COMPLETE FOCUS TEST: WOVEN LAYER POTION

Mortal tier recipe. No cultivation requirements

However, this potion will require you to use complete focus or something with a similar effect. Those at natural gathering stage will have natural senses which already meet this potion’s requirements, which kind of undermines this test. Oh well…

Originally a conception tier recipe, the high precision required made it impossible for mortals to complete. With the rise of techniques to increase precision the ranking dropped. Weaved layer potions were invented in hopes that humans could mimic the webs of spiders to some degree. That obviously failed, but one of the main ‘failures’ produced a relatively interesting effect. The creators of such a thing marketed it quite successfully in general.

INGREDIENTS AND RECIPE

*       Any elemental silk thread, 50 metres – non magical animal part

*       Low-tier enchanted water, 30 ml – natural gathering stage fluid

*       Temporary manipulation gel, 15 ml – non magical fluid

*       Protein core, 15 grams – natural gathering stage mineral

*       Your blood, 5 ml – non magical (Depending on the reader) fluid

Store your blood safely, as to not let anyone get their hands on it.

With so many types of silk producing larvae, there are also a host of elemental silks available. It’s in a mortal’s best interest to use non magical variants since the natural gathering stage ones have strong remnant effects that could hurt them. For example, a fire element larva’s silk may burn you on touch. The effect would obviously be better at a higher stage, but let’s just keep this somewhat simple for now.

Enchanted water is regular freshwater with lots of Qi infused into it. Even if you have a cultivation it’s in your best interest to buy it. Your entire reserve of Qi for a few ml is not a worthwhile trade.

Now the fun stuff. Temporary manipulation gel does two things on consumption. First it allows free manipulation of your body, but mainly only in terms of shifting things around. This stuff is most notably used in mortal tier beauty products which morph this face into a more appealing form. It’s other major use is temporary body modifications, which is the part we care about.

Protein cores are simply protein chains which have been refined into a magical crystal. The exact process is quite technical, but you can just imagine it as a very high pressure compression. These are extremely flexible products that help make most body manipulation potions possible at lower tiers. The cores are manufactured as flat disks, an industry standard to make the following procedure easier

Drop your protein core in a plate with your blood. Make sure that the thin disk is completely submerged, and then leave it for 3 hours. You can begin on the precise step while doing that.

Begin by cutting the thread into segments of length 10 cm. The margin for error on this step is 1 mm, and messing up means buying more thread. This step can be eased by using a mechanical process to cut at every length, but the availability of such a thing depends on too many things. Group the cut up threads into sets of 100, giving you five total sets.

Each group of 100 is further divided into two sets of fifty, which you will use to create a lattice of threads. It’s imperative that each thread is weaved in and out of every perpendicular one, but more importantly that the spacing between two threads is no more than 0.1 mm.

Some people without Qi claim that a pair of tweezers can massively change the difficulty of this task, and I firmly agree. Mortal hands are rather poor tools, and even cultivators will avoid using them when possible. They’re excellent for handling large objects but rather bad at anything super precise.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

This sort of weaving will produce a sort of loose fabric, which is hardly purchasable due to such poor conditions. However, in our case the significantly larger gaps between the fibres is a necessity.

What’s that? You could just have a machine do this step for you with higher accuracy?

Then there’s really no point in doing this recipe. You’re here to improve your skills, and machines are only so accurate. At some point you will have to rely on yourself, so start from here. I mean, what sort of diligent student cheats on a test?

Don’t worry about tying the ends up and drop the completed weave into the enchanted water. The water must soak through into every fibre, easily flowing through the fine holes, for about 5 minutes. The hardest part is done now.

Pour the manipulation gel onto a flat plate and drop the wet weaves on top, doing so one at a time. Each weave must be rotated when compared to the one directly below. For obvious reasons, try to avoid rotating it by 45 or 90 degrees…

The five layers of weaved silk will slowly sink into the gel, and now you wait for the protein core to fully absorb your blood. Depending on how efficient you were at weaving cloth you may still have a long wait. Those rubbish at it may find their core already prepared.

Place the completed protein core on top of the manipulation gel, pushing lightly to force the disk into the substance. The moment your disk hits the weaved silk you must stop and pour the remaining enchanted water all over the gel. It’s quite important that the hole caused by your finger is yet to close up as direct contact with enchanted water is one of the cheapest ways to activate a protein core, and no direct contact means no effect.

At the same time, the water will be consumed to liquify the gel along with everything contained within. This means the silk weave and core will lose their integrity relatively quickly and join the transparent fluid as slight wisps of colour.

The threads colour will leave something, while the protein core will take on whatever colour your blood is. Since most readers are human I presume red blood.

The fully dissolved product can be stirred lightly to ensure complete mixing and finally bottled for consumption. There’s nothing dangerous about this recipe, but it does have an exceptional first time failure rate because people forget a couple weaves here and there. This is why a focusing technique is practically required to do this.

Of course, some show-offs like to do it without, but realistically why bother?

USAGE

This potion may only be consumed by the person whose blood the protein core absorbed. Anyone else using this potion will encounter frightening side effects which will more than likely end in a gruesome, cancerous death.

Consumption is easily completed by drinking said potion. Just down it in one go and the effects will begin after half a minute. The effective time of it will depend on the Qi naturally contained within your silk, as well as the power expended by that specific element. However, even the most expensive shadow effects will last an hour with this potion.

Upon drinking your sweat glands will be morphed to produce a secretion which you cannot control. Your body will continuously expel it to form a thin layer of this mucous membrane over your body, similar to a skin-tight bodysuit. You will not experience any loss in mobility or breathability in this state.

This membrane over your body holds next to no defensive properties, and even the simplest knife will slash right through it. Instead it holds an intense elemental effect depending on what sort of thread you used, and sometimes the silk’s level of Qi. A few examples are:

Fire element silk – forms a heat resistant barrier around your skin, however you can still be lit aflame. If a natural gathering stage silk is used then the barrier is instead resistant to all non-magical flames below 3000 C.

Water element silk – An aquatic membrane over your skin allows you to move in water unimpeded (I.E. Water resistance no longer affects you), and your body can passively draw out oxygen from the water similar to gills. Relatively low pressure limit before breaking, but a natural gathering stage silk allows you to go down ~500 metres.

Light element silk – The membrane can absorb light passively with no practical limit except the two hour potion limit. All absorbed light can then be released as pleased, whether used as a light source or for a single devastating beam attack is up to the user’s choice. Natural gathering stage silk improves this potion’s duration to eight hours.

Listing out each element is a pain. If you care for each one then there are more than enough sources. Alternatively, be an experimental alchemist and just try them all out! Creativity only gives you a brighter path to walk on.