Chapter 137: Best

The next corpse went far smoother than the first, and the one after that barely managed to resist him at all. Once Jaxir understood how to coax the beast’s mana through the blood-condensing circuit instead of wrestling with it, every repetition became another chance to polish that understanding. By the time the hundredth corpse dissolved beneath his palm, the process had become almost comfortable.

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Lv50 Channel > Lv53 Channel

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Jaxir looked at the notification and rubbed his thumb across the final bead of condensed blood. Progress had slowed to a crawl after Level 50 compared to everything before it, even more sharply than the drop he had felt after Level 40, yet gaining three Levels from one afternoon still sounded ridiculous when he thought about it. He barely had a week of actual game time behind him, while most players spent months grinding foundations that never climbed this far.

Gavin’s team had planned an entire three weeks around reaching the second stage of Elite progression, the equivalent of Mage for their respective Classes. They were already Tier 2 as well, which made developing Tier 1 Root Abilities easier for them than it had ever been for Jaxir, so reaching Level 40 should have been closer to his climb toward Level 30.

Yet, Jaxir had crossed that point in what amounted to a couple of days.

Jaxir grinned as he stored the last blood bead and dismissed the thought before his ego got any larger. There was still one more page sitting in his inventory.

He had deliberately kept the two pages separate until now, so the blood-condensing page went away before the second one appeared in his hand. The elixir circuit covering it made the first circle look almost simple, with more branches, more intersections and several places where separate paths seemed to overlap without actually touching. Jaxir stared at it for several minutes before slowly leaning closer.

He still couldn’t explain the blood-condensing circle in any useful way, but after a hundred repetitions he could at least feel where certain sections changed the pressure, direction or density of the mana moving through them. That faint familiarity let him recognize a few similarities inside the new circuit, even if understanding stopped there. The rest, though, might as well have been written in another language.

"I really need to learn this." Jaxir frowned and traced one of the patterns with his finger without touching the page itself. The entire point of these pages was that he didn’t need to understand them, yet relying on something he couldn’t explain bothered him far more than he expected.

He didn’t like blindly following instructions, especially when the instructions involved mana moving through his own body. Even his struggle with the blood-condensing circle had come almost entirely from using Tier 2 beasts, which had made it a lot harder since he was still Tier 1. Against Tier 1 blood, he probably could have followed the lines and succeeded without understanding anything or struggling very much.

’I have to find a way to learn this.’ Jaxir studied the circuit one more time before pulling out the two herbs Luxy had sold him. If nothing else, using the pages repeatedly should give him more of those faint inklings until enough of them eventually connected.

The first stages proved almost insulting after what he had just gone through. Both herbs were Tier 1, and the mana inside them flowed through the refining circuit with so little resistance that Jaxir had to slow himself down just to pay attention to what was happening. Several minutes later, two refined masses of medicinal energy floated in front of him.

"Well, that taught me fuck all." Jaxir sighed and brought out one of the condensed blood beads. The moment he began the final fusion, the easy part ended.

The blood swallowed into the herbal energy like a rock dropped into shallow water, forcing everything around it outward. Jaxir tightened the circuit and pushed the herbal mana back into place, only for the Tier 2 blood to shove through it again with enough force to destabilize the entire mixture.

His first attempt ended with the circle sputtering apart and a cloud of wasted mana spilling into the room.

Jaxir managed to preserve the ingredients themselves, though most of the energy he had refined into the herbs disappeared before he could stop it. He started over, pushed harder on the second attempt, and watched the exact same imbalance return from another direction. The third time he tried to hold every strand of mana perfectly in place, the entire mixture became so tense that Jaxir had to release the circuit before it tore itself apart.

He sat there staring at the hovering ingredients with an irritated expression. The blood was simply stronger, and every attempt to force the weaker herbal energies into perfect balance made him spend more mana correcting problems created by the corrections themselves. There had to be something he was missing.

’Unless...’

Jaxir thought back to Attune. He had always treated the Root Ability as efficiency, reducing waste until the mana cost of everything he did became smaller, but that interpretation still assumed wasted mana was automatically bad. The mess floating in front of him was making that assumption look increasingly stupid.

Some of the energy spilling away didn’t matter. The herbs contained more than the specific properties the potion needed, while the Tier 2 blood carried far more raw strength than a Tier 1 potion could use without overwhelming everything around it. Jaxir had been fighting to preserve all of it when the better answer might be deciding what deserved to remain.

Mana was energy from the world itself, and every form of it seemed to have directions it preferred to move. Twinkle bent and redirected, Light behaved according to principles Jaxir was still learning, and even his Hex abilities became easier when he stopped demanding that mana behave against its nature. Why should refinement be any different?

Jaxir began the fourth attempt and resisted the instinct to clamp down when the blood pushed outward. He let the excess spill away, then adjusted the herbal energy only enough to protect the portions that carried the properties he actually needed. The mixture weakened for a moment, yet what remained settled together far more cleanly than anything he had forced into place before.

"Oh." Jaxir’s eyes widened as the idea finally settled in his mind. Efficiency wasn’t always about preserving everything, it was preserving what mattered.

He let another useless strand escape instead of wasting mana dragging it back into the circle. The remaining energies folded around one another, the Tier 2 blood surrendering enough of its excess strength for the two weaker herbs to survive while still retaining the part that made the final potion valuable. What had felt unstable three attempts ago suddenly seemed almost eager to finish itself.

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Lv47 Attune > Lv50 Attune

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A small vial of red liquid settled into Jaxir’s palm. He stared at it for a moment, then immediately reached for the next blood bead with a grin. The remaining ninety-nine took nowhere near as long.

Hours later, Jaxir stood in the middle of the training room with one hundred finished mana potions stored safely away. Channel had crossed Level 50, Attune had finally joined it, and only one Root Ability remained before all three reached the threshold he needed. Jaxir’s grin spread wider as he rolled his shoulders and headed for the door.

Only Cast was left, and wasn’t that what he did best?

It was time to grind some danger zones.