parute Fruits into plasma, which would have to be stored immediately, for this Elixir was extremely unstable. It was able to exist in nature for less than a tenth of a second before dissipating.
During the Brully Invasion, without any support, the Brimgan Founder obsessively desired a mineral that allowed him, his people, the Free Human Race, and Sumatra itself a chance for survival, to gaze at the next day.
He, alongside his followers, built a dam atop the tallest mountain they could find. They constructed a series of pipelines that were able to withstand the water pressure down the slow, harnessed the pressure as much as possible, and deep underground, where the pipes ended, was a ginormous mechanism, all to open the gate for an instant.
They hailed from multiple Kingdoms that had collapsed under the Brully invasion. They followed the Brimgan Founder’s vision and supported his obsession. More than a million people worked tirelessly for a single individual’s obsession, in their own form of obsession.
Every time something failed in their construction, dozens to hundreds died. Still, they persisted, made repairs, died more, and kept building. They all possessed Iron Grade strength, which was a measly amount of power against their enemy.
Whenever a Brully approached their construction site, a group of people acted as bait to lure it away, and died in the process.
Their numbers dwindled, but they kept working. And finally, as a Brully group slaughtered their way into the mountain, the pipes funnelled water, and the tap opened.
Water that was akin to a laser gushed down upon a giant platform, shaped like a cube, built out of the hardest and toughest material they could find. Its each side spanned over a hundred metres.
There were two such blocks above each other, spaced a couple centimetres apart. In this gap was a pile of Parute Fruits, exactly 8,40,000 in number. This was the amount of Parute Fruits needed to be consumed to attain 8400 units of Prana, the highest possibly amount for an Expert Gold Grade Pranic Beast.
As the water fell upon the upper block, the latter was brought down with enough force to crush the Parute Fruits that they turned into a plasma.
An intricate groove was carved in the two blocks, at the contact point, forming a low-pressure zone. Upon forming, the plasma travelled through the groove at the speed of light, exited the groove, and found itself trapped in a specially designed apparatus, a container meant to store it for the duration of its existence.
Transcendent Elixir!
In the state of Plasma, this was an Elixir that had completely surpassed all notions of common sense, capable of upgrading to the peak the strongest being that could be birthed on Sumatra.
And in that apparatus, positioned right in the line of travel of the Transcendent Elixir, was a Spirit Container. It was the Brimgan Founder’s Spirit Container.
It was a single piece, the smallest possible Spirit Container, with only one unit. The Brimgan Founder only had that one unit in him.
In a vacuum, the Transcendent Elixir made contact with the Spirit Container and, at almost the speed of light, built a lattice. The speed was so fast that the building process didn’t stop once hundred Spirit Containers had formed. Instead, it kept building until it reached the limit of Sumatra’s natural birth, 8400 units.
Spirit Container Lattice!
In a lattice form, there were a total of 8400 Spirit Containers. It seemed to be absurdly natural in existence but was also extremely unstable. And actuated by the Prana in it, the structure, the will in it, and the presence it generated, all gathered to unleash psychokinesis upon itself.
This psychokinesis acted upon the structure and pulled the structure into its centre of mass, creating a singularity.
There was a flash of light once, and then the singularity resulted in a substance that was the size of a Spirit Container and weighed around 74 grams.
Once the process ended, the entire structure collapsed, for it was only built to withstand the process once. As the Brimgan Founder grabbed the single piece of mineral, he was the last of his kind, from the original number of a million Free Humans.
As the Brully group burst inside the facility, they saw a tearful Brimgan Founder clutching the mineral, the product of his obsession. He, a mortal, without any Prana, integrated with the mineral, obtaining a power that was the craziest to ever appear on Sumatra.
Primary Nature—Prana Circuit!
And then, water lasered the Brully group from multiple directions.