Zarek walked up to the statue, and he felt a great amount of resistance.
He paused once again, feeling that he might have been too hasty just now.
At first, he thought this place had to have some sort of exit hatch—or else how else would everyone who had been here have been evacuated to avoid him?
But what if there was never anyone here to begin with? If this place was so sacred, then the odds that there would be people frequenting it were limited.
Now that Zarek thought about it…
His head turned to where his Scouting Skill had picked up on the hidden exit.
The exit was small, and almost too well hidden. If not for his Scouting Skill, he would have never found it. That was because it didn't even have Matrix protections on it—it looked like normal wood paneling, a part of the decor of the room of worship.
Interesting…
Zarek took another step forward, and the resistance the statue was giving him grew greater. But he had an advantage right now that couldn't be understated.
All of a sudden, the energy washed over him like it was more a cool wind than anything of true resistance.
Zarek grinned.
This was how he had defeated Crux. Honestly, he had Su to thank. Well, that and his own sharpness, and Marx's brief input into his Intelligence Growth Potential.
During the battle, he had briefly had S-Class Growth Potential in his Intelligence Gene twice. The first time, he was able to use it to see through this. The second time, he was able to thankfully use it to Limit Break his Intelligence and get the boost of Godsfall he needed to end the battle.
But the main key to it all was the Elixir in his gut.
It should have been a universal antidote, but the more Zarek thought about just how rare such a thing was, the more peculiar he found it. Plus, Su wasn't trying to form an antidote in the first place—her main goal was actually to remove the influence of the system from someone's body.
When Zarek played along and spit out his Lurker's Godsfall as though it was some sort of demon inside of him, she had bought it. Though it was a bit naive of her, she still had ample reason to believe that she had succeeded.
That was when Zarek realized something intuitively.
What if the goal of the Elixir wasn't to target poison, per se… but to instead target foreign energies influencing the body and expel them?
That would make far more sense, especially given the ingredients used to make the Elixir. The Candle Wood that Zarek had "destroyed," for example, was named as such because it was a wood very sensitive to energy. It would burn away the moment a foreign energy touched it, which was also why it was so difficult to procure.
It had to be grown in a very controlled environment, and stored even more carefully. It could be said that Su was quite careless in the way she had stored it—though, to be fair to her, she had just used it to complete her Elixir.
However, that still wasn't enough. So what if the Elixir could be used to repel foreign energies? What good was that to Zarek if it burned away the moment he tried to apply it to his skin?
In addition, the potency was way too lacking. Only a bit of the lizard man's toxins had touched him, most of it having been lost through contact with the shirt he was wearing, while the rest had mostly been wiped off.
That was to say that Zarek had been suffering so much because of a mere few milliliters of this toxin at best. If he needed a whole beaker of Su's Elixir to deal with such a small amount of C-Class Godsfall, how was he going to use it to counter Crux?
Even though Crux wasn't C-Class just yet, and that made it a bit easier, he was still controlling vast amounts of Godsfall from Matrices in such an important, core region of a C-Class Godsfall Tear.
He might as well have had C-Class Godsfall in such a situation.
That left Zarek painted into another corner—until he thought of something else…
The pattern.
Su's Elixir worked in two stages. It didn't just take root on its own, but instead had to be drawn in a very specific pattern on the skin.
However, the Elixir itself had its own potency, obviously. Or else it wouldn't need to be a very specific concoction. That was to say that the two worked hand in hand.
If the Elixir wasn't strong enough… then what if the Matrix pattern was far stronger instead?
That left Zarek at another dead end. He wasn't some Matrix Master. Maybe Suki could do it—no, Suki could almost certainly do it. But he wasn't that old, decrepit, ugly bastard.
He had never wasted time on a secondary profession at all. All he knew was how to eat, sleep, and battle. Oh, and breed. He could do that pretty well too.
If Zarek had been almost anyone else, he would have probably smashed his head against a wall and just ended it all at that point. It felt like he was so close to an answer, and yet so far away at the same time.
But then his words to Crux kept replaying in his mind. The importance of Mentality to his Godsfall Tear… but there was something else he had held back on as well.
It wasn't just Mentality—they were also obsessed with making sure their bodies were pure of outside interferences as well. That was why they wanted to control their own progression, and not just allow the system to do it.
Those two things were very interesting… and the fact he felt there were good odds that Suki would be enamored by such a thing too was likewise very interesting.
And that was when it clicked for Zarek—in a brief instant where his Intelligence was S-Class, he saw something familiar.
As [Limit Break] was continuously circulating, he noticed a pattern in the pathways of the veins his Godsfall passed through.
The very same pattern Su had drawn on his chest was actually hidden within his body as a pattern of blood vessels.
And that made him think…
What would happen if he pushed the Elixir through that exact pattern inside of him?