Primordial Expanse: I have the Strongest Talent!

There was a very obvious question that needed to be asked here though.

How the hell was Alex planning on creating a bomb from scratch, with nothing but the materials in the forest?

Well, it all comes back down to one thing.

Alex, specifically his mind.

The examiners may have stripped him of all his powers and strength for this assessment. But there was one thing they couldn't take away from him, his experiences and memories.

Everyone's mind is linked to their souls, so even if someone one day found themselves inside another person's body, their mind would remain unchanged and their memories intact.

The same goes for if an Awakened one day finds themselves inside the body of a normal person.

Sure, they would be depressed that they'd lost all their abilities and their talent, but they would still have the mind of an Awakened.

Specifically, the knowledge, thinking speed, reaction speed, experiences etc.

This was the case with Alex.

He would never have been able to do what he was doing in the test if his memory hadn't been enhanced multiple times through his upgrades as an Awakened.

And his memory was near photographic level at this point.

This leads us back to the present.

When Alex had been reminiscing about the times he had spent binge watching all those survival videos, he was reminded of one video in particular where the presenter spends hours going through a very detailed process of making a bomb step by step, just for the sake of it.

Alex, drawing on this experience, began to set out into the forest to explore if this wild idea was even a possibility in this assessment.

He went through the step by step process in his mind, just how the presenter did it in the video, and started off simple.

First, he had to gather some charcoal from somewhere. This is easy, all he has to do is find some burnt wood, and he had the perfect idea for that.

Putting a makeshift blindfold over his head, he ventured back into the temple very cautiously with all of his remaining four senses on high alert, and only ventured deep enough before he spotted some faint light coming through the thin fabric of his blind fold, coming from one of the torches lighting up the corridor.

He grabbed the nearest torch he could find and got the hell out of the temple before he had another run in with The Whisperer.

'Hehe…'

With the torch in hand, Alex headed out of the green, lush forest with a maniacal smile on his face and headed into the dead, desolate forest filled with the creepy looking trees.

And started a wildfire…

When this died down after a few hours, Alex would have all the charcoal he could ever need.

This was the easiest step out of the bunch though, as the harder stuff comes next.

These next few steps would determine if his plan was even feasible, as the other ingredients needed may not even be present in this place.

The next ingredient he needed to find was Potassium nitrate.

Potassium nitrate can be found in areas with high amounts of decaying organic matter, and considering there wasn't a single other living organism in this place, it would be quite hard to find such a thing.

But thankfully, it can also be found in places like under an old pile of leaves that had been left to rot.

There were plenty of places like this in the forest, especially past the greenery around the temple and in the sad, creepy and dead forest making up the rest of the land in this place.

The real question though, was whether Alex would be able to extract enough of it.

It would take quite some time and work, and it wasn't even guaranteed if he would find any.

But he had to try. So he prepared the necessary materials for it.

Potassium nitrate can sometimes be extracted from the soil under these decaying piles of leaves by soaking it in water and then evaporating the water to collect the crystals.

Alex prepared everything he needed, using his shirt as a container to carry the water, as it turned out the thing was quite waterproof so all he had to do was plug up all the neck and arm holes and barely any water soaked through.

He poured it on top of a decent looking plot of dirt, placed a ring of wood around the area and lit it on fire to quicken the evaporation process.

Since it would take a few hours before he would find out if he had any results from this, Alex moved on to the next step in the meantime, the hardest step of them all.

It wasn't hard because of any complicated process involved or anything, but because Alex doubted he could even find the damn ingredient!

The penultimate ingredient he needed was sulfur.

'Where the fuck am I going to find this…'

This was the trickiest part of the whole thing, as sulfur could only be found in places like volcanic environments, hot springs etc.

And looking around himself, Alex doubted he'd even find a place like this anywhere within 10,000 km of his location…

It was all just dense, dead and creepy forestry.

'Guess I have to go with the alternative then.'

The lucky thing was that Alex wasn't out of options just yet, as sulfur could be substituted.

Many people may not know this, but when making something like black powder for an explosive, sugar can actually replace sulfur as an alternative, and in Alex's situation, there was a much more likely chance of him being able to extract sugar from his surrounding environment than sulfur.

With this in mind, he returned back to the temple's surroundings, where the only fresh, green piece of nature he could find in this godforsaken test was located.

'Let's see here…'

With his poor eyesight thanks to only being a normal human again, it was hard for him to examine the nearby area for anything of use.

'Sugarcane!'

But after a while of searching, he spotted a promising sight.

***

(A/N: Please don't repeat Alex's actions from this chapter in real life.... I don't want the next Ted Kaczynski running around because of this chapter....)