The Primal Hunter

Curse energy was a great tool for combat. However, when it came to using it to craft while doing alchemy, things were very different.

The energy was actually pretty damn hard to store outside of your body, something Jake already knew and now had to find a way to work around. Jake had a talk with Casper back during Minaga’s City Floor, where the Risen shared that he primarily used wooden stakes due to innate concepts within the element. Wood was great at storing energy of different kinds, as trees in the multiverse tended to be very diverse. You could find trees capable of housing anything dependent on their environment. This included curse energy.

To be fair, most plants were very adaptable, but wood was one of the only things that retained most of these properties even after the tree itself had been cut down. It was also part of the reason why Yalsten had even fallen. If it hadn’t been a giant tree that granted that world its unique properties but had instead been some special kind of star or big rock, the chances of the curse taking hold would have been far lower. The fact it was a tree also helped it survive for as long as it did, even if the curse was eventually reduced to a single root.

Curse energy also didn’t mix well with anything; something had run into this many times with his own magic. Jake’s Sin Curse especially did not do well with any other form of energy. One could even say that Jake’s destructive arcane energy and his curse energy were exact opposites.

One wanted to simply destroy everything, while the other wanted to devour it. When these two met, the result would be mutual destruction until there was nothing left of either. However, the story was different with his stable arcane energy. As long as Jake kept the hungering curse energy and destructive arcane energy apart by just a small sealed barrier of stable arcane energy, they would ignore each other.

It was a bit odd that the curse energy didn’t even try to eat his stable arcane energy, but he just chalked that up to another special trait of his arcane affinity. Maybe the energy just wasn’t tasty or something, or maybe it was because the barrier registered as something physical and not energy. Honestly, who knows? Probably Villy, but Jake digressed.

Due to the difficulty of using it, he only actually had a single skill that actively used curse energy. Piercing Cursed Arcane Fang made use of Jake’s ability to seal in the curse energy with a coating of arcane mana that he would then stab into stuff. It was as simple as could be, really.

Either way, Jake’s problem with curse energy was that it inherently wanted to eat everything, so if he tried to mix it into a concoction, surprise, surprise, it would try to eat the concoction. This is what was called a bad thing in the alchemical world. Even if the curse energy was far from powerful enough to consume the rest of the concoction, all Jake would have accomplished was to destroy a part of what he was trying to make.

In all honesty, Jake had no way around this. The only place where Jake could mix poison and curse energy was during combat. Eternal Hunger didn’t passively give off the curse energy when not in use – it was simply too greedy to do something like that – which meant Jake could coat it with poison with no problem. The curse energy would then activate to attack foes he stabbed or cut, ignoring the poison it was with to feast on something far tastier.

Jake’s idea for a unique poison came from a simple question: what if Eternal Hunger didn’t ignore the poison? More specifically, what if he wanted the curse energy to eat it? What if he made a type of poison specifically made to be eaten by his curse energy to empower it?

Mind you, methods to empower curses weren’t new, far from it. There were many catalysts or liquids Jake could make to empower curse energy; Jake had even been offered a skill to create cursed items that he could then later use to empower his curse energy.

But this wasn’t what Jake was thinking about. No, he wanted it still to be a poison. To accomplish this, Jake looked into another branch of alchemy that he didn’t study much but was considered a side-branch of ethtoxins – soul poison. Some poisons existed out there that didn’t deal any damage or even registered as harmful at any point, some of which even made the person you infected more powerful… but at the cost of grave consequences once the poison ran out.

that made them more bold, reckless, and overconfident. The effects wouldn’t be overly powerful, and the poison was considered very hard to make, but he had found it intriguing, even if something was a bit

idiots. Not just idiots when talking about intelligence, but beings that didn’t even have any ”instinctive wisdom” either. Even elementals who were just beings of pure mana would notice something was

it and rely on their Willpower to get rid of any mental manipulation in the meantime. This made the poison hard to craft and hard to use,

was more a branch that some alchemists recommended looking into to make better flasks using some of the concepts to also benefit from some Malefic Viper

gave Jake an idea. What if he made a poison that effectively boosted the curse energy? Curse energy was odd in that it kind of ”lived,” if that made sense, so Jake was pretty confident he could affect it. He also didn’t care about any of the subtlety or the potential consequences of using too much of a steroid. The curse energy just had to go wild and eat whatever it struck anyway, and if

huge problem with crafting this kind of poison. It included a lot of ingredients classified as psychedelics – which could also be used to make

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at least rare rarity, Mindcap of epic rarity, Rainbow-Spotted Satyr Mushroom of rare rarity, Illusiary Puffball of rare rarity, and finally a bag of mosscap and moss mix. Rare-rarity, please,” Jake asked the Merit

ingredient was mushrooms. Even the goddamn moss was mixed with small mushrooms that grew on and inside of it. To make matters even

Jake before the system would have called magic mushrooms. They didn’t really affect Jake much in their raw form due to his Palate, but some of their effects did leak through as they didn’t register as necessarily being detrimental. Jake wondered why the hell an effect that made everything take on a rainbow sheen or made him feel like his feet were twice as big as before didn’t register as detrimental, but who the hell was he to question the Legacy skill

Jake, so of course he

there is any particular reason why psychedelic mushrooms don’t register as purely poisonous to Palate of the Malefic Viper? Oh, wait, is it related to how alcohol also has some effect despite clearly being a toxin? Could it possibly be that the Malefic One, in his infinite wisdom, purposefully wanted to still leave himself an opening to get both drunk and high? No, that

was naturally purely coincidental he spoke to himself while in the only area the livestream was live, and he was pretty sure the Malefic Viper was

would add a lot to the ”journey” part of the craft, and due to

the dystopian megacity about a month prior, and by

slowly feed the young man’s curse of hatred. Based on his

progress further, Jake had also considered giving him a Blessing but ultimately decided not to. First of all, Temlat didn’t really exist. He was effectively just a copy of someone who died trillions of years ago, so Jake wasn’t sure he even could bless him. Secondly, even if Jake could, he wasn’t sure he wanted to, as it risked exposing Jake could bless someone without the Viper’s approval. There was also that it was a bit of a dickmove to do it without the Viper saying it was

The young man had instead improved many of his skills, and based on how fast the potency of his curse energy grew, Jake didn’t doubt he

Jake expected. The one he had was pretty much a double-agent kind of deal and gave him a bunch of skills to try and deceive people while keeping himself hidden. The profession was also related to curses, so that was a win for sure. Plus, there were a few skills in there he worked on turning more

marbles, but it was a start. As for how he would use his curse energy, Jake wouldn’t dictate. He was very much a hands-off teacher and just believed in creating the best environment for Temlat to figure shit out himself while helping him improve his fundamental power. Ah, but he did do some

Temlat asked as he brought a book related to rituals that could utilize curse energy. ”The

he recognized the ”issue” Temlat spoke of. ”It’s because the connection will be established by the liquid you need to pour into the formation indents here, here and here. Blood is recommended, but as you

I use someone else’s