Seeing that his offer had somewhat placated Draco, Borgious felt proud of himself. His words also made a lot of sense, and Draco could only nod weakly as if he was a man who had lost everything in life.
"I don't have time to select anything from your vault. All I want are the materials!" Draco demanded forcefully, raising Eva up in his arms as he angrily glared at everyone in the room before storming out.
Borgious sighed deep down. After today, it would be hard to repair the relationship between the Merchant Guild and Vita City, but the silver lining was that the crisis the guild was facing had been alleviated!
As for placating Draco, Borgious knew a thousand and one ways to achieve that. Right now, the most important thing was to recuperate those who just awakened while giving Draco some space to cool down and hope that his wife would wake up in due time.
As such, Borgious had his aide quickly gather the materials to Draco, who simply snorted with disdain and left in a huff. Once he was gone, the various upper echelon breathed out a sigh of relief.
"Alright, all of you quickly clear out so we can get some healers in here!" Borgious commanded as he gazed at Olivia who was gently caressing her younger brother's head.
At least, something good had come out of this.
......
The moment Draco and Eva left, she stopped her pretense and sat upright, her face locked in a neutral smile. Draco himself remained silent, only wondering how Eva suddenly became so handsome.
Their act had dissolved all suspicion that they were the ones who had been the instigators behind this calamity, otherwise leaving there would not have been easy, much less the relationship between the two parties afterward.
Now, they managed to turn it around, Vita City would hold the advantage over the guild in future transactions. The method used was sweet and effective too.
Shameless? Psh, that was a word used by the ugly!
Truly handsome fellows would call such a thing as it was, being visionary!
Eventually, the Evil Duo returned to the Aether Hall. From there, Draco went down to the Anomaly Realm just to be safe, noticing that it had expanded quite a bit and more greenery had appeared since last time.
After all, whenever Worldly Energy was converted upwards to Aetheric Energy, it would have to pass through here. Such power would naturally enliven the place.
Eva moved to the side while Draco sat down cross-legged. He then took out the four materials he had been given and took them in hand one by one.
To refine something, he needed to know the intricate details of what he was holding as well as what he was converting it into. This required him to have physically come across whatever he was refining into, or at least know its molecular structure.
In theory, it was possible for Draco to refine things that he had never seen before or even extinct ones that existed in the past as long as he could grasp their structure.
If he were to hone this skill, it wouldn't even be impossible for him in the future to create his own substances with unique properties.
However, that was for much later in the future. For now, he had to expand his research into Refinement and acquire the knowledge of as many substances as possible to increase his proficiency.
This would be tough for most as it was demanding on one's apparatus or senses to go so far down, but with the Eyes of Caelo and his Control, it was a piece of cake.
Either one was fine for the job, so using both was just overkill. Draco could naturally memorize what he saw upon first glance, but he still spent almost an hour on each material, inspecting them over and over again.
He made sure not to just memorize, but understand. He wanted to know why this particular grouping of substance molecules would create this particular resource when combined, as well as reverse engineer the process in which these molecules combined to form what was in his hands.
One hour to do this might seem long, but the computing power required was no less than a supercomputer of the older years. It also needed far more testing, requiring the researcher to expose the material to different stimuli and environments to ascertain the changes in structure and shape.
Luckily, Draco could mimic this using his subjective magic and forcefully create different scenes around the materials to observe. In truth, he didn't need to go this far for all materials, but the four he was holding were Legendary Materials at the least.
For example, Draco could give a cursory scan of Common materials and create them with ease.
Once he was done with all four materials, Draco took a deep breath and checked the information Norma had given him to understand Refinement a lot more before he began.
When he saw the fundamentals and direction of her work, Draco was once again baffled by Norma's talent and greatness. To put it simply, Refinement was basically changing the structure of one item to another, using ambient energy as the catalyst.
All one needed was four things;
- The source material
- Knowledge of the source materials structure
- Sufficient energy, which could be in the form of Worldly, Aetheric, or even Spirit Energy
- Knowledge of the end materials structure
This was the basic formula for Refinement. But this was what Norma used when she was still a mortal. After she became a God, she naturally began to find ways to streamline and perfect the process.
For one, at the Divine level, she no longer needed knowledge of the source and end material. She also found ways to use different forms of energy and reconstruct them into the form she needed.
As such, she had been able to use Divine, Creation, Destruction or even Void Energy to change materials up. No matter where she was, there would never be a problem for her to change one thing to another.
Once Norma reached Semi-Origin, her next breakthrough allowed her to optimize the process even further. She could now refine living things and minimize her use of energy when converting.
