Chapter 1290: God Stage Refinement
In the previous timeline, this fellow went to craft the legendary Mana Sword which felled Eva in their final battle, all because he needed help with utilizing external energy for his paragon sword skill 359: overcharge. Players at Rank 4 and 5 right now were already transitioning from relying on system skills to starting to make their own techniques.
While their willpower was not yet strong enough to affect anything as their real bodies only gained slight feedback from the game - and that was only in terms of stats - they still had some boost from their state of being as Rank 5 Demigods, but just getting a bit of Mind Force was enough to make them equivalent to Supreme Rank Dragons?
What a frightening power system.
What made it even worse was that this was only just the beginning.
The second feature they found out from Mind Force was its boost to Control.
That's right, this new power system passively and actively assisted Control in becoming stronger, increasing its quality profoundly!
Passively, it was like adding a base multiplier boost to Control's effects. The multiplier was the same regardless of your Tier of Control, so even if your VoP was at tier 1 with a range of a few meters around your body, Mind Force passively boosted this by 5x!
Five times!!
Someone with just a smidgen of Mind Force and Control at Tier 1 could totally surpass someone with control at Tier 3!
The third feature of Mind Force was probably even more fearsome, which was its ability to enhance the Evil Trio's efficiency conversion speed of bloodline energy to bloodline branch!!
This one in particular had greatly shaken them, making Eva and Shuangtian red-eyed as they truly wished to snatch Draco's Mind Force crystal at this point. This ability would allow them to significantly cut down their waste of bloodline energy utility while increasing their training speed, allowing them to master the bloodline and condense a Seed of Law to become true Eternals!
However, all things were fair. During testing, Draco almost emptied his Mind Force crystal to increase his Eternal Control by what they estimated to be 0.001 points. The worst part was that they realized that spent Mind Force regenerated excruciatingly slowly and no amount of talent changed that.
In fact, what the Evil Trio didn't know was that if a common Mind Force user's regeneration was like the flow of a sink faucet, then Draco's was like releasing a large-scale dam!
The reason why it was balanced was because the quantity of Mind Force Draco had was also proportionally higher than the common Mind Force user. Your Mind Force regeneration rate was natural and very difficult to increase without using special treasures meant for the mind, none of which the Evil Trio knew of right now.
The final discovery was that Mind Force was more than a level great for Refinement. Draco had broken through to the second stage of Refinement as split by Norma, but nothing had changed because he was already at this level previously by using shortcuts.
This second stage was the God stage, equivalent to Norma when she reached the True God level with Refinement. If Refinement were to truly solidify into an Origin Law, then Draco would have become a True God at this point through evolution, the world ascending him upwards. Stay connected with мѵʟ
As before, Draco could make any item from Common to Legendary now, and he could replicate materials up to the Divine Rank. Previously, he had done this in great abundance for the various members of Umbra, which was how he crafted them all the sets they needed.
What Mind Force assisted with was greatly reducing energy expenditure and giving him a more intimate insight into how the energy transformed the items, which was like giving him a permanent exp boost for increasing Refinement's grade.
After all, now that he was in the God Stage, he still had to practice using Refinement to convert mental power into the liquid form. Well, that was the original way, but with Mind Force now here, he could skip the liquid condensation and directly imbue the refined mental power into the crystal, increasing its size, quantity, and the quality of Mind Force.
Draco, now on the path of Mind Force, could vaguely sense that if he converted a certain amount of mental power into Mind Force, he would experience some kind of breakthrough on the Mind Force path. Unfortunately, he could not tell how much Mind Force he would need for that, but he could tell how much he needed for Refinement.
Based on Norma's requirements, he should achieve 90% refinement efficiency in the God stage before entering the 3rd stage, the Semi-Origin stage. Of course, Draco aimed for a perfect breakthrough like with the mortal stage, so he was going for 100% efficiency.
Previously, just turning 10% of his vast gaseous mental power to liquid would have been enough to reach an overall conversion efficiency of 100% for all items below the Epic Rank and all materials below the Legendary Rank.
Now, Mind Force made his conversion efficiency obviously 100% for all such items while boosting his overall efficiency for Legendary items and Divine materials to 30%. He had just started in his new realm and he was already 1/3rd of the way through!
Mind Force… this new power system had to be thoroughly explored and taken seriously.
However, a dilemma had now occurred. While Draco was able to condense the Mind Force crystal thanks to Refinement, Eva and Shuangtian did not have a 'cultivation technique' so they could only refine their own already neglected mental power into liquid.
If you looked into their mental space, they too were akin to Draco at the start, with a huge gaseous cloud of silvery mist and a tiny puddle of drops in the middle from the occasional use of their mental powers which left some refined.
