Chapter 1286 – The Art of Purification

Jake looked down at his hand. The healing process was ironically faster than usual due to the ingredient that had just blown up in his hand, almost making him chuckle. After only half a minute, all the surface wounds were healed, making him nod.

“Yeah, it was definitely stronger than last time,” he noted to himself before he proceeded to repeat the exact same thing, resulting in yet another explosion that contained high levels of life affinity energy. The sheer conceptual power within the energy was also far more potent than usual, showing that he was closer to his goal than before.

Several months had already passed since Jake’s first minor success with the Unstable Lesser Primeval Gold Mote. That minor victory had inspired Jake to continue down the same avenue of study, and during this time, he’d gone through a lot of different metals. At first, he focused on extremely pure yet “weak” metals like gold, which were known to be non-reactive, but soon, he’d moved on from that.

Gold was good to experiment with, but it was almost too pure for Jake to see any good results. He also realized that, due to its fragility, he couldn’t see himself making a stable Gold Mote any time soon. As he continued his studies, Jake also began to realize something else.

When he used his Lesser Primeval Energy, an explosion occurred, and one type of energy within the given ingredient was massively empowered, overwhelming everything else and causing fundamental instability. At first, his plan had been to strip everything else away from an ingredient besides that one important element he wanted to empower; however, he began to suspect that wasn’t possible.

At least not with his current skills.

Something like a Red Lavender – a core component in any health potion – did possess a lot of life affinity energy, yes, but it also had many other types of energies. Even when he extracted the lavender’s juices for potions, those juices weren’t entirely pure. Sure, these juices were almost entirely pure, but they still contained some other concepts and trace amounts of other energy types. Ones that Alchemist’s Purification didn’t even try to strip away.

This got him thinking… was it even realistic to use Lesser Primeval Energy merged with Alchemist’s Purification to create something one-hundred percent pure? That had been what Jake had tried to do, as that had seemed like the only way to create a stable item infused with Lesser Primeval Energy, but now he’d really begun to question that assumption.

In his pursuit of purity, he had missed the fact that in the real world, was anything ever actually pure? Even something like gold, which was known to be entirely nonreactive, still held trace amounts of other forms of energy. Ones simply required for existence. Energy born from countless concepts that were simply there as fundamental building blocks for physical objects. Gravity, time, space, light… everything that was affected by these energies, which were unavoidable, would contain smidgens of these energies within.

Jake’s attempt to fully eliminate everything when he used his Lesser Primeval Energy was entirely unrealistic and didn’t fit in with reality, so he looked to another discipline of alchemy for inspiration:

Transmutation.

The art of Transmutation was all about transforming something from one state into another. In this process of transformation, the key role of the alchemist was to preserve stability, guide the subject of transmutation towards a desired outcome, and keep as much of an item’s innate energy as possible throughout the process.

If one then wanted to elevate the quality of a transmuted object, one had to merge other energies into it, often by combining several items or using other such catalysts. Usually, simply infusing one’s own energy wouldn’t have a huge effect when it came to raising the quality of an item. That’s why, when Jake had transmuted weapons in the past by infusing them with his arcane affinity, it had always come at the cost of losing enchantments or similar from the item in question.

However, there was one exception to this rule: Primeval Origin Energy.

Jake had tried to transmute items in the past by infusing them with Primeval Origin Energy, resulting in a massive increase in both the quality and quantity of energy. This seemed impossible on the surface based on what Jake knew… except there was some precedent for it happening before.

And that was when the system got involved to upgrade something.

He recalled an item from all the way back in the Tutorial. Upgrade Tokens. These items had been used to – as the name suggested – upgrade equipment by consuming the item in question. As these upgrade tokens weren’t rare in the multiverse, with the system giving them out relatively frequently through different events and, in rare cases, even through natural dungeons, they had been thoroughly studied throughout time.

The general consensus was that these Upgrade Tokens didn’t actually contain the energy required to cause an object to upgrade. Instead, they were closer to “keys” that allowed an item to tap into some greater unknown source of Records and energy that would be the real source of the upgrade.

It was a gross oversimplification, but the fundamental thought behind the theory was that these tokens could temporarily create a bridge that formed a connection with a greater source. This all made a lot of sense to Jake, but it also reminded him a lot of what happened when he used his Primeval Origin Energy.

He had already theorized it before, but Jake’s Primeval Origin Energy was just the catalyst to spark a change. It could open the door to new Paths and sources of power… almost like a key. A key to the Records and power found within Primeval Origins.

Lesser Primeval Energy was just a lesser version of true Primeval Origin Energy, so wouldn’t it only make sense that it worked similarly? He had created a legendary item, even if its existence was brief, from only a mundane gold bar. Even if Jake had taken all the energy inside of a million such gold bars and merged them into a single one, he would never have met the threshold in Records or energy to become a legendary item, yet with a single one, he’d created that Gold Mote.

That meant energy had come from somewhere, and while Jake had infused a bit of Lesser Primeval Energy, it was far from enough to create a legendary item. Coupled with all his other thoughts about how Lesser Primeval Energy actually worked, Jake shifted his view of how to use the energy.

He moved away from trying to actually fully control every part of an item’s transformation despite that seemingly being the point of using Lesser Primeval Energy in the first place. He still wanted to decide the outcome of a process; rather than control it, he would plan it.

When Jake used his Lesser Primeval Energy in the beginning, he did so by infusing a little at a time, and then once change started to occur, he would desperately rely on his senses and Bloodline-empowered instincts to quickly react to whatever was going on. Needless to say, this didn’t tend to go very well, as the speed and sheer volatility of reactions were far too fast for him to cope with.

That made him question whether his approach of using Lesser Primeval Energy hadn’t been off from the start. In retrospect, there were some clues that this was indeed the case. The first of these could be found during his profession evolution.

The Harbinger of Primeval Origins profession had provided +210 Willpower per level. That was even more Willpower than his class gave Perception, despite classes being able to provide more stats in total, and his class being extremely Perception-focused. Speaking of Perception, Harbinger of Primeval Origins hadn’t given any there.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.