Chapter 151: Yeast Master Will

Seed of Inexorable Death

A Synthetic Sacrifice, it is the refined essence of the inescapable Sin Amalgam and three spirit butlers.

Adds Undeath, Dimensional, Lifesteal, and Inevitability Abilities to the aspirant’s class choices. Provides 2 Res, 1 Acu,  2 Foc/level. First of it’s kind.

Ooh, it’s such a good Nuker Sacrifice, Will thought, practically drooling. This one had S-tier 5 points of stat growth, and it moved the Seed of Undeath’s Strength boost over to Acuity, which was what affected most Nuker’s damage output.

And of course, Resistance to survive, and Focus to fuel Ability uses. And In Will’s experience, Dimensional Abilities were crazy good.

If he’d had this when…

No use dwelling on it. Besides, I’ve benefitted from high Kinesthetics in a lot of understated but vital ways.

Will stored the Sacrifice in his Dimensional Storage, not wanting anyone else to get their eyes on it.

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust them, exactly. They just couldn’t be forced to reveal his possession of a priceless Sacrifice if they didn’t know about it.

As Will was glancing back up, he saw his three butlers, waiting for further orders, and a thought occurred to him.

Could I bake the wand of the Undead Retainer with Sourdough?

Will understood that the Wand of the Undead Retainer was imprinted and lost, but it probably wasn’t the only one in existence. Maybe he could find a new one and apply the Seed of Inexorable Undeath to it and give the guys an upgrade.

Unless there was some way of getting the wand back out…

Normally a Sacrifice wouldn’t work well for baking with Sourdough, with all the…fleshy components, but the synthetic sacrifice was pretty much entirely stabilized miasma compressed into a sphere, which was probably why it’s stat growth was S-tier.

Since it’s just stabilized miasma, it could be a good substitute for Relic dust.

Will studied Billy-bob, Stevie and Noob.

Gods know they’ve worked hard enough to earn an upgrade.

“Make sure none of my team members gets vaporized by the defenses outside the building.” Hopefully they hadn’t managed to get themselves hurt in the eight-or-so minutes since he’d run into Sin Amalgam.

Two of them disappeared into the wall while Billy-bob waited for further instructions. As the butler with the most seniority, he seemed to function as the anchor.

“If I found a new Wand of the Undead Retainer, modified it and overwrote the one slotted in my Phantom Hand, would you still be you?” Will asked, studying the writing on the wall of the room, wondering how he could one-up two men who had stepped straight out of myth and legend.

“Unlikely,” Billy-bob said, shaking his head. “Our unique consciousness is preserved within the wand itself. It’s why we weren’t erased when we fell into the refiner. If it is overwritten, we are overwritten.”

Will briefly considered feeding them into the refiner over and over to make a ‘ghost butler’ seed, but immediately decided against it. He would likely need at least hundreds of them to make that happen, which would mean months of living in the poisonous atmosphere, feeding them in one at a time.

 Bad for his health, not time-effective…and a bit cruel.

I guess upgrading the wand is off the table.

“Master, I wish to point out that we don’t have an attachment to existence. We aren’t ‘alive’ as you might think of it, and are indifferent towards remaining so. Any weight you place on keeping us ‘alive’ come from you.”

If only there was a way to get it back out of the Phantom Hand…wait a second.

The Wraith Vessel didn’t allow me to manifest the Relics imprinted, but I know for a fact that the right upgrades can stack their effects on top of each other, Like with sourdough fixing relics in addition to consumeables, then modifying them.

Right now I can manifest things stored, but what if I could manifest Relics that were imprinted? Will frowned as the thought and its implications flickered through his mind.

It would take two to three very specific Sacrifices to make what he was thinking of happen, if it was even possible. There was no sense overthinking it right this second, because he wasn’t in a place where he could do the research he needed to do, and he didn’t have the upgrade slots either.

But if I could…

Will would be a Lord unlike any other.

I suppose they all have to be unlike any other. So I’d be like all of them.

What would my nickname be as a Lord that can manifest incredibly powerful Relics from thin air? The Lord of Bling?

Will stifled an un-lordlike snort at that thought, his attention turning back to the refiner.

“Get the rest of the Party here. We’ve only got the one night before we have to move on. Let’s see how many more of these Seeds we can make.” Will said.

“Right away.” Billy-bob bowed before vanishing into the floor.

Will frowned at the wall for a moment, looking for a nice open space to leave his own comments.

“And find some paint!” Will shouted.

“Right away!” a distant voice called back.

A few minutes later, Will was doing his part for whoever decided to come after him.

Fixed flow rate. Check masheen underneeth. May rekuire maintenence. Refill parts if you use them. ‘Take one’ my ass. Your just lazy.

-          William Oh

As a final parting gift, Will drew a dick pointing directly at Castavelle’s name.

Will vaguely recalled a legend about a hero by that name who was apparently the mightiest Nuker to ever exist, a highly educated noble scion who found a way to manipulate a consumable to permanently reinforce his body far beyond what it should’ve, making him grow stronger and stronger without any actual effort, and making him undefeated in both magic and might.

Sounded like a wuss.

Overnight, Travis was able to lure thousand of zombies into the death-trap, where they were annihilated by the vaporizers and fed into the refiner.

