Jake was generally confident when it came to understanding monsters, especially those he’d known for a while. He didn’t need them to speak regular words for him to understand their meaning, but sometimes, he did question whether he got things right. This was one such instance. Not because what Rick said was unclear, but because Jake simply refused to acknowledge what he said as the truth.
“Are you sure?” Jake asked again, hoping the troll would tell him he had indeed heard wrong and-
A confident nod shattered Jake’s understanding as he simply stood there for a few seconds before sighing.
“How does that even make sense?” he asked desperately.
Rick proceeded to explain as he pointed to the musa while making grunting sounds. With every second of explanation, Jake got closer and closer to reaching acceptance before he finally couldn’t deny it any longer.
That’s also why he didn’t say anything when Rick plucked a banana from the musa. He could only look on as he reflected on his prior actions and his pure ignorance of how the banana musa worked.
The troll gardener had revealed to Jake that, unbelievably so, plucking the bananas from the musa was actually a good thing. That the banana thieves had been helping the plant all along while Jake had been the one trying to actively harm it by preventing them. It was still hard to believe, but with Rick’s explanation, he just had to accept it.
According to the troll, the fertilizer Jake had brought back was so powerful that the musa absorbed more energy than it could properly process. Thus, in order to not suffer the equivalent of drowning from being watered too much, it created more bananas to get rid of excess energy.
Jake was right that reabsorbing the bananas the musa grew was typically good for it. These bananas contained concentrated energies that the musa benefitted from getting back as recycled nutrients, but after Jake had fertilized the thing, reabsorbing the bananas was too much.
A part of Jake still wanted to argue, but he really didn’t have a leg to stand on. Rick even said that during Jake’s absence, he sometimes had one of his kids go up and take a few bananas off the musa to keep it healthy.
After all the explanations were done, Jake knew there was one thing he had to do. His face turned serious before looking straight at Rick. “Never share this with anyone else, alright?”
Rick tilted his head in confusion before Jake reiterated what he said. “This must be kept only between the two of us and the kids, alright? It’s very important no one else finds out, or it could lead to disastrous consequences. That is to say, if anyone asks, taking bananas off the musa without permission is still not allowed, you got it?”
The troll still looked confused but nevertheless nodded, letting Jake breathe out a sigh of relief. If Carmen found out that her banana thievery had not only been justified but that she’d actually been helping Jake all along, he knew he would hear about it for the next century or two.
It was way better for Jake to instead bury the truth and make himself look like a nice and forgiving person by allowing them to still take bananas here and there.
With Jake having gotten a quick gardening lesson about the musa, Rick soon returned to his underground grove once more to tend to stuff. Jake waved the large troll goodbye, thanking him for taking care of the musa while also telling him to say hi to the kids from him. Even if Rick said he liked taking care of Jake’s musa and that doing so gave him a lot of levels, Jake still felt grateful. Finding a good gardener could be hard, after all.
Alone once more, Jake went back down to his lab, which had already been repaired and even improved a bit by Hank. The builder had once more gotten some help from Arnold to put proper shielding around the glass bubble, meaning that the next time Jake had a minor concoction mishap, he hopefully wouldn’t blow a hole all the way up to the surface.
With a good refill of death affinity mushrooms, Jake could get back to making his poison gas bombs. Alright, framing it like that did feel a bit weird, and he couldn’t help but recall a time he felt uncomfortable poisoning someone and watching their body melt in front of him.
Now, he would only feel a sense of pride if his poison was able to melt a strong foe. In fact, if he could create a poison gas bomb that would make everyone hit by it melt, that would be pretty darn neat.
Getting back to work, Jake dove straight into it once more. He was still using the same approach as before, where he wanted to merge destructive arcane mana with the poison gas, and he felt confident he could make it work. It just took a lot of focus and experimentation to find the right balance and properly direct what the purpose of the arcane energy was in the concoction, besides making it so that arcane energy and the poison gas didn’t clash. That was the most important aspect, as that would also mean that all his explosive attacks wouldn’t inadvertently destroy a lot of his own poison, something he currently did with his mist from Wings.
The problem was that the destructive arcane mana mixed into the poison couldn’t actually be destructive all the time, as that would make it consume the concoction, ultimately weakening the toxin. At the same time, it couldn’t be too stable either. No, he needed it to be perfectly balanced so that the moment Jake made the outside layer of the bottle turn destructive, the destructive energies within the bottle would quickly do so, too. After the transformation to destructive, the mana could be channeled toward some purpose that he had yet to fully figure out.
