[Beastborne: Tower of Blight] Chapter 23

Once Hamrin had a plan and a bag of beans to work with, he left with a signed letter from Hal telling the builders that anything Hamrin wanted for the new farm he was to get without delay, no matter the weather conditions.

Any commissions he needed were to be given top priority over everything but the safety of Brightsong, and the care of those who were injured or sick.

With that taken care of, Hal turned back to his own crafting. Most importantly, his Osseochemist Perk that was still awaiting him.

[Osseochemist Perks: 1]

Essence Properties 0/1

Unveil the unique essence properties of a given essence type and family, allowing you to extract the essences and enhance them further to distill their power for future crafts. More essence properties can be unveiled as your Monster Core gains additional Ranks, and your attunement to each essence increases accordingly.

High Octane 0/1

Consume more raw materials in order to increase production and speed of crafting. The more raw materials consumed, the faster you can craft, up to a limit based upon your current Osseochemist Level and the Rank of your Monster Core.

Alloyed Essence 0/1

Combine various essences into a singular alloyed version based on the amount of each essence applied to the process. If you also have Essence Properties unlocked, you can more finely tune the process to extract the properties of each essence and store it as its own Alloyed Essence.

Hal stared hungrily at the three options. Each was immensely useful, with the least being High Octane. Not that it was a bad Perk by any means. Consuming more materials to make his crafting speed pick up was a decent compromise when he was short on time.

However, what truly shone were the other two Perks. Essence Properties and Alloyed Essence both allowed him to get a better handle on his essences and the effects they would provide.

Clearly Alloyed Essence was the superior Perk there, but if he had Essence Properties, it would perform even better. Getting the ability to blend essences together into something that he could store and repeat later was the holy grail of crafting in his mind.

Up until this point, he had to redo the effect every single time and there was no way he would be able to replicate it perfectly. There were simply too many variables. Between the different quality in the bones, their essences, and his own MP, it was simply impossible.

With Alloyed Essence, Hal could create a combination of shadow and golem, then store that for later so he could repeat the effect or tweak it at his leisure.

And to do that, Hal would need Essence Properties first. While it didn’t seem that useful, he wasn’t able to see Essence Properties yet. He knew what they were to an extent. Like how golem bone was sturdy and had good mana conductivity, while mimic essence was pliable with a similar conductivity.

Or how eldritch bones were heavy and sturdy.

However, none of those things were Shard-given properties like the Perk suggested.

Hal selected Essence Properties and immediately got to work.

Tapping Vorax on the lid, he held out a hand and summoned out the various bones he had acquired from the monsters within the Tower.

Blighted bones were oily and black, much like the creatures themselves. Their primary essence property, now that Hal could read it, was Contagion.

Essence Property: Contagion (Blighted)

The Blighted’s capacity for spreading disease and malady is without equal. Not only does the Contagion property allow for exceptional ease in applying afflictions, but it can also spread afflictions from target to target.

Hal’s eyes popped at the description. Not only did Essence Properties give him a true description, it imparted more information than the words suggested.

He could see possibilities with Contagion that he would have passed over before. If it was just the description and the ability to extract the Contagion property from blighted monster parts, Hal would have been jumping over the moon with delight.

The Perk, Essence Properties, was so much more. He knew how the property functioned without ever having to touch it or spend many days and weeks fruitlessly working out the kinks.

He was sure there were uncountable nuances he was missing, but more than any other crafting trait or ability he received, Essence Properties seemed to be the most effective time saver.

Rather than spending all that time and resources experimenting to get the properties dialed in, Hal simply knew them by examining a piece of monster bone with that essence.

It was too bad he didn’t have many other monster parts. He made a mental note to look for more once the Tower was dealt with. Simply having a slew of essence properties to pull from would make his crafting easier and better in one fell swoop.

Hal focused back on the oily bone in front of him.

The important part wasn’t that it was able to spread nasty afflictions. That was a given considering the monster type. What was truly important was that the newly discovered essence property, Contagion, had another, far more useful property.

Perhaps with only Bonecrafting, he would have chalked it up to a simple poison enhancing property. But with the knowledge of both Aetherochemy and his new Osseochemist Class, Hal knew better.

Contagion said it could spread maladies easily, but it didn’t say it had to. That was the key takeaway.

What it did, better than any other essence property he had yet to find, was spread. That meant it was a carrier. Whether he chose to make that carrier spread disease, or healing, or buffs was up to him.

It wasn’t the same as the golem or mimic essence property, Conductive, which provided varying degrees of high mana conductivity.

This was a way Hal could spread the properties of other bones or magic without spoiling them. If he was able to make a healing amulet, Contagion would allow him to spread that healing throughout the wearer’s body more easily.

Osseochemy was a wild new world just at his fingertips. A world he didn’t quite understand, but was dying to figure out. If not for the Tower, Hal would have likely spent every day and night closeted up trying out new Osseochemist recipes and concoctions until he came up with something that would make even his [Founder’s Folly] seem like a Nerf toy.

