The Primal Hunter 11, page 76
”I think we should give poor Jake a helping hand by allowing him full points even for stuff that is fully Bloodline-reliant,” Minaga said in a faux-sad tone. “The guy is clearly starved of points.”
”I am sure he’ll be just fine,” Nature’s Attendant said, chuckling.
The Viper smiled at the conversation, remembering how Nevermore had changed and adapted with time. It was true that Nevermore had once had far fewer balancing factors and far more things to exploit. There’d been quite a period where the evaluations in all these Challenge Dungeons were made entirely based on the Records contributed. This, in nearly all cases, resulted in anything using a Bloodline leading to an automatic top score, as few things could be more unique than a unique Bloodline. Well, besides maybe a Transcendent skill, something that would also automatically qualify someone to get a top-tier evaluation back then.
Now, things had changed significantly. No longer was a Bloodline an unsurmountable advantage, even if it was still a big bonus. It also mattered how well one used one’s Bloodline now, and the overall quality of the items submitted using it.
Even so, the Viper was confident. As long as he remembered to submit a damn Grimoire, at least.
”Ah, by the way, that human from your Chosen’s Planet just got done with the Challenge Dungeon,” the Wyrmgod shared with the room a bit—about three months—later as he looked at Vilastromoz. “The one who walks a Path of the Void under the influence of Oras.”
”So?” the Viper questioned, finding himself a bit intrigued but not overly interested. He already had a good idea of how that man would do.
”A 25% Grand Achievement earned,” the Wyrmgod said, finally getting the attention of many of those in the room. 25% was incredibly rare, after all, and unless Bloodlines or Transcendent Skills got involved in breaking a scenario, it was considered borderline impossible. The fact that the man following Oras had neither made this outcome an event worth noticing, even for the gods present.
Vilastromoz wasn’t overly surprised, though. He had seen what the man had created, and out of everyone there, he was one of the people most knowledgeable about Oras. He knew the Void God wouldn’t ever bother with anyone who didn’t surpass comprehension in at least some areas.
”How?” the Blightfather, who had been silent for a long time, asked. ”From what I gathered, he had a mechanical profession. The variety of methods and Creations he can submit should be limited, and he didn’t even spend overly long in there.”
”You know that is not a question I can answer.” The Wyrmgod shook his head with a sigh. ”All I do know is that underestimating the mind of a man who walks side by side with Oras and keeps his sanity isn’t wise.”
A notion none of the gods present would ever disagree with. The Void Gods were incredibly well-respected entities, after all. They were gods that existed outside of the physical realm while rarely interfering directly with reality. Not because they couldn’t, even if they were severely restricted outside of the void. However, even if they rarely interfered, one could never truly make them enemies… for doing so would mean the void would become a place even a Primordial should reconsider visiting.
Then there was also the fact they were just so alien that not even the Viper was sure what their deal was most of the time.
”So, will your Chosen also walk out with a 25% Grand Achievement?” Minaga asked the Viper. ”If he does, things could get very interesting on those Leaderboards. Not to say it won’t get interesting even if he gets lower, but, you know, it will leave a lot up to the final Challenge Dungeon. Not that I think he will do badly there at all… In fact, I am very much looking forward to the experience.”
The Viper listened to Minaga’s long rant and answered the initial question as honestly as possible. “How would I know how Jake will do? I haven’t seen any of the Challenge Dungeon, as the screen only flickers on for the minutes he walks around the atrium.”
”Oh… yeah, fair enough.”
Jake had no idea his small marble had left a Bound God who had existed since the Second Era pondering in genuine puzzlement. Much less the happenings in the streaming room. Not that he had any time to think about such things, even if he had known. He was a busy man, after all, and was working hard on his current poison project. A project that had experienced what Jake believed could aptly be described as the concept known as feature creep.
The original plan had expanded several times as Jake got more and more small ideas to improve things. At first, Jake had wanted to make either a really strong Hemotoxin or a really strong Necrotic Poison. Mind you, Jake had at least been clear from the start he wanted a poison that targeted life-affinity lifeforms. A poison tailor-made for those would be better than trying to mix in stuff to also target something like elementals, hence going with a more focused one.
Also, the vast majority of foes Jake hunted were flesh-and-blood lifeforms. Beasts of different sorts, primarily, and while he did throw in the occasional plant, elemental, or mechanical creature, his Blood of the Malefic Viper usually did the job fine against those. Plus, as a hunter, Jake could choose his own prey, so if he only had poison good against flesh and blood, he could just target flesh-and-blood prey. And currently, the only things Jake was itching to put arrows in were quite susceptible to both bleeding and necrosis.
Jake was at least fairly confident Ell’Hakan wouldn’t enjoy having his body rot and bleed from the inside.
His original plan to make either a strong Hemotoxin or Necrotic Poison quickly morphed into Jake asking himself a very simple question: why not both? Well, the answer was that different poisons very rarely mixed well, resulting in the final product turning out worse than if you had just focused fully on either. Alas, this was a problem Jake knew could be overcome, as merging poisons was something he had read a lot about and knew to be possible from prior projects. He just needed a way to make his two best types of poison compatible.