Refinement allowed Draco to turn 10% of this cloud to liquid in 30 days, but all the other methods the other two knew were likely to require years of dedicated practice to achieve the same!
This was their conundrum, but that wasn't Draco's problem!
After the tests were done, the two beauties glanced at him with puppy dog eyes, clearly asking him for help. Knowing Draco's ways, if he walked around for a small adventure, he might stumble upon an ancient civilization of Mind Force titans and discover the best method for them to practice.
However, Draco cruelly closed his eyes and looked away. His adventuring days were over!
After being ganged up on and beaten until his body cracked, he was now anti-adventuring! He would become a NEET, staying at home 24/7 with his family while practicing his other crafts! They could forget about tricking him into going out!
Eva and Shuangtian paled when they faced his firm rebuttal. Not knowing what to do. While they didn't mind going out for adventures themselves - as Eva often did so in the past with the other wives - the problem was that they simply did not have Draco's knack nor his luck.
Eva especially, after discovering Shinoka continent, seemed to have used up all her luck at once. Shuangtian never had any such luck to begin with, or the search for the continent that resembled Ancient China would not be left to her son to complete.
In the end, the two could only leave with troubled expressions, wondering how to tackle this issue. Meanwhile, Draco glanced at their backs and sighed with relief, as not only was it difficult for him to say no to them face to face, but he was also like an addict who had been rehabilitated, he didn't want to relapse!
In the end, he sat down in silence and focused on Refinement for a bit. After doing a day's work, he compared how much progress he had made in three fields: his conversion of the gaseous mental cloud into Mind Force, the amount of Mind Force growth he actually achieved, and how that Mind Force affected his refinement progress.
For the first, he had turned about 0.1% of the remaining 90% of the gaseous cloud into direct Mind Force, which was a direct 700% increase in his conversion speed compared to the Mortal stage! This was because to practice in the God stage, Draco needed to work on Legendary items or Divine materials only, which he did with the planet beneath him.
40% of it had been turned to iron, so he decided to continue up the iron development tree. Basic Iron was Common Rank, Black Iron was Uncommon Rank, Pure Iron was Rare Rank, High Iron was Epic Rank, Supreme Iron was Legendary Rank, and naturally, Divine Iron was of the Divine Rank.
This wasteland planet, which had been condemned to become an iron dump in the middle of space, only valuable to low-level civilizations but a scrap heap to high-level ones, was now promoted to being a supreme resource that even high civilizations would go to war for.
The second aspect was about how much Mind Force he actually gained, and by his estimate, it was a pitiful single unit. Mind Force was solid, but that referred to the crystal itself, as within was a tangible energy that was silvery-blue in color. Based on consumption for different things, Draco had managed to quantify it into units.
After all, unit measurement was incredibly important for various forms of utility of any power or ability, far better than using basic percentages. Seeing this growth speed, Draco knew that he had a long way to go if he wanted to advance in the path of Mind Force.
The third aspect was how this increased Mind Force affected his Refinement growth, and as Draco checked it, one unit of increased Mind Force brought him 0.2% of the way, meaning he was now at 30.2% of the way to 100% in the God stage.
So with this, to reach 100% in the God stage, he would need to acquire an extra 349 units of Mind Force. Of his remaining Mental Power, he would need to convert 34.9% of the gaseous cloud, which would take him exactly 349 days!
Whew!
That was the better part of an entire year of nonstop work, which was a huge demand in terms of time. Draco also had other things to do, so he decided to split his work time into 12 hours a day for Refinement and 12 hours for his other tasks, which was mainly his Tradeskills.
As Draco began converting the wasteland planet's remaining dirt to Divine Iron methodically, there was now a palpable whirlpool of Worldly Energy converging on him. While the energy in the inner universe was infinite thanks to the Eternal Tree, Draco had previously opted to use the Common Rank basic iron because it would make his energy consumption lower so that he could better feel the effects of the transformation.
Now that he was forced to go higher due to his new realm, the energy consumption to change basic dirt into a literally 100% authentic divine material that only had a low chance of spawning in the Divine Realm could be imagined. However, this was necessary because while the Mortal stage was about understanding the material structures and ensuring basic efficiency, the God stage was all about maximizing energy efficiency.
In other words, it was better for training purposes to make sure that the gap in objective quality between the items you were refining was low while in the Mortal stage but be as high as possible in the God stage, which was the exact opposite.
If you thought about it, it was quite strange. By this point, one could create any item they wanted, even legendary ones and even Divine materials on top. Why would you stress yourself to rise higher when you could use this power to live like a god?
What exactly was Norma aiming for?
Draco only idly pondered this before stopping his practice after 12 hours, advancing his progress by 0.1%, which was 30.3%.
It was time to focus on Tradeskills!