Chapter 545: Three Powers, Three Pills

There was enough going on for Omilaena, which meant it was too much for everyone else. So many political concerns, so many events and deadlines, even three separate lines of projects. Another woman might have been confused, but she simply split herself...

.

..

.

As valuable as it was, as unquestionably beneficial as it had been, as fortunate as they were to do it... robbing the Brightwind Sect's grand vault had taken some of the wind out of Omilaena's sails. Half of what she could do was useless because they already had the materials that some poor alchemist sap had "donated" to the vault ages ago.

Not for long, though. On top of all her other work, Omilaena was determined to exceed anything the vault could offer.

Pure cultivation pills were annoyingly simple: alchemists figured out the qi-related properties of plants and condensed them into pill form. Their idea of creativity was using the plants in a different combination than they read in their recipes. Trouble was, they were damn good at it. Generations of that focus meant that they could produce a pure qi pill with extremely high efficiency and Omilaena wouldn't be able to simply better the process in a few weeks.

To improve on it, she needed to cover more than cultivation alone. And so, for her first goal pill, Omilaena focused on her wife: she need stable qi, strong chakra, fiery mana, dark Physique...

And she needed them all in one pill.

It began with her work for the Krysali - she had successfully broken altruism so that it would serve her - as she experimented with alternate forms of pills. Her first success was an "acid pill" that could grant a boost to acid cultivation. Based on her conversations with Aeglien, she managed to strengthened it further through several iterations before getting bored and leaving it to acid cultivators to keep iterating on the concept.

That was only half the job, however: she also wanted to master an equivalent for crystal cultivation, to truly understand how cultivation could fill the different aspects of the soul, and how qi pills could interact with it. Given that Krysal already had pills, typically mediocre qi/mana combinations, this one might have stymied her in the past.

Now, however, she had a new angle of attack: instead of trying for a qi pill, she tried to work on a qi potion. She started with the idea of melting down crystals, and after a few attempts that definitely would have been lethal for any testees, she managed to use potion-brewing techniques to make the liquid crystal survivable.

The result was an instant boost to crystal cultivation. Maybe effective for Krysal, maybe a dead end, but Omilaena didn't really care: she had figured out how the reagents worked in the soul, so she could create a pill that boosted every piece of Zin Nim's cultivation.

A day later, Omilaena had her result, but the batch of pills wasn't good enough. This was something that didn't exist on Cloudspire, but it wasn't good enough for her wife. Omilaena absently sent them with someone to Krysal and went back to the drawing board.

She needed a way to incorporate a Physique element, which would normally be too much to work into a single material. Fortunately, she knew someone who already fused such energies freely, so she went and "extracted" some energy from her own husband.

Being married was less emotional work than she'd expected. Oh, there were some disagreements and some mushy times, without question, but there was no need for dances of seduction and manipulation when she wasn't in the mood. She could just meet up with Kai between his teleportation trips, take everything she needed, and move on.

Of course, she would need to finish with energy from all three of them, but Omilaena had a viable pill in the very next iteration. An exact match for all of Zin Nim's abilities, perfect for helping her break through when she reached the next tier.

Which left part of Omilaena suddenly without a project. Since she'd already been thinking about how to develop souls holistically, she began to consider whether Goralian potions could be improved with other disciplines. Juray had said something about a survival flask made from monster cores...

.

..

.

Developing a pill to help Kai break the 999 barrier was one of Omilaena's largest challenges, so she devoted a significant portion of her mind to it. This was the sort of thing that many cultures said was impossible to create, as soul-expanding resources could only be found in nature and refined.

She was betting a lot that this ancient wisdom was bullshit.

Of course her research took her to Krysal, made convenient via teleportation, since they had the most examples of soul-expanding materials. Their moonmelt pills to break the 99 Power barrier had become a common product, mass produced in the acid pits and spread across Deadwaste. The only reason it wasn't making them more money was that not enough people could get up to the barrier in the first place.

Instead of wasting time with commerce of her own, Omilaena just headed to Zin Nim. Her wife smiled from her cultivation seat and patted the ground beside her. She'd just come for information and banging, but fine, she shouldn't let her ice cultivation get stagnant.

"You had something to discuss?" Zin Nim asked after a period of meditation.

"Do you have pure moonmelt pills? I got some at a market, but the quality is shit." Omilaena rolled one in her palm to demonstrate.

"I could request some, but I actually have something that may interest you more." Zin Nim reached into her spatial bracelet and withdrew a small crystalline case, within which were three glowing pills. "These are sunmelt pills, a new product of Krysal. They use-"

"Mana and chakra too." Omilaena snatched up one and began examining it with her goggles. "That's more than I expected them to accomplish. I want to know how, but first, why?"

"I believe that their goal was to find a method to break the barrier that would be useful to more types of fighter. It may seem all the same to us, at the 99 Power barrier, but for some who have been stuck there for years, the minor differences are relevant."

"That's amazing, exactly what I need. Even if they blundered into it, they've done critical work on the shape of the soul..."