The next morning, they walked away with three more Seeds of Undeath, and of course, all the relics in the gutters of thousands of years of Climbers that had been killed by the traps.

“Stay here and make a few more of these,” Will commanded his butlers before they left.

Four was good, but Will was only going to take his fair share, so he would really only get two.

They set off into the sky on a ramp made of air. Will’s Set was still at its full effect as long as he wore every piece he had.

Shoes, pants, mask, off-hand, weapon, torso.

Will glanced at his empty finger.

I really should find a new ring. And probably should Sourdough the Amulet of the Homefield Advantage.

It didn’t even give any stats.

Will spent the next twenty minutes cataloguing the Relic haul they’d gotten from the gutters outside the refinery, with a focus on filling his empty Slots, namely his ring, and hopefully a one-handed Hand relic, like the falconry gloves or Loth’s bangle.

Most of the Relics were things that weren’t meant for his archetypes, the wrong Slot, or simply convenience items. He didn’t find any one-handed Hand slot Relics at all.

There were a few dozen rings in the gutters and the sewer beneath, helpfully retrieved by Will’s butlers, despite their complaints about being forced to sift through poop-filled sewers.

Will didn’t think they had a leg to stand on there, because the poop was eight thousand years old at this point. It wasn’t even poop anymore. Just dust.

A few of those Ring Relics were just as old and esoteric as the poop-dust they were sifted from.

Mk’en’tosh Interface ring.

A Synthetic Relic that connects the user to a Mk’en’tosh system. Also monitors physical fitness and can be used to control any integrated system in the user’s home, such as the Air Conditioning, and provides access to government-approved channels on the home entertainment system based on the user’s Caste.

Useless, Will thought, flicking the ring back into the pile. Maybe a collector somewhere would be interested, but not Will.

Hello, what’s this? Will thought, studying a ring seemingly made out of polished hardwood.

Ring of the Yeast-master

+2 Strength

+3 resistance

+1 Acuity

+15% potency of Brewing and baking Abilities.

Helps create ideal environmental conditions for brewing and baking Abilities to achieve the intended result, such as temperature, moisture, pressure, etc. Scales with resistance.

Hmm. Look at that.

Will briefly imagined a fungus-focused baker archetype that had taken their Build in a wildly different direction using the ring to help grow and control their fungal army…then he dismissed it. Nobody he knew was actually doing that.

Might be useful for Sourdough, though.

Do I still have some of those smoke bombs? Will wondered to himself, mentally going through his Dimensional Storage.

Will went through his stuff and found that he still had a couple of those explosive beads he’d bought so long ago.

Using a little tool that Loth called a ‘caliper’, and a bit of math, Will was able to confirm that yes, the ring of the Yeast-master did in fact boost the amount of material reserved by Sourdough, because the difference between the two beads was nearly nonexistent to the naked eye.

Every little bit counts. And maybe after an upgrade I could feed it to Phantom Hand. That would bring the boost closer to 50%.

Will slipped the ring on for now, as nothing else really caught his attention.

A ring that boosts rogue Archetype Abilities would be useful.

Sadly, there hadn’t been anything of that nature in the haul.

I should check when we hit the 5th Floor again with all this loot.

By the end of the day they were approaching Ghoul’s Stronghold, and it became glaringly obvious why the Stronghold and the Key Site in need of clearing were in the same direction.

A pillar of solid blue Miasma was being pumped straight up out of the key site, smack dab in the center of an ominous castle made of the blackened, melted remnants of Blessed steel and glass.

Ghoul lives on top of a Key Site.

A key site that the System says needs to be cleared.

That’s…deeply suspicious.

The idea that an immortal Lord like Ghoul would lose control of a Key site he’d literally built his Stronghold around was unthinkable.

More likely…There’s some weird fuckery going on here.

Will parked the caravan outside the massive drawbridge that served as the entrance to the sickly-looking castle and headed forward on foot, the rest of his Party in tow.

The drawbridge lowered on chains made of welded-together glass and Blessed steel, forced into the rough-hewn shape by forces that Will couldn’t quite place.

It gave him a feeling like bones trapped in amber.

Will tensed as a zombie shambled forward, emerging from the darkness of the gatehouse.

Maybe this place did get overrun?

His concern was misplaced, and his original suspicion turned out to be the correct one as the zombie shambled to the side and wordlessly gestured further into the castle, towards the pillar of miasmatic light stretching into the sky.

Will and his Party shared glances before they shrugged and continued on.

The castle was what Loth would call an ‘open concept’, as there didn’t seem to be a roof or walls on anything save the exterior wall itself, leaving what appeared to be dozens of workstations filled with paper, and smithies exposed to the elements.

In the center of it all, was the Key Site, a beam of pure blue light at the top of a carefully carved staircase climbing a cone of volcanic stone.

And in a chair at the center of the beam of Miasma was Ghoul, a pair of reading glasses hanging low on his nose as he browsed through a romance novel.

“Oh, guests?” Ghoul said, peering above the cover depicting a sweaty man with abs.

Purge the undead.

A powerful sapient undead has taken control of the Key Site with its minions in tow. Destroy it.

“William!” Ghoul said with a rotten-toothed grin, snapping the book closed and setting it on the arm of his char as he began descending the Key Site.

“Lovely to see you! Have you been practicing what I taught you?”