After overseeing the progress of the aspiring "smiths" Ed wished for nothing more than a bottle of alcohol.
'Was I an alcoholic in my past life?' Ed thought before quickly shaking his head. With so many games to play who would have time to get drunk? Plus, getting drunk in college implied having lots of friends. Ed didn't think he fit the bill.
The alcohol however reminded him of the alchemy experiments he had yet to perform. When he first entered his orc body, this was excusable since the dungeon was watching but he was more than free to perform his magic now.
Plus, there was also the remote materialization upgrade he had given the system. He had yet to try it and now was a perfect time.
"You guys can all go home" it was barely noon when the orcs were all done creating lumps of useless metal.
"Can I keep it?" One of the orcs asked holding what they said was a sculpture of their beloved. No matter how much Ed scrutinized it however he couldn't see nothing more than a disfigured lump of iron whose hideous and twisted appearance was only inferior to eldritch horrors.
"Um, yeah…" Ed certainly didn't want to keep that cursed object in his vicinity. Though perhaps having it thrown into the furnace would be a more fitting end.
"Thanks! She'll love it!" The orc said with pure glee. He was smiling widely while caressing the ugly "statue." By this point, it wasn't just Ed that gave him odd stares.
[Assimilation is off cooldown]
Seeing this glowing message, Ed didn't linger in the area any longer as he immediately turned to leave. His direction was of course the alchemy garden that the old witch Lagakha had created.
The first thing that welcomed Ed's vision once there were his many dud potions. He had kept them with hopes of having them seeing some use.
'I can't possibly let all of those serenity buds go to waste' Plants didn't grow in the span of a few days. Ed knew this much very well.
He would occasionally hear that Dakgu tended to complain about how much the boars were eating. It was only natural for the dungeon spawned boars to eat so much given how quickly they reproduced and grew. Ed would go as far as calling them plagues.
'Although all of the baby boars can take up to two weeks to reach adulthood the parents don't know to take a break' Ed tossed aside the inane thoughts and focused solely on the system. His will resonated with the system link skill which in turn allowed him to connect remotely to the storage.
Ed only felt this connection however as he had no visual or auditory feedback on what exactly his storage held. This meant that if Ed didn't know what it was he was taking out then he wouldn't be able to retrieve it. Luckily he knew exactly what it was he was searching for on this occasion.
[Zephyr's Phalanges (Material)]
He was looking for Zephyr's big toe! Ed's intention was clear.
'I need more agility' His constitution and vitality outmatched his agility, strength, and dexterity to the point of imbalance. While Ed couldn't say he suffered from this disparity there were times were his agility fell short. He thought it a side effect of having too much chonk.
[Assimilation is on cooldown]
[Aglity +3]
Immediately Ed felt much lighter and nimble. He always felt that the attribute system was rather miraculous, the three points of agility made a world of difference. It was only natural when one considered that this was more than double his previous amount.
'Assimilating the drop items is quite effective' Ed still remembered how his own drop item gave him one point of constitution and that was without any assimilation. Gaining three attribute points from Zephyr's big toe was monumental in comparison.
It was worth noting that Zephyr wasn't in any way particularly strong. Ed would place the threat that Zephyr placed at middle or peak C-class at most. The skeleton's experience in combat was lacking and his brittle body left much to be desired. Zephyr was even limited in his use of mana which would usually boost him straight into the B-class by human standards.
Overall, Ed was satisfied. He was satisfied with the assimilation as well as with the remote materialization skill. Although it still lacked many quality of life improvements Ed was sure that the upgrades that could fix these inconveniences existed.
'Create a problem sell a solution…' Ed muttered as he considered what to do with the dud potions. They were not prone to reactions, that was their sole quality.
'I suppose that's useful in its own right' Ed could have these reactionary solutions work to separate potions or any other such volatile materials. The real question was when and why. At the current time, he had no need for something like that and he definitely lacked the technical expertise to put anything of the sort into practice.
'I might be overreaching' Ed had a tendency to look ahead but what he had to do was focus on the present.
Using remote materialization, Ed summoned two more alchemical materials.
[Drench's Crystal Phalanges]
[Earthen Spirit Bone]
The two items were of Drench and Trench. Similar to Zephyr, Drench's entire body was made out of crystal. This meant that he had the same weaknesses as Zephyr and also that Ed needed to really narrow in on what exactly could help create a drop item for him.
Surprisingly it was actually Drench's index finger that did the work. As he hadn't observed the skeletons in their antics he had no idea why.
Trench on the other hand was a well-developed and intelligent skeleton. Trench's drop item didn't even have his name attached to it but Ed knew that it didn't mean it was lesser in strength.
Ed, now holding a crystal blue finger and a small brown bone, wondered what potions to create. The ultimate goal was to increase the strength of the orcs through alchemy and for this Ed had three main requirements.
One, that the potions were effective. The healing potions he made were very effective at healing injuries, which was in line with his intentions. The main reason behind this effectiveness however was the blood of Blurak which brought Ed to the second point.
The materials should be easily obtainable. Blurak's blood could barely be ranked as such since Blurak was known to throw tantrums. Regardless, the blood was still much more readily available than the drop items Ed had made. It made one question why he went through the trouble.
The answer was ultimately to gain experience as well as the third requirement.
The potions should not have severe side effects. After reading the system's assessments on Lagakha's recipe tablets Ed had grown a severe aversion to negative side effects.
The dumb giants that could only be kept afloat through the use of runes were ingrained in his mind. While these giants were powerful they still fell at his hands.
Basically put, Ed didn't want his potions to force the orcs into becoming abominations the more they took them. Each defeated giant had become that way after being fed the vile potions for years after all.
As for how exactly drop items and the third requirement correlated, the answer was that higher quality materials had fewer side effects. It didn't take a genius to figure this out.
The more a material focused on perfecting a single direction be it for example agility, the least likely it was to create adverse side effects. The more it did this however it was equally likely to fail when mixed with anything but ingredients of its same attributes.
This was the basis of alchemy as Ed had taught himself. The knowledge from the alchemy lvl. 1 also supported his claims. Ed was at times surprised with the system's ability to cheat in knowledge for him but given that it had a large database full of information it wasn't at all a surprise how it managed this.
'I wonder how far the system's information scopes' So far Ed could say it held knowledge on skills and people. Which on closer look weren't in any way unrelated...
'Could it be that the system knows all of these skills from spying on prominent figures in these fields?' IF that was the case that would mean that Ed could learn the knowledge of legends that had long since passed through it.
'You are quite amazing system' The more Ed learned about it the more Ed thought that the system was a severe violation of privacy. Whoever had made it, if the thing wasn't a god in of itself, was bound to face scrutiny.
'That assumes that a person could face such a god' Ed would rather not think about it much longer. He would instead rather think about how to make the best of the system's assessment skill and his own alchemy knowledge to make two potions with the earthen spirit bone and Drench's crystal phalanges.
'The earthen one is likely to dabble in constitution' Ed could use the recipe that Lagakha left behind as a reference.
'As for Drench…' Ed wasn't really sure. Water was quite ambiguous to begin with. At most Ed thought he might be able to use it to create some sort of soothing potion.
'I'll have to think about it more… For now, let's start with Trench' A constitution potion, that was what he would work on.. Who knew, perhaps such a thing could also help Nag get off his sickbed.
