Patrick Laplante
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PU Book 3 - Chapter 76: Incorporation
🕑 Added 2024-10-29 01:57:07 +0000 UTCThe next morning, Tiffany paid a visit to their room and tossed them a black plate brimming with deathly energies onto the table. “This pass is required to attend the Golden Circle’s auction in five days. While it’s good for a group of five, I won’t be going. Feel free to fill up the remaining slots if you wish to risk your cover.
“I also wish to inform you that there’s been a change of plans. I can no longer accompany you in this place. I will instead monitor the situation from afar and make contact if it becomes evident that danger comes your way.”
Sorin frowned. “That wasn’t part of the deal, Tiffany.” He reached out with Strife and tugged on her bond of service.
“Threaten however you will, I will not risk my life unnecessarily,” said Tiffany with murderous eyes. “The reason for my actions is simple: The Skeleton Patrol has increased its monitoring activities. I may have a less than comfortable relationship with the authorities here, so it has become necessary for me to lay low.”
“Fine,” said Sorin. “But be warned; if I discovery any hints of treachery, your ending shall not be a good one.”
Tiffany sniffed as she turned around and slammed the door on the way out of their room. “I guess Agents of Jealousy are the emotional type?” said Lawrence to lighten the mood.
“Good riddance, I say,” said Gareth. “It’s inconvenient not having a guide, but it beats having to deal with her manipulative banter.”
As the risk of being discovered had increased, they decided to spend the remainder of the week in the hotel with Lawrence and Gareth keeping watch. This was fine by Sorin, as he only had a five-day window in which to solve Strife’s entanglement.
He began by inspecting the goods they’d purchased the day before. A few tastes confirmed his initial guesses about the medicinal pills and poisons and confirmed that while the corruption in the pills was an issue that even Sorin couldn’t mitigate, the effects of the pills were astounding.
For starters, the most expensive vial, which contained ten corrupted sanctification pills. Each pill could increase the consumer’s sanctification by 1 percent, and it did so by using madness to bypass the body’s natural resistance to additional divine energy. What’s more, these pills could be consumed by both early and middle sanctification cultivators. It would be just as effective on a cultivator who had 55 percent of their flesh sanctified as someone who had ten percent of their flesh sanctified.
Due to the corrupting effects of the pills on a cultivator’s soul, Sorin didn’t dare give them over to his friends for consumption. Instead, he consumed one pill himself to analyze its constituent poisons and fed the rest to Lorimer, who was unaffected by the pills’ negative effects.
He then did the same to the remaining corrupted alchemical products he’d acquired. By reducing them to their base components, he was able to add almost a hundred new varieties of poisons to his repertoire.
How interesting. These are common poisonous ingredients, but they’ve been so thoroughly infused with corruption that they can no longer be considered pure poisons. They’re instead a blend of poison and corruption with very different effects.
The joining mechanisms for these poisons are similar yet different. The only question is whether the difference is substantial enough to counter as a separate poison when it comes to upgrading Red-Eyed Devourer.
Sorin had no way to determine their equivalent runic structures without Mordecai, but by digesting these poisons, he learned enough that he was able to infuse the equivalent runic structures stored in his blood with corruption and force powerful mutations.
He started from the simplest poisons and worked his way up. Violence, Madness, Hatred, Jealousy, and finally, Hope, were all used to produce variant runic poisons.
Sorin then added these corrupted runic poisons to Red-Eyed Devourer. Due to Mordecai’s absence and the lacking facilities, he was not able to incorporate a fourth hundred-poison, but he was still able to upgrade Red-Eyed Devourer to the 600-poison level using a total of 5,999 poisons.
The infusion of corruption into his poisons resulted in a sharp increase in Sorin’s tarnished nature. His flesh-sanctification level also increased to 60 percent, propelling him to the top of the God Seed rankings in record time.
Incorporating this new brand of poisons completely consumed the five days Madeline had granted him, but the rewards were well worth it. By infusing all five forms of corruption in his blood excluding Strife, he was able to marshal everything in his possession to lock down Azrakul’s prison and substantially diminish the amount of Strife capable of leaking out.
Still, Sorin didn’t dare directly attack the prison. A herald was frightening entity; it would be foolish to face him before reaching the limits of his strength.
There were two more added bonuses to incorporating corruption into his cultivation. The first was an increase in his spirituality, and the second was the ability to manipulate Hope.
The effects of increasing one’s cultivation on spirituality in the Flesh-Sanctification realm were well-documented. From 40 percent sanctification to 60 percent sanctification, a cultivator’s spirituality would approximately quadruple. Sorin, however, experienced a nine-fold increase in his spirituality, roughly a three-fold increase for each ten-percent increment in sanctification.
With respect to Hope, Sorin gained the ability to utilize it as a poison. Like the clergy of the Temple of Hope, he would be able to corrupt cultivators using this familiar white energy.
Wishes were the key. Whatever these cultivators wished for, he would be able to manipulate their emotions and though patterns, but only as long as these emotions thought patterns were consistent with the fulfilment of these desires. Doing so might also result in a detrimental effect. The greater the change, the greater the potential detriment.
The most important aspect of manipulating Hope, however, is gaining control over Historical Amnesia. I can intuitively tell that Historical Amnesia will no longer affect me. What’s more, I can also amplify the effects of historical amnesia on others to selectively alter their perception of the past.
Sorin could think of a few potential applications, especially when it came to patients. Not to do anything insidious, obviously. He was back to normal and not under Strife’s control. He just wanted to help them help themselves. Some people just didn’t realize they were their own worst enemy.
There were other applications, of course. Largely as tools of revenge. Hatred flared in his heart as he thought of his uncle Reeves and his cousin Fineas. They would get what was coming to them.
But first, science. Sorin took out a few corrupted divine crystals he’d obtained in the marketplace and focused his poisons on it. It only took a slight effort on his part to eliminate the foreign energy and separate the divinity and the corruption present in the crystal.
The corruption in the crystal was mixed, but it could still be split. Using Grove Manipulator’s Touch and Hand of the Twisted Physician, he peeled off layers of corruption from the crystal to produce a small green crystal of Violence, a mesmerizing sky-blue crystal of Madness, a blood red ruby of Hatred, a pink diamond of Jealousy, and white pearl of Hope.
What remained was an entanglement of Death, Disease, and a third type of corruption. One Sorin had never heard of. Unfortunately, he had no control over Death and Disease. Obtaining these forms of corruption was notorious difficult. Even the Under City had little supply and zero recorded demand. Without obtaining crystals corresponding to Disease and Death, which were notoriously difficult to.
“It’s so obvious, now that I can think clearly,” muttered Sorin as he mapped out his way forward. “All this time, Lord Hope has been carefully manipulating me. Several opportunities to accept corruption were placed before me. I refused most of them, but all it takes is a single time to prove the concept works and a second time to prove that harmonization is also possible. “That third type of corruption is what I’m after. And after that… well, there’s no point in thinking about it. What the fox wants, he takes.”
The real question was not whether he would see this path to the end. The question was what he would do before he got there.
He had no doubt that this path would bring him great power, which he would then use to complete his original goal in discovering the truth about what happened to his parents. It was what he did after he discovered the truth that fill Sorin with uncertainty.
Because unlike his human patients, Sorin did not hold much hope for the Kepler Clan. Its leadership was malignant, and the only reasonable way to return the clan to good health was amputation.
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Robert Gardner
TFTC