Zin Nim had a small smile on her face, absurdly pleased to have made Omilaena happy. She was so cute, Omilaena wanted to push her down right then and fuck her. But Zin Nim was more delicate than Kai, so instead Omilaena warmed her up over multiple visits with romance and questions about the process.

On her visits to Krysal, Omilaena first learned to make moonmelt pills - a braindead activity, better left to less competent people. She used that knowledge to replicate the sunmelt pill, which took more time and effort: discussions with Zin Nim, a visit to Yurwa, and more focus than expected.

After she'd mastered that, Omilaena set about developing her own soul-expanding pill. Distracted by another part of herself's thoughts of Irun, she ended up making something they named an ironmoon pill, which was more suited to Irunians and chakra-users. Some of the Krysali were impressed, but as far as Omilaena was concerned, it was just another step of her process.

"I knew you could do it," Zin Nim said with that same smile on her face. "While you weren't here, some of the Krysalif spoke of how complex it was, but I expected you to make something new."

"And that's just the start." While peering at her work, Omilaena leaned over onto Zin Nim in a relaxed posture.

"You mean to break the barrier for Kai, yes? He told me about his Physique blockage."

"That's exactly right. It's orders of magnitude more difficult than just breaking the 99 Power barrier."

"I can imagine. Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help."

"Oh, there's one thing." Omilaena tossed the pill aside and pulled her wife closer with a grin. "Kai's pill will need a lot of unique energy. He can supply the yang, but he needs yin to synergize with... and who better than us to supply it?"

Zin Nim blushed, then melted as easily as any of the pills.

.

..

.

Of course a major fraction of Omilaena's mind was dedicated to herself and her own advancement. If she didn't become more powerful, what was the point of all this experimentation anyway?

This was the part she spoke about least with anyone else, not due to secrecy but simply because she was so far beyond what anyone ordinary was doing. Kai could understand the principles, and Zin Nim had provided many Physique examples, but ultimately it came down to her trying to break new ground.

The goal was for her to revolutionize her own body, a poisonous or metallic equivalent to Zin Nim's Blackblood Physique. Ordinary Physique development involved working energy into the body to reinforce it, and normal Physique advancement pills usually boiled down to an unusually large surge of energy. To transform herself, she needed something that would force some kind of phase transition.

Drawing blood from so many different sources had been very useful there. In particular Kifaela, who Omilaena suspected had done something similar in abandoning the usual naiad soul formation. It definitely seemed like the process wasn't a simple one.

Zin Nim was her primary model, but there were plenty of examples from Rosemount over the years, warriors who had worked metals or other materials into their bodies. The tricky part was finding the line between just incorporating foreign material, which she'd been doing her entire adult life, and transforming the body on a level that was somehow more fundamental.

One thing that seemed fairly sure based on her experiments, both abstract and with Irunians, was that the change required a lot of time for power to saturate the body. In improving the Ironpath Physique and using it on large numbers of trainees, she'd discovered a useful trend: how well it was taken up was directly related to how extensively the Irunian used their powers. Not the raw strength or tier, only intimate familiarity. It was like there was some deeper mechanism beneath the obvious layer of the soul, similar to what she had discerned with the primary soul components.

Her attempts to actually see those, via new goggles or otherwise, had ended in failure, yet she could still keep working. She developed an iron chakra pill that could boost Irunians without actually putting them on a chakra path, for example. All the Irunians she worked with were very impressed, but Omilaena remained frustrated from her goal.

As her irritation grew, she took a break by getting both Kai and Zin Nim together, to harvest dual cultivation energy from them for her eventual pill. She'd been saving that as a reward for herself, but fuck it, what was the point of being married if she didn't take advantage?

With that easing her frustration, Omilaena attacked the problem from a new angle. She really wished she could draw blood from Quinta, but the woman remained inexplicably hostile. Instead Omilaena drew some from Tusquo, which was useful since he'd been developing his Irunian Physique so long.

Along the way, Omilaena flirted with him a little, just to check his wife's reaction. Quinta glowered, but not particularly more than usual, and solely at Omilaena. The woman didn't seem to doubt her husband in the slightest - justifiably, since Tusquo either didn't notice or ignored her - and this just reinforced some preexisting dislike for Omilaena.

Odd, but irrelevant to this project. Back to pills.

In the end, she still hadn't managed to do it. Omilaena could produce a pill that enhanced Irunian Physique, and she could create a "poison pill" for herself, but she couldn't create anything that would cause a fundamental phase shift.

Back to the drawing board.

.

..

.

As much fun as all the experimentation was, Omilaena knew that it couldn't last forever. Eventually, she would need to draw her full mind together for the competition, which was now only days away. She had mostly ignored Yuinafal's alleged progress and focused on her own work.

Except not even that, because she was really doing it all for the three of them.

One complete cultivation pill, a nearly-complete barrier breaker, and only experiments for her poisonous Physique... she would have to do better.

(This chapter has a long bonus alternate, but I suppose I'll post it on Wednesday.)