Now, Jake did also consider merging in a few concepts from his Sleeping Night poison but ended up quickly scratching that idea, as he felt trying to mix in Neurotoxins would just make the entire project way too damn complicated. Plus, if he struggled to merge two poisons in a satisfactory way, how was trying to merge three going to make things any better?
To clarify, the Sleeping Night Toxin had contained elements of hemo- and necrotic toxins, but he hadn’t outright merged two fully created poisons together to make it. That poison had also been far more subtle due to the ethtoxin infused to calm the two other kinds of toxins down until it was time to go wild. Finally, even in Sleeping Night, the two toxins didn’t exactly mix well together. It was just that their violent clash would only happen once awakened, and as it would take place within the target’s body, it wasn’t really a problem.
To start this new and exciting project, Jake had first needed to make two powerful poisons—one Hemotoxin and one Necrotic Poison, both firmly in the rare rarity—to then hopefully merge them into an even better rare-rarity poison.
Once more, it had to be reiterated that poison rarities were quite a bit different from many other types. A bit like potions. The rarity was a lot more ”set” than in other things, and even just making rare poisons in C-grade was considered pretty damn good. In fact, Jake had been told by Villy that should he manage to create an epic-rarity poison and upgrade the skill to epic while still in C-grade, it would be very impressive.
Shit, it wasn’t uncommon for some alchemists to never even reach rare rarity with their poison crafting while in C-grade.
One of the reasons the rarities for these crafting skills were a bit different was because they were never downgraded. Every evolution from now on—B-, A-, and S-grade—would result in every single skill getting evaluated and potentially downgraded. The only ones immune to this were Jake’s unique skills and his crafting skills. Elixir making, potion brewing, and poison concocting, to be more accurate. So, if one wanted to look at Jake’s rare poison skill in a more arrogant and definitely not accurate light, one could imagine it was actually meant to be three rarities higher, as it would dodge three downgrades, making it already a legendary skill.
Yeah, alright, that wasn’t how it worked, but Jake liked to imagine it was. Anyway, this peculiar nature of the crafting skills also resulted in the spectrum within each rarity being far, far wider. Jake could make a rare-rarity poison that was dozens of times more powerful than another and still stay within the same rarity, while if he did that with most other projects, the sheer power difference would result in a rarity difference also showing up. It did feel a bit weird that Jake could toss a dozen legendary-rarity ingredients together and end up with a rare poison, but what can you do?
All of this is to say that despite Jake only aiming to craft another rare-rarity poison, it didn’t make the final result any less impressive. He didn’t even consider making an epic-rarity poison, as he knew it wasn’t going to happen. In fact, he had a way higher chance of making one of ancient rarity due to Malefic Viper’s Poison proccing—something he seriously doubted would happen due to how damn low its proc rate was.
Jake even regretted using that Venom from the horrible statue Felix had made, but then again, it would probably have counted as a crafting ingredient and not something Jake could use during the Challenge Dungeon.
Back on the topic of this poison in question, Jake had rapidly made progress over the last many months, and when he transitioned into only focusing on this specific one, things only picked up further.
Before he began, Jake had been quite a bit better at making Hemotoxins compared to Necrotic Poison, but he quickly shored that up and got them to just about the same level. That was necessary if he wanted to merge them and create something new. Jake had come across a damn impressive and highly innovative name:
Hemonecrotic Poison.
Alright, it was just a combination of the words hemotoxin and necrotic. But the poison itself was actually pretty damn good.
One of Necrotic Poison’s biggest weaknesses was how effective it was. It sounded counterproductive, but it tended to simply rot away the area it affected too quickly and run itself dry of energy. This even happened with the higher-quality Necrotic Poisons that released necrotic light into their surroundings. The result was that anyone who was afflicted could more accurately target the poison with their vital energies or even just cut off the affected area.
Some enemies Jake had faced on the different Nevermore floors even ”sealed” off the area he had affected and let it rot away until the necrotic energy ran out to then swoop in and cut off the very small affected area. This could result in a potent Necrotic Poison doing nothing more than rotting away a thumb-sized hole around where his arrow had struck, doing far less damage than he would have liked.
In many ways, Necrotic Poison was the most straightforward kind of poison there was, with no real hidden tricks. Just a shitload of death-affinity energy trying to make stuff die. It was both its biggest strength and biggest weakness.
However, what if the Necrotic Poison, with its incredibly potent death-affinity energy, was allowed to spread throughout the body? If it rapidly began to affect several places in the body at once instead of just one localized area?
To then make matters worse, this necrotic energy would be merged with a Hemotoxin—one of the notoriously most difficult poisons to get rid of, as it bonded to the blood and vital energy of the infected person. It was a real double-whammy of damage that would create a high-damage, high-resistance poison. The kind Jake could confidently build up throughout a long fight.
The kind of poison he would happily use on his prey.
Jake was excited about finally getting it done, and as he researched, what he had hoped would happen even ended up happening. He found something else that seemed interesting to craft… He found what could very well become his tenth and final Creation.