If previously she had needed, say, 20 units of Divine Energy to change 1 gram of Divine Ore into 1 gram of Origin Ore, she now needed only 2 units or less. It was a huge step forward and was why she eventually became neck-deep in resources because they had been so easy to make for her.
Then came the one final objective for Refinement that was a wall so high that it had trapped Norma for years, preventing her from becoming an Origin God.
Her breakthrough had required only one thing, but it was so hard that even Draco wanted to weep now that the burden was on him.
Refining from nothing!
That's right, the final goal was to turn the 4-step process into just one step, creating an end material from nothingness, using no energy or at least very little in the process.
This was what the Origin Gods needed Norma for. If she could create Origin Energy from nothingness, the quantity did not matter as much as her ability to do so.
The Origin Gods had to pay a price to generate Origin Energy continually, and they could only upkeep the world, without ever being able to create a surplus. If Norma found a way to create such surplus, it didn't matter how long it might take, but eventually, they could take a break and head down to play around.
Most Origin Gods had been called to duty from the moment they were born, so they had never even seen the lower realms except in their dreams.
Once Draco learned all this, his brow had naturally been covered with sweat. Thanks to Norma's hard work, Draco could access all methods up to Semi-Origin, but if he ever wanted to officiate and complete Refinement, he would need to bring it to the Origin level.
However, Norma had purposefully restricted Draco so that he wouldn't reap rewards without benefits. Right now, he was confined to the mortal-tier 4-step process, and he could only progress once he had mastered it to a stage beyond the standard Norma set.
Draco sensed the standard and nodded. Since he had refined something before, he could understand what was required of him. Based on his estimations, it should take 3 months to progress if he practiced Refinement non-stop, day and night.
Since he didn't, it would take much longer. It made sense since Norma had expected her successor to begin research the moment they received it and spend day and night on it, not run up and down doing Unique Quests and causing trouble.
After all, if one were to put it nicely, Norma had been a hardworking woman!
If one were to put it bluntly… Norma had been a giga-nerd loser!
Without any social life, no friends, and no real goals apart from Refinement, she had been all alone! She never sought power nor companionship!
Even those who called themselves her descendants were not of her w.o.m.b directly! She had just extracted her blood, mixed it with some others, and refined it into their ancestor!
After creating more through such a method, they grew up believing they were her children - and they certainly were in a way - and procreated among themselves endlessly until the current 99 villages came to be.
Draco sighed and shook his head. He then waited as Zaine entered the Anomaly Realm with the others in tow. They all held different stuff in hand, plenty of Bags of Holding that Draco had requested.
Placing them around Draco, they stepped back and stood with Eva, curiosity on their faces. They too wondered what this almighty Refinement was like and what would come of it.
Draco opened the first Bag of Holding, releasing a pile of humus. This was topsoil taken from a random farm that Draco was going to use as his source material.
He took a fistful of it and made a cursory scan. Once done, he imagined the sand in his hand morphing into the Primal Soil he had envisioned. Then energy began to close in from all places, rushing into his fist.
As the gap between Common humus and Legendary Primal Soil was so great, the amount of Aetheric Energy drained was crazy. If Draco had tried this anywhere else, Worldly Energy would not have been enough to cut it, and he would have to use Aether Crystals to make up for it.
In Vita though, there was enough Aetheric Energy, it was not a matter how much energy, but how long it would take. Unlike the birth of his children who had sucked in the energy for long periods, this one lasted only a minute.
After all, Draco was changing only a fistful as a trial run, not the whole dirt pile. However, Draco was not happy when he saw the perfectly produced handful of Primal Soil, though his women were excited, especially Zaine.
Her eyes turned into the shape of platinum coins as she had sniffed potential for endless wealth. In truth, it was obvious to even Draco as to how overpowered Refinement was in terms of fetching money.
After all, Norma had been the richest deity in the Divine World. If she claimed to be second, not even the legit Goddess of Wealth would dare to claim she was first. This was why Draco was hesitant to use Norma's token to get a seat in the Divine World as of yet.
The reason Draco was frowning was because he had wasted far too much energy! Norma had left measurements for him to scale, and based on the standard Draco needed to achieve at the minimum, he was about 50 folds off!
In other words, Draco had wasted 50 times more energy than was absolutely necessary as stipulated by Norma. Against Norma's own record at this stage, Draco was off by 45 folds.
He had so much work to do and a lot of room for improvement!
His eyes fell onto the pile of dirt before him and he smiled.
(Un?)Fortunately, the essence of work was repetition!
With enough repetition, proficiency would be created, his efficiency would rise and experience would be gained!
Now, Draco finally felt revitalized as he had found something fun to work with!