Chapter 1547: Back to the Research Center
Meanwhile, the Research Center was also hard at work.
For one, they were perfecting some of the products whose prototypes appeared during the previous war: The improved bombs, the improved beast-attracting potions, and the alchemically improved shields and armors.
The previous versions were definitely imperfect. The improved bombs had an extremely low success rate; the improved beast attracting potion and beast repelling potions disintegrated too fast, and the alchemical improved shields and armors lost their binding after a few days.
That was to say, the anti-elemental attack coating melted off, and the equipment so awesome during the war lost this effect.
Basically, they got lucky with the first batch they released because even the ones that didn’t get destroyed during the fight had lost efficiency after it.
They were still good as defensive equipment, in a sense, but the extra layer that could provide protection against elementalists wasn’t able to stay for long.
They hoped not to go into another war until these were perfected.
Or maybe ever, but they shouldn’t be too idealistic.
Fortunately, Althea was slowly developing the techniques, and hopefully, she could create stable combinations soon. Ideally, she’d also figure out a way so that she wouldn’t be needed. She couldn’t enhance each of the equipment by herself, right?
Anyway, the Grandmaster Hoffen had developed a particular obsession with the potions-on-equipment concept. Sure, potions were still very interesting, but combining potions with equipment was a completely new thing even to Hoffen!
"How do you think
of these things?" he asked Althea for the nth time, the past week or so, as he stared at the items. It was fascinating.Those rumors about him kidnapping people for experiments were completely false (though the human subjects he had did volunteer to get free medicine), but when he saw Althea, he couldn’t help but wonder how her mind worked.
Althea smiled awkwardly (he apparently said this out loud), and she just waved away his thoughts. "Well, I wouldn’t have succeeded without the skill you gave me."
"That skill would’ve been useless if it stayed with me," Hoffen said, and then proceeded to stare at the equipment sample again. It was one of the things she made about a day or two ago, and they were observing how things changed in time.
"You need to go to sleep, Master. We set up the phone cameras so we can watch the changes in time-lapse later."
Cameras were extremely fascinating to the aborigines. Sadly, the Alterrans couldn’t reproduce such equipment yet, so to aborigines, it was just magic. It was like a moment was literally captured in such a small, thin box.
"I know... but I want to see it for myself."
He looked at the microscope again, staring down while standing. Interestingly, the old man could stay in this position for a day straight.
He was so unmoving that some of the assistants asked her more than once if it was already an onset of rigor mortis.
Anyway, the breakdown happened much like how nuclear elements decay. It simply could not stay combined for long.
Even in Terran, keeping radioactive materials from decaying was nearly impossible. Now, her elements weren’t radioactive, but they were similarly difficult to control.
There had to be some sort of external force that could stabilize it. What it was, they didn’t know yet.
That said, they did have the option of just letting it be. It wasn’t like the material itself would be wasted. If they timed well and combined just before the war, then it could still be used in wars.
Anyway, equipment would lose durability during big fights, so the enhancements might not have lasted past the war, regardless.
However, both Hoffen and Althea were obsessed scientists and just couldn’t sleep until this mystery had been solved.
So for the next few days, except for Althea going home a few hours to spend time with her family, the rest of the time, she’d be stuck on this particular experiment with her similarly-obsessive master.
Sadly, even after that, there was little progress.
Althea stretched her arms, pausing midway when she got an idea.
"Master... Do you know what is one of the best ways to get out of a slump?"
...
And so, the Master and apprentice pair headed on a short exploration walk in the forest.
They’d be heading beyond the lines of the territory. This wasn’t a problem. Although Hoffen was old and wasn’t a fighter, his sheer level made the mobs not particularly threatening to them.
However, after about half an hour of walking together, the old man started grumbling, wanting to get back to the lab.
"Silly apprentice. Your master is too old for adventure!"
She looked at him. "You went on adventures in your youth?"
"..."
She giggled. "You asked how we think of such outlandish things sometimes, master?"
"Hmn."
"Well, this is one of them," she said, smiling. "Exercising helps the brain, and having a change of pace and setting can recalibrate the mind, possibly giving new perspectives."
Hoffen’s eyebrows rose, and his eyes glazed in introspection. "Hmn..."
The two casually went around like this, with Hoffen taking an interest in the plants. Many of them were common, but in retrospect, the old alchemist realized that he hadn’t seen them much in their natural habitat.
Which plants tended to appear next to which plant, which one loved the sun, and which ones loved the shade?
He knew many of these things by studying and by theory, but there were a few times he had witnessed it himself.
At some point, he paused, looking at a few plants. "A bug."
Althea paused and looked over. "I wonder how many there are," she said. There were bugs all around them, but sometimes it felt like they moved in a different dimension. It was rare to catch them visually.
Hoffen looked at her. "Aren’t you disgusted?"
"All creatures are born with a purpose for the world, Master," she said.
Hoffen sprayed a slowing potion around them, and suddenly several bugs appeared, easily seen with the naked eye.
Althea blinked. It had... been a while since she had seen so many varieties at one time. I.e. the last time she had seen this many bugs, it was when she was still in Terran.
The two paused and stared at the bugs. They were going on with their lives, but they moved in a way that they were visible to them. It wasn’t slow motion, of course, and they moved similarly to how it was in Terran, but with their levels, the movements and subtleties were much easier to detect.
When Althea mentioned that bugs (and non-monstrous birds, for that matter) felt like they moved in different dimensions, it was not entirely untrue.
Their speed was very different, and this was how they survived amidst the monsters and the extreme weather changes, doing their own roles for the world.
"Now that I can see them, they really moved differently. Accelerate to normal speeds, it seems like they are just at different wavelengths from us."
"Wavelength?" Hoffen mumbled, recalling some of the knowledge he learned in Alterra. "The lessons on waves and vibrations, huh?"
Althea blinked. Vibration?
She whipped her head to look at her master, whose eyes widened just a bit as if coming to a little theory himself.
"Beautiful Apprentice... I think we’re on to something here."
She grinned. "I agree greatest-best Master, I think so too."