MMA: Chapter #39 (Patreon)

“How long until I can’t use the system any more?” Alph asked hoarsely, his gaze still fixed on the popup.

Holding up both hands, with her fingers spread, Myst answered quietly.

“Ten days.”

“So, I have ten days to come up with a solution.”

“Less than that. You have four days until you drop below Journeyman proficiency.”

“Which means, if it takes me ten days, my solution has to be with an Apprentice stage potion. Whew. That… that seems difficult.”

“Difficult? It's impossible,” Myst said, shaking her head.

Turning to look at her, Alph’s were vacant, as if he was looking at her but seeing nothing.

“Is it?” he whispered, talking more to himself than to her. “I guess we’ll see in ten days, won’t we?”

Looking at Alph from where she was sitting, Myst wanted to say something, but at the same time, didn’t want to interrupt his intense thinking. She understood Alph well enough to know that unless there truly were no other possibilities, he would never accept her help in resolving the situation. The only thing she could do was let him try to figure it out. Setting a reminder for herself to issue a quest nudging Baor in a direction that would result in discovering Alph’s predicament, she watched as Alph stood there, staring blankly into space.

Alph’s mind was moving at an unbelievable rate as he tried to figure out what to do. He had originally wanted to develop a concentrated enough poisonous gas that he could clear the room and force the machine to stop. Doing that would have allowed him the time to figure out his options while logged in, but that was no longer a possibility. He had been using the production system’s ability to completely contain his creations as a way to get around the challenges of handling the potions manually.

Though he could create concentrates of his potions without the system, the challenge was the amount of time it would take to distill each one. Normally, it was a two day process to distill a single potion, and if he had to distill ten of them in order to combine them into something strong enough for his purposes, it would take a minimum of twenty days. Which didn’t even take into account the amount of time it would take to combine them.

Calming himself down, Alph began to reconsider his options. There was no good way to remove the collar without creating an environment that wouldn’t persist after his death, which meant that, if he spawned into it, he was going to have a really bad time. The exception to this was poison, but a poison of the potency he needed to get around Marlov just walking in and blasting him as soon as he spawned was going to take too long.

“I need a two-piece solution. Something that can destroy the room, and something that can save me. Best if they can work at the same time. Myst, is there a set number of items that drop when someone dies?”

Shaking her head, Myst had a ghost of a smile on her lips as she replied.

“Not really. It is a minimum of three, unless you have less things in your inventory, of course. But it can be as many as five. Oh, and gold is one of the things that can be chosen.”

“Got it. Which means I need to pack it all into two potions. Fine.”

Getting out a piece of paper, Alph began to make a list. Soon, the paper was filled, and a second paper emerged beside it. An hour passed, and then another, and then another after it. When Alph finally stopped, there were only sixteen hours left before his next login. He had not slept in days and despite his powerful mind, exhaustion was starting to catch up with him. Still, he didn’t rest, and instead began pouring over the list he had created, making marks next to the potions that the thought might work.

Anything that had to be consumed in order for it to work was rejected, as was any potion that needed more than a week to create. Slowly, the pages of potions were whittled down and just before it was time to log in again, Alph had reduced the list of hundreds down to almost a dozen potions. If he heard the notification, Alph gave no indication as he started to list out all of the materials in the thirteen potions still on the list.

“Alph? Shouldn’t you rest?” Myst asked, only to be waved off.

With supreme focus, Alph carefully combed through his material list for the potions, beginning to combine similar materials, or eliminate materials outright. There were many materials across the potions that he chose that shared similar characteristics, and could be used to develop the same effects, so they were eliminated, with only the most effective being retained. The first pass eliminated six materials, and the second got three more.

After that, the next two passes only removed one each, but Alph didn’t stop. Over and over again, he went down the list, recalling every bit of information he could about each of the materials. Only after he had gone over it a dozen times with no progress did he throw it down and slam his fist on the table, causing many of the vials to jump.

“I know that there are more materials that can be eliminated! They’re there, but I can’t see! Fine! Don’t want to give up your secrets? We’ll do this the hard way.”

