Chapter 1233: Element Extraction, The Invisible Richest Person

Soon, Xia Duo had arranged a series of protective spells in the laboratory; naturally, the focus was on the avoidance of detection, as he did not want to have just refined a bit of high-grade mithril today only to have someone show up at his door tomorrow.

To reduce the possibility of being spied upon, he even sealed off this small patch of the Magic Net in the spellcasting area, casting only with a micro magic net expanded by his own arcane fire.

"If I can still be discovered like this, then I'll accept it!" Xia Duo said fiercely.

He then controlled the Magic Net strings to construct an energy circuit, and the moment the spell took effect, the entire laboratory was submerged in a bright light.

Even Xia Duo, the spellcaster, could not judge the state of the target—that is, the mithril ingot brought by the Arcane Union—at this moment.

However, he did not care; he had seen such a situation more than once. If necessary, after returning to the Tower of Time, he could have Niya observe and record it for him from the side.

This was merely the glow produced by the element reaction reaching its extreme; it could not be penetrated by the naked eye or even magic vision, but through special scrying spells, one could fully understand the many details during the reaction process.

As for what those details were, Xia Duo knew them without needing to observe; after all, he had already researched this spell quite thoroughly.

The so-called "Element Extraction" is not actually "taking" the mithril directly out of the mixture, but starting from the elemental essence of the substance mithril, exciting the state of the sample substance to the critical state of 【Matter-Element】.

(The sample needs to be mostly mithril; if other substances are in the majority, then it is extracting other substances.)

Those non-mithril substances will partly disintegrate directly into elements and dissipate, and partly be attracted by the framework of 【Mithril-Elemental Essence】 and converted into mithril.

The last part remains as it is; whatever it was originally, it remains that way after leaving the critical state—colloquially, these are "impurities."

Of course, mithril itself will also produce these three results during the extraction process; naturally, for mithril, converting to mithril is maintaining its original state, so in reality, only one result will occur, which is—

A small portion of mithril is gone!

By using multiple extractions, the impurities are reduced time and again until a limit is reached, which is also the upper limit of mithril purity that the spell 【Element Extraction】 can achieve.

Currently, Xia Duo has not tried extreme extraction, nor does he know how pure the mithril refined by this spell can be. It is not that he does not want to perform extreme extraction, but the limit is truly too far away, and he does not have that much time or energy to test it.

This is an attempt with diminishing marginal utility; perhaps after trying until the end, it might not be much stronger than first-grade mithril.

After trying more than ten times before, Xia Duo decisively gave up. Besides the mithril consumption that he could not accept, the theoretical endlessness was also an important reason.

Theoretically, there does exist an upper limit of purity that can be extracted, but theoretically, it can never be reached, similar to the limit problem of the summation 【1/2+1/3+1/4+……】.

The more extractions, the closer to the limit, but can a normal human being extract infinitely?

Even if they could, with such a spellcasting tool-person with infinite time and infinite energy, when the sample quantity is reduced to a certain level, it is possible for it to dissipate entirely in the critical state.

This is the gap between theory and reality.

……

As for this time, Xia Duo only planned to refine these mithril pieces to first-grade.

On one hand, he did not want these mithril pieces, which already had a relatively high purity, to suffer too much loss.

On the other hand, this mithril was for a magic item customized by someone else; as long as it met the basic requirements, the other party would not pay extra for higher purity, so why should he work hard for no reward!

Soon, the first extraction ended, the elemental glow filling the laboratory dissipated abruptly, and it took Xia Duo quite a while for his eyes to recover from the contrast with the darkness.

He first checked the target mithril ingot; except for some irregularly distributed tiny pits on the surface, the overall shape had not changed much.

Immediately after, he cast a spell to measure the weight of the mithril ingot again. Counting the amount used for testing purity earlier, if the Arcane Union had not shorted him, then this extraction of his had consumed at least 100 grams of mithril.

100 grams is negligible compared to 10 pounds, but this is not something that can be finished in one or two extractions.

"Sigh—"

Xia Duo let out a long sigh and pulled himself together to begin the next round of spellcasting.

……

A total of ten rounds of extraction!

Xia Duo had some experience with this; from standard mithril to third-grade mithril, only two rounds of extraction were needed, but from third-grade mithril to first-grade mithril, at least ten rounds were required!

For ten 9th-circle spell casts, Xia Duo had to replenish his arcane fire with arcane energy ten times midway; his current arcane energy limit was only enough to cast one 9th-circle spell.

To want more, he naturally needed to replenish with arcane crystals, and this was the significance of arcanists accumulating arcane crystals daily.

It was also fortunate that he was using his own arcane fire to cast, which made his mental consumption much less. When he performed element extraction at the Tower of Time, to save arcane energy, he always used the external Magic Net to cast, which was much more difficult than this.

And after ten rounds of extraction, the originally very regular and complete cube in front of Xia Duo had become riddled with holes.

This time, Xia Duo did not measure its weight; he just weighed it in his hand and roughly judged it to be over 3 pounds by Temple standards.

Although this did not meet the ideal value Xia Duo had hoped for, for the current Netheril, it was already an unadulterated bumper harvest!

Deacon Tom of the Arcane Union had said before that 5th-Level Members could purchase high-grade mithril at the welfare price of standard mithril, 10 pounds of third-grade or 1 pound of second-grade.

This also somewhat indicated that in the economic system of the Arcane Union, for every grade mithril improved, the price would skyrocket tenfold.

Xia Duo's extraction this time, turning 10 pounds of third-grade mithril into 3 pounds of first-grade mithril, increased the price by 30 times. If he sold these 3 pounds of first-grade mithril and then bought third-grade or even standard mithril to continue extracting.

Repeating this many times, he could completely use this to become the richest person in Netheril!

The wealth that can be seized by technological leadership is beyond imagination!

Of course, if he really did that, the butcher's knife might also fall down very quickly!

No one is willing to have the wealth they worked hard to accumulate quickly siphoned away by others in such a way; the water in first-grade mithril is too deep, and Xia Duo cannot grasp it for the time being.

He even suspected that the reason there were so few high-quality magic items on the market was perhaps because someone was using such a method to lure out clues about first-grade mithril.

Excluding the few "legal" sources, it must be that someone has mastered the refining technology for first-grade mithril.

Of course, Xia Duo does not need to worry for now; he has a Mythallar ruins in his Territory, which is a fact almost everyone knows.

In any ancient Elf ruin, it is possible to find quite a bit of first-grade mithril; as for the specific quantity, only the discoverer knows.

But if he were to ship it out in large quantities, that would be bad; it would be almost a straightforward and unmistakable announcement to others that "I have the goods," and how could the others tolerate that!