Monarch of Profound Toxin [Progression, LitRPG]

"Aah, nuts," Eik muttered under his breath as he looked down at the pulverized corner of his worktable crumbling between his fingers.

He had been working on the grade 6 Potion of Might Strength appropriate for S-rank Awakened for a couple of hours now, but he was no closer to figuring out the recipe. S-ranked Awakened specialized in combat were already immensely rare in the Unified Mass—ones with the skills in alchemy to actually make potions appropriate for their own level significantly less so.

That meant that there were no recipes to buy access to. Any alchemist who might have discovered a viable method and ingredient combination had maintained its secrecy exactly like Eik himself had done with his Legendary Mystery Medicine.

Besides Oru the Devourer and Bobopahn the Reacher, Eik had only ever been present for the deaths of two S-rankers. The brood mother nesting in the mine shaft that he had just killed and the dragon that had been kept in stasis for the A-rank crucible test to be mutilated and murdered to test the talent of the Nidafjeld Alliance.

He had harvested a number of parts from both of them and had tried a slew of combinations already. Nothing had worked thus far. One of the apparent rules of the Potion of Mighty Strength that had repeated itself since the first F-ranked potion he had learned to make was the presence of a monster part in the mixture, be it blood, sinew, heart, jaw muscle. There was always something.

The problem was that what he needed for this one wasn't necessarily anything from the two he had harvested from. Walking into the laboratory today, he had been hoping for a miracle but at this point he was beginning to feel lost.

The fact of the matter was that he really wasn't that good of an alchemist. All things considered, he barely had any practical experience nor knowledge of the art he had made all of his vast fortune on.

Yes, he had become successful beyond his wildest dreams, but that was because of some uniquely useful properties of his Worldbreaker. It wasn't because he was some kind of genius who had sat down and read a few hundred text books, used unrivaled brain power to theorize and realize heretofore undiscovered truths of alchemy, and then spent then next forty years acquiring enough practical experience to finally create the masterpiece he had been chasing since his youth.

No. He had brute forced the whole thing like a caveman bonking himself in the noggin with his club until the gray matter was scrambled in such a perfectly coincidental way that he suddenly realized that if you wipe your ass it doesn't smell as bad.

If you really thought about it, he was a complete fraud. His intentions were good so he was grateful that the one with this capability was him and not some tyrant who loves evil, but that didn't mean he deserved it.

Far from it. It should have been Olivia with her tireless work ethic and willingness to die for those she protects. Or his brother, Torbjørn, who paid with his own life in the early days of Earth's induction into the Unified Mass just so they they could eat that night. Or his mother and father, whose only real wish had been for the world to make at least a bit of sense again.

Any of them deserved it more than him. Yet here he was, accidentally breaking his own damn table just because he couldn't figure out right away how to make himself even more ridiculously overpowered.

But whether he deserved it or not, he still wanted to make those damned grade 6 potions! He would have to scour the markets and auction houses for parts, and go on more S-ranked hunts in search of the ingredient combination that would unlock the recipe.

And if he really could become the next Elixir King like some people had indicated, then he could get some of those actual alchemists to help him with the theory crafting of the S-rank potions.

Having made little progress besides excluding the materials he already had to the extent that he knew how to use them, he made a detour to Gimleh on the way home. This failure had really put into focus how much he lacked in basic knowledge of alchemy and its theories. It was honestly embarrassing.

While his Worldbreaker combined with the many pills he had already taken had given him unimaginable power relative to any power rank he had ever held, gaining access to S-rank pills as soon as possible would make a big difference in development.

Besides visiting Wanjihan, his trusty supplier of plants and other alchemical materials, he bought over twenty books on alchemy from unpopular recipe books and detailed reference books to obscure theories from alchemists of varying degrees of fame.

Free moments from now on would have to be dedicated to… studying. Ugh.

Tomorrow, that was. From tomorrow he would make sure to do that. Tonight was reserved for his family to enjoy each other's company. And he would be damned if he wasn't going to savor it to the fullest.

***

"How does that make sense?" Olivia said.

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"According to the oracle, that's what the strategists and ritualists of the cult have found out is the optimal way to conduct the ritual to awaken the Lord of the Moon," Andihar said.

Olivia crossed her arms, frowning. "But how do they even know when the center of the cosmos—what was it called again?—the Chasm, is going to become unstable again?"

"There are ways to calculate it to an approximate but pretty accurate degree," Andihar told her. "Not to mention that it happens with cyclical frequency so it's not exactly impossible to predict."

"And what happens precisely?" she asked.

Eik nodded. "I'd actually like to know more about that as well."

Andihar gave it a moment's thought before he began to speak. "As far as scholars of the cosmos have been able to piece together, whatever happened all those years ago when the system came to exist wasn't exactly… perfect. It's not a stable execution of the design which means that, over time, the entire thing grows more and more volatile. In order to counteract this volatility and, so to speak, reset the saturation of energy, the Chasm will occasionally expel this excess energy into space directly."

"Okay, but what actually happens?"