Standing up, he stalked past Myst, his eyes red with exhaustion. For a moment, Myst considered just knocking him out and forcing him to rest, but part of her was curious about how long he could maintain this level of focus. Reaching one of the shelves where Alph stored his potions, he took down the last two [True Sight] potions, and the last five [Clairvoyance] potions that he had and walked back to the desk. Returning once more, he brought two cases of stamina potions and placed them next to his stool.

Taking the cork out of one of the stamina potions with his teeth, he chugged it down and tossed the empty vial aside. Wiping his lips with the back of his hand, Alph took a [Clairvoyance] potion and drank it, following it quickly with a [True Sight] potion. The change was immediate as Alph’s eyes turned black and his senses increased to a tremendous degree. Staring at the list, he rapidly eliminated three more ingredients, and then four more, and then seven more. His pen flew as he ruthlessly cut down on the ingredients.

On occasion, he would write another in, before rapidly crossing out two or more, and this continued until the [True Sight] Potion began to fade. Letting out a growl, Alph jumped up and dashed across the room to where his ingredients were stored, scanning over them frantically. Grabbing half a dozen, he brought them back to the table and began to mix them together. Half way through his process, the [Clairvoyance] effect began to fail as well, so Alph drank another one.

They made his senses incredibly sharp, to the point of granting him a limited sense of precognition, which allowed him to predict when his motions were going to fail. Faster and faster his hands flew as he tried to finish his potion, and when the second [Clairvoyance] potion ended he was already drinking the third one. Soon the fourth followed, giving him the final boost he needed to finish his potion.

Standing next to him, ready to intervene if it became necessary, Myst stared at the potion that Alph was putting together, her expression impossible to read. She understood what all of the different plants were that he had put together, but she had no idea what effect he was trying to produce. To her, it looked like true madness, without rhyme or reason. Yet the conviction expressed in his movements was impossible to fake.

Already, he had lost a lot of his potion crafting proficiency, and his hands shook with each step, threatening to ruin the entire thing. Boosted to an incredible degree by the [Clairvoyance] potion, however, each move he made was the correct one. When the potion was finally done, Alph didn’t even hesitate before drinking it down. A wave of mana filled his lab as all of the mana in the potion rushed into Alph’s mind.

“You just accelerated your thoughts? At the cost of turning your legs to stone?”

Hearing Myst’s accurate identification of the potion he had created, Alph nodded, looking down. From his feet to right above his knees, he had transformed into a gray marble. He could no longer feel his toes, and for a moment, a spike of worry filled him over what he had done, but before he could change his mind he caught sight of the list on the desk and his focus snapped back into place.

“Yes. And now, I’m going to do it again.”

Casting a glance over the items on the table and then turning to look at the storage area in the distance, Alph’s forehead furrowed for a moment and he called out a list of materials. Realizing she was being used as a gopher, Myst rolled her eyes but didn’t have the heart to turn him down. By the time she returned with the ingredients he wanted, he had already prepared the equipment, and soon the main part of the potion was bubbling away as he worked on grinding one of the supplemental ingredients.

No longer was he in a rush, despite the fact that time continued to tick by. He was working on another potion that Myst didn’t understand, but when he drank it and turned his upper thighs and waist to stone, she was not sure she liked where the situation was going. Gasping slightly, Alph just laughed and asked her to fetch him more ingredients. This time, she stood by the workstation and brought the ingredients over with a wave of her hand, not wanting to leave him in case something happened.

With the second potion, Alph’s eyes took on a slightly blurred look, as if they were moving rapidly back and forth. Occasionally, his hands would spasm, but he always seemed to know when it was coming, and kept them clear of the equipment on the workstation. Another death had passed after he drank the second potion, and yet another ticked by while Alph was working on the third. This time, however, he didn’t drink the potion right away, and instead started working on a fourth potion.

Five and a half days had passed since his first death, and by this time, Alph’s proficiency had fallen to the apprentice level, and would quickly be reduced to nothing if he did not escape, but he was supremely focused. Though it was possible for him to stay up for multiple days at a time thanks to the time dilation, that was limited to a bit less than a week. He wasn’t one to sleep regularly, and had been pushing his limit before he was captured, so he was currently about to enter his twelfth day with no sleep.

