Arthur stood on his front porch and watched Kazi Alukai's retreating back. The man had stayed for an additional five minutes after handing him Earth's Blessing before the planet apparently became too impatient with him dallying for so long. Turned out Primes were just as overworked as anyone else, or at least Kazi was with his unofficial status as leader of the Primes.

  Arthur looked down at the green liquid in his hands. Earth's Blessing was a perfect catalyst, much like his blood, only it existed in a realm above at Legendary. The catalyst would be excellent for his upcoming plans, so perfect in fact that Arthur wondered if Mother Earth was also curious about just how broken he could make his Soul Splinter. He'd made plans, yes, but after securing a promised delivery of phoenix blood, his amassed credits and this new catalyst, Arthur was worried that things may have just gotten a little out of hand.

  He wondered how he’d top this with his next Soul Splinter or if it was even possible. Arthur placed Earth's Blessing in his storage ring and gulped down what remained of his tea. Even after half an hour, the liquid remained at the same perfect temperature. When you paid 10,000 credits for a single cup, magically retaining heat was the least you could ask for. With the beverage momentarily clearing his head, Arthur considered his options.

  Just as Kazi had said, Earth was taking a significant risk by giving him his reward before he actually did something. Nothing was stopping Arthur from pocketing his reward and completely ignoring the planet’s request. All he’d suffer was some bad rep with Kazi Alukai and no chance of future world quests coming his way. On second thought, those consequences sound pretty damn bad.

  Fortunately, Arthur had already decided it was in his best interests to deal with the Fell humans as soon as possible. Now that he knew of their existence and the experiments they were running with his blood, Arthur didn’t need any extra incentives to kill the mad scientists. With how unpredictable unstructured magic was, leaving the Fell humans be was like keeping a ticking bomb in his house. It was only a matter of time before things blew and considering his blood would be the source of this particular explosion, he’d be sure to feel its effect via unexplained magic fuckery even if he avoided the place like the plague.

  Blood was the primary ingredient for Sympathetic magic and curses. Mixing it with the unstable elements of unstructured magic would cause him no end of trouble and he didn’t need to be a seer to see it coming. Arthur had never been one for the heroics but the line had to be drawn somewhere and he'd just found out that harming innocent children crossed his.

  That didn’t mean he’d drop everything and rush to help straight away though. The chances of the children still being alive were slim to none and he'd only be hurting himself by rushing. With his safe house on a seventy-two-hour timer, this was the last opportunity he’d get to perform ritual magic in peace for the next forty days. Having a deadly Soul Splinter on his side would increase the odds of him surviving the Origin Hunt significantly.

  Iris had told him the phoenix blood was set to arrive sometime today. Everything else he needed could be bought from the System store. The ritual asked for one hundred tier 3 ether stones. Each of them contained approximately 50,000 ether and was priced at 10,000 credits each. With the ingredients Arthur was using, however, he wanted a little more power.

  Tier 4 ether stones were divided into grades, poor, average, great and superior, containing 500,000, 1,000,000, 3,000,000 and 10,000,000 ether respectively. Anything but the lowest grade was completely out of his budget, nor did he think his ritual magic would work with so much ether. Tier 4 ether stones— at least the higher grade ones— were used to fuel entire cities and planetary arrays, not ritual magic that originated from a legendary class, no matter how special Arthur Ward might be. There came a point where too much energy became a detriment and not a benefit.

  In the end, Arthur managed to settle on a deal with a private seller, ninety tier 3 ether stones and ten tier 4 of poor quality; all for 1.75 million credits. The private seller was happy that he’d managed to offload so much product and Arthur was content with the 250,000 credits he’d managed to save. That left him with a little over 5 million credits to spend on the most important ingredient, the item that would form Wovan's new body.

  Knowing what he now did about unique stats like Draconic Vitality, Arthur had spent hours agonising over what he should purchase. His plan was to make the deadly magical predator as durable as possible. He also factored in the fact that 1% of all of Wovan's stats would be added to his own in lieu of the 3% of Draconic Vitality that would be taken from him to create the Soul Splinter. Whatever he chose for Wovan needed to be something he’d benefit from too.

  He'd narrowed his selection down to three items, two of which were available for immediate purchase and one on an auction that was ending in two hours. A fragment of a World Turtle's shell, a single scale from a Depthless Serpent, and finally, the finger bone from an Elder Titan.

  All three items were graded as epic-ranked materials commonly used to make Legendary armour, though Titan's bones were sometimes capable of producing Mythical gear in the right blacksmith's hands. It was also the most expensive item of the three, on auction with a predicted sale price of four million credits, which meant he should be able to afford it so long as his luck held.