"Well, the pressure on the worlds closest to the Chasm reaches extreme levels, like being squished down by high-ranking aura constantly. Only the strongest of individuals would be able to endure being there. Such dense cosmic energy spawns incredibly powerful monsters on those worlds which obviously need to be culled. That's the gist of it, put very simply, of course. I'm afraid I'm no expert on the matter."

"It spawns monsters? What the hell?" Eik asked.

"It does, yes. If you're interested, there are many scholars who would probably even pay you for the opportunity to give a whole lecture about it. It's a very complex topic, and one that requires a lot more research."

"And nobody thought that this might be relevant in relation to the cult's plans?"

"We have been feuding for hundreds of years and the expulsion happens at a rate of once every ten to fifteen years. We're always monitoring the cult leading up to a predicted expulsion but there's never been any indication that they were looking to utilize it. Or even that they were capable of it."

"And when is the next expulsion? How are they going to utilize this event to awaken the Lord of the Moon anyway?" Olivia asked.

"Technically, it could happen at any time right now, but realistically it will probably be at least another year—"

"Except the cult is going to use the Life Harvesters to funnel enough energy into the Chasm to bring it over the edge prematurely. And that means they can time their ritual with the initial burst of energy from the Chasm," Eik said.

"So the Life Harvesters aren't the main fuel for the ritual, they're just the tools to get it?"

"Pretty much."

"And we don't know exactly when they are going to use them because they might have altered their plans after the oracle was taken?"

"Exactly. Smaller efforts on various cult bases are already being carried out in order to muddle our main assaults."

***

"Goo Magnasen, I choose you! Go!" Eik shouted as he lobbed a blue sphere into the air and watched it unfurl into a house cat. "No, Goo, not like that! Something scarier! Remember the picture book we looked at last night? Tyrannosaurus Rex! Do the Tyrannosaurus Rex!"

"Why do you always do that weird thing when you send Goo out to fight?" Sinki asked with confusion. "Is it some kind of battle ritual from your home culture?"

"Uuh, no, not exactly," Eik admitted awkwardly. "It's from an anime I used to watch all the time as a kid. It doesn't do anything, really. I'm just trying to communicate with Goo as much as I can. I'm hoping he starts responding soon."

"Are you seriously expecting mutual communication at some point?"

Eik just shrugged. He had been purposefully vague with the guys who had accompanied him on this attack on one of the cult's bases and they only had pieces of the full story. Now that he had become the Monarch of Toxin he couldn't help but feel less inclined to go as far in hiding his abilities, although it would be difficult to claim that he had laid low at all recently.

Goo, flanked by two larger Profound Toxic beasts for safety, brought his claws to bear on a robed cultist. He had learned to harden his claws to the point of crystallization and they had a lot more destructive power than he had expected out of that little body.

Although the cultist seemed to be a mid E-ranker at best and Goo was still at E-rank grade three, the slash cut deeply into the woman's torso, severing skin and muscle alike with frightening ease. Blood spurted out but Goo leapt back in time to avoid the splash.

"Fetch!" Eik shouted and threw a frisbee of toxin that entered the long gash. Before the cultist could react, Goo followed, flowing into his original shapeless blob form and entering the wound.

"Interesting way to teach it to fight," Sinki commented.

"Him," Eik corrected.

"Sorry?"

"Goo is a him. Do not let my daughter hear you get that wrong. I might be the one who makes and holds the pastries, but I distribute by her decree. If you loose muffin privileges then they're gone forever, mate."

Sinki swallowed. "Noted. Thanks for the heads up. On an unrelated note, what kind of toys have your daughter been into recently and where can I get them?"

"Good start, good start. I'll have my office send over her Christmas list later."

"I don't know what that is, but thank you."

The Profound Toxin Eik had thrown into the E-rank cultist would have killed her in a second but he had left it inert so when the woman eventually collapsed, it was all Goo's toxin. He hopped out of the dying woman, significantly smaller than he usually was.

He wasn't capable of producing more Profound Toxin than his own body was already made of. At least not yet, so leaving some of it inside was the best he could do.

Perhaps unwisely, Eik had ordered his strike team to let live any low-rank cultist that lost their will to fight. Murdering low-rankers in cold blood just didn't sit right with him, although he couldn't for the life of him figure out how his moral compass worked. There was little consistency to his tendencies and it honestly bothered him.

Eik's arm suddenly stung. He read the message, hiding it from all but himself.

[Acquired Living Manifestation — Lv. 193]

He was getting levels in Living Manifestation from Goo's activities and it was steadily bringing the ability to amazing heights. With every levels his summoning capacity was growing. At this point he was not Monarch in name only. Hidden within his spirit was a genuine army, willing to follow his command to the letter.

There were still pockets of fighting scattered across the grounds of the base but they had come in with overwhelming force and it was mostly a matter of finishing off the stragglers.

He would use these blitz attacks on the cult to achieve two things.

One was to get Goo used to combat.

The other was to test out his own newfound might as the Monarch of Toxin.