He had mixed his arcane mana with other alchemical ingredients before, but this time was a lot different, as poison gas was quite, well, hard to handle. Which made sense, considering it was intangible. Still, it added another layer of challenge that Jake gladly took on.
When he didn’t do alchemy, Jake meditated to recover resources. During these meditation sessions, Jake naturally studied the tome left by the First Sage, and he could confidently say that after over a year of studying, he still didn’t even feel like he’d scratched the surface.
The level of knowledge the First Sage had imparted was simply in another realm compared to anything Jake was used to dealing with. The only things Jake possessed that were slightly comparable were Villy’s drop of blood, the Puzzle Box of the Seeker, and the void lollipop Oras had gifted Jake. The last one he wasn’t even trying to understand, though, and the Puzzle Box was constructed to be slowly opened with a fuckload of levels of difficulty.
Meanwhile, the knowledge of the First Sage was entirely up to Jake to comprehend. He didn’t even have a skill like Sagacity, which helped him glean knowledge from the drop of blood. No, it was all up to Jake, with no help at all.
Seeing as the difficulty was that extreme, any regular person would perhaps have been happy just getting some benefits from the book, but Jake was far from regular. The more he read and understood, the clearer it became that Jake could get absolutely massive benefits from the book.
Assuming he didn’t fuck anything up, that is. Because it could also end with him only getting slight benefits.
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Upgrading skills was generally only viewed as a good thing. The only downside was if you wanted to upgrade a skill in a specific direction. One easy example to use was Jake’s Powershot. His bread and butter. He had upgraded the skill to Arcane Powershot and truly made it his own, which had made the skill incredibly powerful for its rarity due to how well it suited Jake, but it also had some downsides.
If Jake learned of an upgrade path to Powershot from some supreme god, chances were he couldn’t even learn it. Alright, he technically still could, but the road for Jake would be tens if not hundreds of times harder than someone who merely started out with regular Powershot before getting the Legacy.
It was a bit the same with Meditate. Jake had already upgraded it to Serene Soul Meditation, which did make Jake afraid he’d cut himself off from properly learning the First Sage’s Legacy, but luckily, from what he’d read, it shouldn’t be that hard to get the skill back on the First Sage track.
He wanted to make sure that when he did finally upgrade the skill, he did it right. Unlike Villy’s Legacy skills, the Meditate skill was far more open-ended with way more branches leading in all directions. Perhaps that was part of the reason it had become a Legacy skill for pretty much everyone in the multiverse.
Its sheer versatility was a big factor for why Jake was confident that he could still adapt. From what he’d read so far, chances were he could keep upgrading the skill in the current direction he was already going, but Jake wanted more.
Jake was very greedy like that. He didn’t just want a powerful Meditate skill... he wanted the best he could possibly get. He wanted the version that aligned as closely as possible with the one the First Sage himself had possessed and used. In other words, he sought the Origin of the Legacy skill.
He also felt such a pursuit suited his Path best. He had the ability to make things return to Origin, so wasn’t it only fitting he had skills that closely aligned with their original Origins? At least in this case, he believed it would.
Finally, there was one more reason he didn’t want to mess up his Meditate upgrade... if he did, he had a feeling he wouldn’t be able to uncover certain secrets related to the First Sage. The First Sage’s book did have some things in common with the Puzzle Box in that he couldn’t read all of it without first understanding what came before. It wasn’t necessarily something Jake would call tests, but was instead more thresholds of comprehension Jake needed to overcome to keep reading.
If he wanted to, Jake was confident in upgrading Serene Soul Meditation to ancient rarity within the hour. Legendary rarity shouldn’t be difficult either, and he reckoned that would, at most, take a week. He wasn’t confident in getting any higher than that, though... which made any upgrades he could get now unacceptable.
Jake had resolved himself to ensuring that the next upgrade to Meditate he got would take him straight to mythical rarity. That was the minimum requirement. If he could get above even that, great, but Jake didn’t have high hopes considering he was still only a C-grade.
Anyhow, between doing alchemy and studying the Legacy left by the First Sage, the days quickly passed. Jake rarely diverted from his usual schedule, only occasionally getting dragged into something by Miranda or deciding to take a break to play a bit with his Puzzle Cube.
He heard reports here and there about how the rest of the galaxy was doing, but he didn’t pay it much mind. Miranda would tell him if something truly big happened, and getting involved in minor matters wasn’t something anyone wanted. He had chosen to stay on top of some things, such as the Holy Church.
Jake was glad to see the Holy Church sticking to the terms of their surrender. According to Miranda, they hadn’t caused any trouble, pulled back all their members, and thoroughly isolated themselves, awaiting evacuation.