  Arthur read through the three monster's descriptions. World Turtle's were incredibly powerful, though they didn't rank very high on the threat scale because they were herbivores that kept mostly to themselves. Depthless Serpents were a species of sea snakes found on giant water worlds, where the pressure at the bottom of the ocean reached millions of pounds. Their bodies had evolved to handle that kind of force, their scales in particular known to be nigh-invulnerable to blunt force trauma. Had the creatures existed on land, there was a possibility they'd be given an apocalypse distinction, but like the World Turtle, the Depthless Serpent rarely interacted with sapient life.

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  Finally, there was the Elder Titan, one of the few monster races Arthur had heard of where every member was sapient. The name Titan was practically synonymous with durability, and the elders of the race were known to bathe on the surface of stars. Arthur had no idea how the physics there worked, only that the phenomenon had been observed enough to become a well-known piece of trivia. It had taken a lot of searching— he'd looked through a dozen books on monster physiology before he'd found what he was searching for in a booklet called Multiverse of Marvels; Most Durable Monsters And Where To Find Them.

  The title was a little on the nose, but the information it contained was exactly what he was looking for. From there, it was easy to create a comparison key measured via baseline human stats to see which monster suited Arthur's purpose best.

  ~~~

  ~~~

  Every stat had its own unique properties, the World Turtle would make Wovan's already deadly magic more potent and the Depthless Serpent would grant the spider a healing factor almost as good as his own when he was using his skills to enhance it. It would also give her the ability to duke it out physically whenever the occasion called for it. Wovan is female, right? Bigger spiders always are, and she was fucking huge. Whatever the case, Depthless Serpent's Durability was the perfect choice, a single stat that covered the duties of three. He would have selected it in an instant, only there was one big problem.

  Titan's Constitution existed.

  An attribute normally reserved for Titans of incredible size, he wondered how it would look when a hivemind consisting of thousands of creatures possessed it. The thought was terrifying, a hivemind where every tiny creature within it possessed a Titan's insane survivability. Wovan, when Arthur had faced her, had been a massive creature almost a hundred metres across, easily weighing north of 500,000 kilograms. Translating that weight to kinetic power— one that didn't rely on any energy source— would comfortably place Wovan into the realms of terror normally reserved for apocalypse beasts.

  No, she'll be beyond that, won't she, Arthur realised morbidly. Was there a tier beyond apocalypse beasts? Arthur didn't know, but he'd be finding out soon. He'd also be gaining the stat, a tiny fraction of it, yes, but it would still grant him the powerful traits. From his most recent weighing, Arthur came in at 162 kilograms, nothing too crazy but it would still grant him an entirely new powerset to work with.

  The most important thing, however, was the 25% reduction from all damage sources. Arthur had been chasing the peaks of survivability ever since the System first arrived; he was about as unkillable as you could get at his level. Gaining a single point of Titan's Constitution would take that to a new extreme. Arthur made his decision.

  That Titan bone would be his, no matter how much he had to pay. The first thing Arthur did was withdraw his earnings from his seller account, paying the 250 credit fee to do so. He'd be making this next purchase as an anonymous buyer, not under the name of his store to prevent anyone unhappy with his elixirs from ruining things for him. With the 293,000 credits he had in his personal account, Arthur now had 5,043,000 credits to bid with.

  It has to be enough. Please, please, please. God, if you're listening, I'll donate a hundred thousand credits to charity if I win.

  Crossing his fingers, Arthur placed every credit he owned on the bid.

  Arthur didn't do anything. He just stared at the screen and waited. The bone's price didn't change at all for an hour and a half, remaining at its initial 1.25 million credit price. With twenty-two minutes left in the auction, though, someone finally placed a bid and the price immediately shot up to two and a half million credits.

  Arthur started to sweat. He'd never wanted to win an auction so much in his life and he was cursing himself for not pumping out more elixirs. If he didn't win today, he'd have to wait forever before an opportunity like this popped up again. At ten minutes, the pressure became too much for him and he closed his eyes, counting the seconds down. With his intelligence so high, he was as accurate as the most precise watches ever made on Earth.

  Finally, with thirty seconds left, Arthur opened his eyes. 3.4 million credits. Arthur breathed a sigh of relief. Still, he waited. Fifteen seconds. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. With four seconds left on the clock, Arthur finally let his bid through. He almost had a heart attack when nothing happened, the screen seemingly frozen, three seconds stretching into eternity before something finally changed.

  Arthur read through the message and started to laugh. It started off normal enough but quickly descended into a hysterical cackle as he slapped his kitchen table. The wood instantly disintegrated into a thousand splinters.

  Arthur had won.

  Etherious: Originator

  Etherious: The Locus of Power has gone live. As a self published author doing everything myself, my novels success lies entirely on my shoulders. As such, the first day of a books launch is by far the most important time that determines how well my book will do.

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