Chapter 56: Volcanic Worm

Li Huai: "It's hard to describe precisely, but if I had to use an analogy... think of the relationship between a gas canister and a balloon."

Lan Qingyou: "Go on."

Li Huai: "The gas canister represents the talent's total upper limit. The balloon represents our body."

Li Huai: "Right now, our bodies are about the size of those long, thin finger-balloons."

Li Huai: "Trying to use all the gas in the canister with a balloon that small has only one outcome — it pops."

Li Huai: "We simply can't withstand the full capacity of our talent."

Li Huai elaborated.

Honestly, this was a lesson Li Huai had paid for in blood.

The last time he'd used even a sliver more power beyond his body's limit in a critical moment, he'd been left battered and broken — nearly unable to make it back.

And yet—

Lan Qingyou: "Got it, thanks."

After a single reply, Lan Qingyou went completely silent. Li Huai looked at the screen with a mix of exasperation and amusement.

The exasperation: back on Blue Star, he'd been a successful young CEO. Here, he was an S-rank talent holder — a top-tier powerhouse. And this was the treatment he got?

Used and discarded?

The amusement: this kind of behavior was perfectly in character for Lan Qingyou as he knew her.

Lan Qingyou, of course, couldn't care less what Li Huai thought.

With the answer she needed, she could now fully validate her hypothesis.

Reaching out to Li Huai had actually been a carefully considered decision.

Talents like hers or Gu Xiaobei's were too indirect to serve as useful reference points.

But Li Huai was different.

His talent was offensive — pure and straightforward.

All he needed to do was attack. No additional considerations.

Which made his feedback the most direct and reliable possible.

And now she had his answer — exactly the answer she'd been hoping for.

Combined with her own theory and Li Huai's confirmation, Lan Qingyou was highly confident in her "talent equals magic" formula.

With this formula came a breakthrough point for developing a talent-enhancing potion.

Lan Qingyou: "Do you have any spirit-attribute monster materials or herbs?"

Shang Chuan: "Yes."

Lan Qingyou: "Send them."

Shrieking bats, fuzzy alpacas, swaying flowers, blue-spore mushrooms, forget-sorrow grass, whispering grass...

After a brief exchange, Lan Qingyou had a batch of spirit-attribute monster parts and herbs in hand.

Then she launched into development.

Though talents came in every variety — self-targeting like Lan Qingyou's, external-targeting like Gu Xiaobei's, or enemy-targeting like Li Huai's —

No matter the form, they all fell under the absurdly broad category of "magic."

So Lan Qingyou essentially designed her approach around the conditions for upgrading magic.

Her personal info stated that magic could not be upgraded, but knowledge could be accumulated.

Clearly, upgrading magic wasn't a simple matter.

After three more batches, Lan Qingyou was on the verge of shutting down entirely.

No.

Three batches — a full three hundred mugs — and not a single one had produced the golden flash? Not even half a success?

Where had she gone wrong?

Scratching at her already hopelessly disheveled bird's-nest hair, dark circles ringing her eyes, Lan Qingyou's brow knotted tight.

There was no way her formulation ratios were off. She'd tried every permutation.

So where was the problem?

Lan Qingyou was starting to feel irritable — the inevitable result of going without sleep for dozens of hours.

She pulled up her personal status on her right hand and stared at it with laser focus, willing herself to find some fragment of inspiration.

Several full scans later, nothing new emerged.

There was only so much on the status screen. No matter how hard she stared, she wasn't going to conjure flowers from it.

With a sigh of frustration, Lan Qingyou closed the display and braced both hands on the wooden desk, eyes boring into the notebook full of crossed-out formulas.

'Something's wrong. Something is definitely wrong.'

'But if the formulations and ratios are all correct, what am I overlooking?'

Her gaze traced the ingredient names listed beside each formula, and her frown deepened.

"Wait — the materials!"

Mid-thought, Lan Qingyou's eyes locked onto the ingredient names and she snapped her personal status back open.

Her gaze darted straight to the one character she'd been overlooking all along.

'E.'

That was it! E!

How had she not noticed before?

What she was trying to develop was a talent upgrade potion.

Every one of the two hundred million forcibly teleported people had awakened a talent, regardless of rank.

The lowest rank was E, ascending through D, C, B, A, and S.

So if she wanted a potion that upgraded an E-rank talent to D-rank, then the potion itself would need to be at least D-rank quality — which meant she should be using D-rank materials!

"Heh heh heh..."

Lan Qingyou tapped her slightly sweaty forehead, fighting the urge to laugh at herself.

She'd still somehow managed to stumble into the most basic of errors.

But did she even have any D-rank materials?

Probably not — and Shang Chuan likely didn't either.

After all, D-rank materials were something that hadn't appeared anywhere in the Forgotten Forest. And even if they had, current-era survivors wouldn't be able to—

Mid-thought, Lan Qingyou suddenly remembered Li Huai.

'Wait!'

'Actually... maybe I do?'

Floating to the storage room, Lan Qingyou located the box Li Huai had given her previously — the one containing a volcanic worm.

This creature was not only D-rank but also happened to be spirit-attribute.

Unfortunately, she had just the one.

So she contacted Li Huai. When he didn't have any more, she checked with Shang Chuan — who, as expected, didn't either.

Fine. All her hopes now rested on this single specimen.

With no other choice, Lan Qingyou pulled out the volcanic worm, set it on the alchemy workshop table, and began her dissection.

Thankfully, its crystal core was still intact — at least that counted as something.

Then there was its blood, or more accurately, the liquid inside the volcanic worm's body. That needed to be preserved too.

Lan Qingyou worked with extreme care, spending a full half hour to completely dissect the not particularly large volcanic worm.

She crushed the entire D-rank monster crystal core and ground it into fine powder, then brought out her collection of jars and containers.

Beakers, measuring cups, an alcohol lamp, a funnel...

After some swift assembly, she managed to cobble together a rudimentary distillation apparatus.

The distillation setup was for purifying the volcanic worm's crystal core. With only one core, she had to treat it with the utmost seriousness.

Once all the prep work was finished, Lan Qingyou reviewed her planned workflow one more time, selected some of the rarer E-rank materials as secondary ingredients, and began a fresh round of brewing.