Chương 154: Chapter 230: Experiments

William Oh was not the one who discovered the periodic table of Miasma. He was the one who told Miasma to straighten up and get its act together, which lead to it's eventual discovery by lesser beings. Modern science will forever be grateful. Jason Salazar Will habitually checked his map and tried to assign a lockdown bounty to Void. Nothing. Over his shoulder, Ria stood guard, holding a phantom of her favored halberd.

Since Brianna was embedded in all the Parties and Strongholds, if any of them spotted Void, they would let him know in an instant. Will turned his attention back to his current experiments. This stuff is incredible. Will had been chomping at the bit to play experiment with the crystalized giant's bone. The crystals held randomly assembled miasmatic structures, and Will was easily able to locate and separate them from each other thanks to his Uru Drake Eye. Will wasn't sure how other people managed it.

By the miasmatic glow, indicating general location? By feel? It probably varied from person to person, but he was sure it was less accurate, especially with the way they tangled together. The whole time he was teasing apart strands of miasmatic structures frozen in crystal and cataloguing their different effects, he was mentally comparing them to the ones he'd seen while fighting the burning undead fae. Will took all sorts of notes and stored them in his map's legend.

He practically used it as a notebook/sketchbook. There was no limit on the number or the complexity of the legends he could make, so why not? He could navigate them with the speed of thought. Since miasma wasn't a terrain for Will, he couldn't make it show up on the map, but simply having a way to take instantaneous, accurate drawings of things he perceived was a huge advantage in the study of miasma. Right now he was referencing the picture he'd drawn of the fae's fire-resistance.

The close-knit chains had a repeating hexagonal shape that easily linked to each other, forming a densely packed layer of Miasma that easily warded off the corrosive flames. Will summoned up his picture of the corrosive faefire and zoomed in to study the individual pieces of miasma floating around suspended in the fire. They looked… something like tiny crowbars, or shards of glass. They were designed with a pointy end and a lever. Similar to the ground-penetrating strands from Attrition, but different in function.

For one, it was much smoother than Terrain Dive, lacking a bunch of the wiggly bits that identified what it was supposed to do. The pointy end was not designed to hook into anything, instead it was designed so that the sharp end would eventually penetrate into a strand of miasma, then the wider lever end would be tapped or wiggled by something. The torque would cause the sharp piece of miasma to wiggle around inside the strand, popping it apart. Not unlike a crowbar. Or shards of glass.

Would it be too much to call it 'crowbar miasma'? Will thought. I would call it corrosive miasma, but it doesn't corrode in the traditional sense. It physically breaks miasmatic structures apart. We'll call it crowbar for now. Will compared the crowbar and the 'chainmail' miasma and discovered that the hole in the center of the chainmail was just the right shape to catch the fat end of the crowbar and lock it in place where the pointy end couldn't do any damage.

The connection between the hexes themselves were reinforced three ways and self-correcting, so it would take no less than three crowbars hitting the exact right spots all at the same time in order to open a single hole in the armor, which was unlikely to happen while the chainmail was actively wiggling the sharp ends towards the 'catch' in the center and healing the damage they took. So what did I do that destabilized the balance? Will wondered.

The obvious answer was that he applied no less than 50 Charge to raw miasma and used tore aside the armor like so much paper. His current goal was to find one or more miasmatic structures in his collection of giant's bone that interacted with the 'chainmail' in one of two ways: he wanted something that could tear it apart, and something that could recreate it.

In short, Will wanted to create one or more wands that could cause one of those burning fae to completely self-destruct for a single Charge without sacrificing his hand… And… A way to recreate the chainmail, or at least an effect similar to that, which could protect him from the corrosive fire that Void was sure to be bringing to bear. If will could accomplish those two things, he'd make this creature's head spin with how fast he kicked his ass. Corrosive fire and immune undead were the core gimmicks of the Set.

If Will created answers to those two features, then the set lost a huge amount of it's value against him. Just need to figure out what works… without any samples save for my notes. I wish Ghoul was here to bounce ideas off of. Loth had the intelligence, but she couldn't actually perceive the miasmatic structures, and she was also busy with getting the Stronghold set up to defend against flaming undead. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Her time was better spent coordinating the Stronghold's defense with Brianna, June, Heath, and Sammohan. Sammohan was understandably pissed about being ordered to keep his miners inside the walls of the Stronghold without even an explanation why, but Will didn't want the information getting out into the general populace. A creature with the strength of a Lord is wearing a full set, wandering around the Tower. It wants to lay eggs in your brain, and we don't know where it is. Don't panic. Yeah, that'll go over well.

Will could easily see a large portion of his Stronghold fleeing to the lower floors, or going out on their own to try and kill the thing and get the set for themselves. Will had personally witnessed the greed a set could inspire in a person. Way back when that blood berserker tried to steal the 'Family Gathering' set from Jason. Lots of people wanted to be Lords, and a set was just about the quickest shortcut towards making that happen.

Will estimated about 15% of his unemployed Climbers might think they have a shot at taking this guy, form Parties and go wandering off on their own, where they would likely get picked up by Void and converted into more vectors for the spread of the Norworm. Will couldn't help but compare them to the headcrabs on the 6 th Floor. The headcrabs were a social species that piggybacked on humans for most of their thought processing until they were mature enough to think for themselves.