On multiple occasions, Myst almost stopped him, but far from showing the usual signs of sleep deprivation, Alph only seemed to be getting sharper and more focused as he went. It took a full day to get the fourth potion done, but once it was a weight seemed to be lifted from Alph’s body. While he was waiting for the various stages to complete, he had begun working on a new recipe, writing out what looked like a long and complicated formula.

“This would be much easier if I could build my own mana active proteins,” he muttered at one point, shooting a sly glance at Myst.

“Absolutely not. I’ll help you fetch materials you can’t reach, but that is it,” Myst said, her voice firm.

“Worth a shot.”

Shrugging, Alph went back to his potions, completely missing the notification that his sixth death had passed. With the fourth potion done, he took a deep breath and got ready to drink the third thought acceleration potion that he had prepared earlier.

“Alph, what are you doing?” Myst asked, finally unable to help herself.

“Simple. This is a permanent thought acceleration potion. It triples my intelligence. It's built off of an [Insight] potion, but since [Insight] is a temporary effect, I needed a way to make it stick. Thus the permanency effect. It's not perfect, but it's working so far.

“I’m about to lose my ability to make potions. Four more days. But then I realized something. I don’t need an ability to make potions. As long as I can understand the interactions between the materials myself, I can make potions without needing the [Potion Crafting] ability at all. Potions come together because of the manipulation of mana inside the ingredients. That’s why they work here, but not in the real world. However, to make those manipulations on the scale needed, I don’t have the computing power. At least, not yet.

“The thought acceleration potions have to come one at a time, since I need a stronger one each time. The first was the best I could make, while the second was better, and this one is the best yet. Who knows, the fourth one might just be strong enough to blow my brain up, thus why I’m mixing in the [Petrify Person] potion as well.”

“You are transforming yourself to stone so that you don’t explode? Did I get that right?”

“Pretty much, yeah,” Alph said, shrugging.

“And that potion?” Myst said, pointing at the fourth potion.

“Oh, that’s the most important piece of the puzzle,” Alph said. “It's a [Depetrify Person] potion for you to give me once I’ve drunk the fourth potion. At least, I think it is. I don’t know, I’ve never seen one before.”

Grinning at Myst who was staring at him, speechless, Alph tipped the third thought acceleration potion back, wincing as his stomach and ribs turned into shining stone. It was getting hard to breathe, and a small stream of blood dripped from his nose, but Alph just wiped it away and drank another stamina potion. Turning his attention to the fifth potion, Alph took his time, double and triple checking everything. Already, Myst could feel that Alph’s control of the mana in his ingredients had reached another level, allowing them to meld together like magic.

The last potion took longer than the previous two combined, and when he finally finished it, Alph would have collapsed to the ground if he had not been frozen to his stool. Barely able to move, Alph’s gaze remained on the potion he had just finished as he spoke to Myst, his voice a whisper.

“How many days has it been?”

“Eight. Almost nine.”

“I bet Marlov is going insane right now since I haven’t dropped anything but flowers. Heh, that will change soon. Once I drink this potion, it will take half an hour for my body to get used to the increase in my intelligence. After that, please give me the [Depetrify Person] potion.”

“And if I don’t?” Myst asked, her expression inscrutable.

Chuckling, Alph shook his head.

“Then I’ll have a long rest. That might be nice actually. But you’ll have a lot less fun.”

Sensing the sly tone in his voice, Myst knew exactly what he was getting at. Pursing her lips, she reached out and flicked his shoulder.

“I’ll still be smarter than you, Alph. No matter how many potions you take.”

“Oh yeah? My intelligence was what? Thirty-three? Times three is ninety-nine, times three is two ninety-seven, times three is eight hundred ninety-one. Times three is two thousand, six hundred seventy three. Give me time to perfect my potion, and I’ll get there. Quicker than you might think.”

Withdrawing her outstretched finger like it had been burned, Myst hid it behind her body.

“Just drink your potion,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“This one first.”

Downing the last [True Sight] potion, Alph waited until it had taken full effect before he turned to look at Myst and drank down his fourth thought acceleration potion.