Despite that Hal had some extra company watching him craft, Hermes didn’t distract him. The oppa studied his work closely, learning a considerable amount about Osseochemy and this new Worldshard.

Though Hermes seemed to be a petty thief at first, he began to reveal his intelligence through his thoughtful behavior.

The oppa asked a few pointed questions, which prompted Hal to talk aloud as he worked. Illuminating Hermes, while at the same time giving voice to some of his thoughts. As he spoke, Hal found it easier to work and figure out what bones he would need.

You gain the effect of Crafting Apprenticeship (Soul Aeder).

+10% Crafting Experience points gained.

+1 Support Crafting Skill Level gained.

+10% Spirit.

Hal surmised that the buff likely lasted while he was technically teaching Hermes, which included the temporary crafting support Level. Even though the additional crafting experience points were an incredible boon, he was most interested in the 10% higher Spirit the effect granted him.

He wasn’t sure whether it came from the fact that Osseochemy used Spirit, or if it had to do with Hermes himself.

Without getting a higher Rank on his Monster Core, Hal was pretty much at the limit to how much Spirit he could hold. A few of the blighted monsters dropped [Lesser Monster Cores], which he could consume with Core Tap, allowing him to restore some of his Spirit.

However, a higher capacity was always more than welcome.

Even though Osseochemist allowed him to split up the crafting stages, each stage still needed to be done in one go. That meant Hal needed to do the refinement or imbuement stages with whatever Spirit and mana he had on hand.

It was a far cry better than his Bonecrafting days, when all he had was the full amount of MP he had at the very beginning of the whole process. He used to have to do every stage of crafting, from creation to finalization, without stopping.

If he stopped, the crafting process was as good as dead.

Now, he could stop at every stage and take a breather, restore his MP and Spirit, and then get back to the task. It dramatically improved every aspect of his crafting, including his sanity.

Now that he could break down monster parts into essence, he could even spare his Spirit and MP by consuming the essence of a monster part to create a bone blank instead of his own energy.

Not only did this lead to a stronger base product that retained more of its positive traits, it meant that Hal could iterate on designs far quicker than ever before.

The downside was it required a lot of monster parts, which meant farming for specific creatures. The adventurers under Mira’s guidance had done the best they could, but many of the essences Hal needed were either incredibly rare (like aberration or shadow) or too dangerous (like eldritch) for anybody but himself to gather.

And with everything that had been going on, Hal never seemed to have the time to go out on a shopping run.

The blighted bones were the best he had, and that was largely because Vorax was able to gather them up by the dozen inside the Tower.

“Why don’t you use some of your abby essence to create a core of rejuvenation, then spread it out with that icky stuff?” Hermes asked, a paw to his muzzle.

Once Hal translated what he meant, he realized that he could do that. He still had some old monster parts from before, and after a bit of searching through Vorax’s many stomachs where Hal kept most of his prized possessions, he came out with a gnarled and twisted bone.

“Been chewing on this, have you?” Hal asked the mimic.

Vorax had the good graces to look ashamed. He whimpered a little and scuttled about, doing his best not to look at Hal directly.

“Oh, it’s fine,” Hal told him, patting his lid affectionately. “Just try not to destroy things I don’t have much of, okay? Aberration parts are a pain to get.”

All it took was a few solid minutes of examining and running a thread of his Spirit through the bone to break it down into essence motes, which he stored in an elder glass vial.

They pulsed a sickly purple-pink hue.

Aberration’s prime essence property was Sturdy as the Grave.

Essence Property: Sturdy as the Grave (Aberration).

Death holds no sway over the aberrant undead. Their bodies are renowned the world over for their durability and capacity to withstand severe punishment without deterioration.

Nothing about that property stated it could heal, but Hal knew well enough that one of the primary effects of aberrations was their ability to rejuvenate. Was he missing something?

Hal turned to Hermes and held the vial of its essence out to him. “I don’t see any ability to rejuvenate, do you?”

The oppa sniffed, made a face and was racked with a hacking cough for a moment before he calmed down and rubbed at his muzzle. “Smells bad, mate.”

Hal looked at the oppa. “Where did you pick up that word anyway?”

“What do you mean, mate?”

“...You just keep saying mate, but your accent is… well, it’s normal.” Hal was reminded of his friends as a young boy all watching Crocodile Dundee at some sleepover or another from a collection of old 80s movies. Afterward, everybody on the block was saying “G’day mate!” and “That’s not a knoife, this is a knoife!” but even as kids, they tried to emulate the accent and inflection.

Hermes just… said the words without the accent. It was like somebody saying “Hola” instead of “Ola”. It was odd, yet endearing.

The little oppa continued to stare at him, unsure of what he meant.

Finally, Hal let him off the hook and patted his head gently. “It’s nothing, Hermes.”