The host's brain was largely undamaged, and the two personalities blended together at what Will guessed to be about an 80-20 split, human-crab. They thought like people, they controlled their spread to only washouts who were in the process of destroying their lives anyway. They made themselves as unobtrusive and vital to the Flotilla's infrastructure as possible. Their survival strategy was based on seamless integration. The norworm, from what Will had been able to learn… was the complete opposite.

They jumped bodies on a whim, rode their hosts with reckless abandon like a teen boy with a borrowed horse. They had no desire for integration. They didn't feel unnecessary emotions like pity or remorse, and they were smart as Abyss. Their survival strategy was to remain undetected then strike hard and fast, taking as many people as possible before they were purged. There was no peaceful solution. There's going to be some form of unstoppable synergy between Void's Class and the Burning Court set.

It's going to be more than simply making those undead minions stronger. Some kind of infinite combo. Sacrifice one undead and the others get stronger, then resummon and repeat? Near- Infinite life, similar to Loth? Infinite corrosive fire to sweep across a Stronghold in a matter of seconds? Will didn't know exactly what form it would take, but he knew one of the pillars supporting the set's synergy was going to be based around those fae undead, and he'd already gotten a hint for how to deal with them.

If I can kick that pillar out from under him, I can topple his whole Build to the ground before it gains traction. Will picked up another crystal, labelled Q-12 and carefully put a single Charge through it, keeping his hands as far away from the crystal as possible, transmitting his Charge through a stick, just so it didn't melt his hand off. This was the 4 th stick today alone, carved from a patch of leftover giant's bone without any miasmatic structures, and it had the battle-damage to prove it. Crack!

The air around the crystal turned a strange cherry hue and gained slimy mass, drooping to the floor with a strangled scream that faded as the cherry slime evaporated, leaving behind an acrid, vinegary smell. Hmm. Will noted the effects and the shape of the structure in his legend before setting the oblong crystal back down. He went to pick up the next one when he paused, a bit of light catching his eye. Will lifted the bone grabber, checking it for damage.

There was a hairline fracture about halfway up the stick, rendering it dangerous to use… along with a tiny piece of frozen miasma that hadn't been there before. … what? How did that get there? Will was absolutely sure the section of bone had been completely free of miasmatic structures. And now it had one. A tiny little squiggle whose effect had to have been extremely primitive and weak. But it was there. Will set the piece down and tugged on his beard as he thought.

Going into these experiments, I assumed that the miasmatic structures inside the crystal were completely unchangeable, as though they were trapped in amber. What if that's not the case? What if it's closer to gelatin than amber, and I could insert miasmatic structures inside with the right techniques? What if I could change what was already in there? Will went over to his samples and began cutting ingots out of the bone, creating dozens of blank ingots out of the space between preserved miasmatic structures.

"Brianna says you're cute when you're excited about something." Ria said, leaning against her weapon as Will rushed around his lab, lining up the crystal blanks in preparation to determine how to impregnate them with miasmatic structures. Will responded with a wordless grunt.

Will raised his left arm, the Phantom Hand perching at the end of his stump an inch away from the crystal, drew Charge from his core then swaddled it in Miasma before unleashing the tightest beam of charged Miasma that he could, straight into the slab of bone. 142-117 Charges remaining. Wow. Would you look at that? Will thought, cocking his head as he picked up the slab of bone.

There was a wavy circle of Miasma frozen in the center of the slab of crystal, almost like someone had taken a skirt and laid it out on the floor. A center ring of vibrant miasmatic blue that from which thinner ripples spread out from. The slab itself was riddled with hairline fractures from where the forces involved had damaged the crystal bone. So… I just have to find a way to inject the miasma without damaging the bone. That opened so many doors.

If Will figured out how to inject miasmatic structures without damaging the crystal, then it was one step away from removing or even altering existing miasmatic structures without damaging the crystal. And sure, that would allow Will to make wands of basically any Ability he wanted given enough time, but that wasn't the most exciting thing. At least not to Will.

Taking the idea of freely injecting, removing and altering miasma inside the bone one step further, if Will could make a tablet that he could shoot miasma into which trapped and preserve his miasmatic structures until it was reset without damaging… that would be the perfect tool to practice his miasma control. He could try to use an Ability, carefully study how the miasmatic structures turned out, reset the tablet and try again.

Typically any miasmatic structures he made just vaporized the moment they destabilized, giving him very few hints about what made them unstable in the first place. Preserving the miasma would give him valuable feedback that would let him adjust with a clearer picture of what he was doing wrong, drastically reducing the amount of time it would take to perfect the skill. As if to emphasize that thought, Will noticed a small section of the miasma imprint that was a bit thinner than the rest.

A minor imperfection that would've resulted in destabilization. Eventually I'll get it. And once he could make miasmatic structures perfectly from scratch, who needed wands? Well… I do. I still need wands. Practicing enough to make an original Ability off the cuff would still take a lot longer than it would to produce a wand or two that destroyed the fae's fire resistance, which meant that right now, he should probably be more excited about the customizable wand thing, even if he wasn't. No time like the present.

Will checked his map and tried to assign the bounty again. Nothing. Where the Abyss is Void?