Chapter 86
A Corrosive Idea
Poison came in many shapes and forms. Jake usually relied on the classic poison in liquid form that he coated his weapons with, but powdered poison was just as normal. Powder had the great properties of being dissolved in water or even burned to create a mist or smoke with toxic properties. If this powder was dissolved in purified water, one could even have a do-it-yourself poison kit.
Jake felt like he could quite easily make a powder, and this was one of the things he considered as his final Creation. It didn’t take much more than putting in certain catalysts and then boiling a mixture long enough for all the water to evaporate. Getting a working method down shouldn’t take more than a month or two. Jake found a few use cases for a powder, but ultimately, it wasn’t something he thought worthy of submitting, so he didn’t bother getting more familiar with the craft.
However, as he briefly studied these powder poisons and worked on crafting his Hemonecrotic Poison, he came across another form of poison he had neglected for a long time. A form of poison Jake had encountered before, and he kind of questioned if it should even be called a poison.
It was something many other professions also used. Jewelers and blacksmiths used it to remove impurities when crafting, weaponsmiths while tempering arms, and Jake had even seen Arnold use some that he had acquired from who-knows-where.
He was naturally talking about the wonderful world of acids. Alright, calling it a wonderful world was probably overdoing it, as dying to an acid was probably one of the worst ways to go. Jake should know. One of his first really close encounters with death was that time in Villy’s Challenge Dungeon, where he’d barely touched some acid and nearly had his entire body corroded and melted away.
The poison back then had been of the necrotic kind and made to dissolve anything alive. That’s also why there could be an entire basin of it, as it wouldn’t do anything to anything non-living… and this was actually where one of the big differences between poisons and acids appeared.
If Jake opened a poison bottle and poured it into a bowl, the bowl would begin to take heavy damage as the energies within the toxins would leak into it. Even if it was a poison made to kill flesh-and-blood lifeforms, the antagonistic mana within was simply too reactive with anything it was in contact with.
This was also the reason poison lost its effects pretty quickly when out of the bottle. If Jake didn’t have Malefic Viper’s Poison, it would last minutes, not hours, when he coated a weapon and had it out in the open. Another reason why his quiver was also a godsend, as it allowed him to have poisoned arrows in there for way longer without losing potency.
Acids, on the other hand, were far more stable unless they came in contact with what they were made to corrode. Jake could leave an open barrel of acid just sitting there for years without it losing much, if any, potency as long as no one consumed any of the energy within by dissolving anything.
Jake had never really worked on acids, as, in many ways, they were just worse than the poisons he used. Splashing a few drops of Necrotic Poison on an open wound would corrode an arm away, while a few drops of acid with necrotic properties would only melt away a tiny bit of flesh where the liquid hit.
The mention of open wounds here was quite important, because this was where acids differed quite a lot from regular poisons again.
While throwing a bottle of poison on someone did do some level of damage and would act slightly acidic, it was very inefficient. Nearly all of Jake’s poisons worked through injection with sharp objects like arrows or katars. He needed to personally deliver the poison to the inside of the Soulshape, or it would have little to no effect.
Acids, you could just throw at people. It didn’t really matter; as long as someone was hit, it would do its thing. Sure, an open wound would be nice, but it was secondary to just splashing someone with plenty of it. And Jake did mean plenty of it, because just throwing small bottles of acid would rarely do much unless it was really potent acid.
Now, the ultimate question was why Jake suddenly got so damn interested in acids. In truth, Jake didn’t really need to learn how to craft it. Combat-wise, it wouldn’t even do that much for him. However, there were some instances where acids were just straight-up better than any kind of poison Jake could craft.
He still vividly remembered his fight with the Altmar Census Golem. That damn thing had been entirely immune to all his poisons, and sharp weapons didn’t really work. The only way he had eked out a victory had been through Touch of the Malefic Viper, which managed to corrode the Golem’s defenses. Back then, the energy Jake had released may as well just have been him making his hands into acid due to the nature of the toxins released.
In one of the books, Jake actually read an interesting analogy. It said that if the usual poisons were the swords, daggers, and spears of toxins, then acids were the hammers, maces, and staves. The blunt weapon of the toxic world. This was mainly because of the targets it was considered good against and how a blunt weapon would hit a large area with far more overall force, especially effective when sharp weapons just wouldn’t get the job done, while at the same time recognizing that when a sharp weapon did work, it tended to be a lot more effective.
Jake liked that analogy quite a lot, and right now, he didn’t really have any blunt weapons. His closest thing was arcane explosions, and that wasn’t really a blunt weapon, now, was it? So, there would likely be some combat applications if Jake made a good acid.
As for how acids worked a bit more in depth… well, there were a few ways. Acids had to be targeted against something specific, the same as regular poisons, but in a far more deliberate way. Mixing different acids to corrode more things also didn’t really work, and honestly, why would you even want that in most cases? The acids you could mix also had to be in the same ballpark, or they were utterly incompatible. At least to someone like Jake, who was still working on his very first acid.