What’s more, Miranda had once more proven why putting her in charge of negotiations was a good idea, as the Church was providing compensation in the form of pretty much all the raw materials they could gather from their homeworlds. The way Miranda framed it, their labor to collect these materials was the least they could do when sitting around anyway, and as the planets didn’t actually belong to the Church, anything gathered should be handed over.
This included nearly everything they had in storage, too.
Being a crafter part of the Holy Church did have to suck with such a lack of raw materials, but the rest of the galaxy benefitted as they couldn’t get enough these days. Fully rebuilding everything would take years, and everyone in the entire Milky Way had gotten a great boost in Records from recent events that helped them all progress, heightening demand further.
Jake kind of felt like the only person not really progressing. Even as months passed and he made hundreds of uncommon gas grenades, he didn’t get a single level. Not to say he wasn’t making good progress, but not getting those sweet dinging sounds did bring some sadness.
He soldiered on, though, and soon enough, his struggles were rewarded. He’d pushed to increase the rarity of his gas grenades during all this time, and with this attempt in particular, he had a really good concoction going.
Everything was just going right, and as Jake tried to fully fuse the arcane affinity and poison gas while maintaining a perfect equilibrium, things finally clicked into place. The poison gas and arcane energies mixed, and with a big smile, Jake funneled all the gas into a pre-prepared bomb bottle.
After sealing the bottle, he inspected the product and saw that the gas within the bottle had a very dark green, almost black, color, and if one looked very closely, faint purple-ish sparks could be seen here and there. He knew before even checking the notification he’d succeeded.
You have successfully crafted [Arcane-Infused Rotbreath Poison Gas (Rare)] – A new kind of creation has been made. Bonus experience earned
The name had only changed by adding on Arcane-Infused, and as he Identified the bottle, that was indeed the only significant change.
[Arcane-Infused Rotbreath Poison Gas (Rare)] – With every breath, life shall wane and destruction roams. Mixing potent death affinity toxins and arcane energies, a powerful poison gas has been concocted. This poison is primarily inflicted through breathing but can also easily penetrate the bodies of anyone in physical contact with it. If inflicted, it will spread through the body and cause necrotic damage to any tissue it inflicts, causing flesh to rot. Destructive arcane energies allow it to spread faster as it weakens the foe’s tissue. Wounds caused by necrotic poison are extremely difficult to heal.
Jake had considered for a while what kind of effects the destructive arcane energies should have once infecting someone, and he decided on going with something that would purely benefit the poison gas.
Trying to make the destructive arcane energy deal direct damage would be a total waste. The amount of damaging arcane energy Jake could pack into a bomb couldn’t even compare to a single arrow, which was why Jake decided to have the arcane energy take advantage of the fact it had infected someone alongside a poison.
Having the destructive energies weaken tissue was a relatively new idea he’d only gotten on recently. Rather than directly attacking the flesh, he instead used the energy to slightly weaken the concepts allowing tissue to resist the poison, creating an opening for the toxin to do its thing.
Now, there was still one huge elephant in the room... Jake had no idea how potent this effect would actually be. It was entirely possible adding his arcane affinity only provided a negligible increase in the damage done by the poison gas, but just having proven the concept was a massive success to Jake.
The fact he’d even gotten another level from said success definitely only made things better.
’DING!’ Profession: [Heretic-Chosen Alchemist of the Malefic Viper] has reached level 312 - Stat points allocated, +35 Free Points
’DING!’ Race: [Human (C)] has reached level 307 - Stat points allocated, +45 Free Points
He was getting closer and closer to the peak of C-grade, one little step at a time.
Jake considered starting another craft as he checked if any messages had recently arrived. Going through them, nothing really stood out until toward the end. Lillian had informed Jake that Caleb had returned to Earth to ensure he was back there by the time the system event ended, which also reminded Jake that it should be approaching its end.
Once the event ended, the universe would open back up, and Jake would definitely find himself busy once more. He would be able to go back to the Order or anywhere else in the entire multiverse, and while he definitely would be back to Earth to explore the solar system a bit, he knew he wouldn’t be sitting still for long. Unless he was doing alchemy, of course.
Realizing this, and coupled with seeing Caleb was back, Jake made a decision as he packed up his cauldron and other ingredients before heading to take a shower. He could do more alchemy, yes, but honestly, this was probably the best period to visit and spend time with his family he would have for a while.
Jake also reckoned doing so would be healthy for him, as sometimes, even the Chosen of the Malefic Viper could do with a break... with maybe only a little tiny bit of First Sage reading and Puzzle Boxing here and there.