Chapter 88

Chapter 88

"Your laboratory is truly vast, and the environment is splendid." Eve rested her hand on the slender wooden railing, ascending the layered steps before ducking into the opening. The laboratory, nestled within the hollowed-out tree trunk, was impeccably clean and fresh.

Leaning her elbow against the wall while a machine cleaned the dust and dirt from her shoes, she surveyed the bright, spacious, all-wood laboratory and remarked, "With all those flowers and plants outside, securing such a large space on the Capital Star must have cost a fortune."

"Of course, just look at whose laboratory it is."

Gu Zhaoxi loved nothing more than having her taste in lifestyle affirmed. She never hesitated to spend money on things that enhanced her comfort, including the downtown bar, which she had personally funded and designed to her exact specifications.

Eve’s seemingly casual praise perfectly struck Gu Zhaoxi’s sweet spot. She immediately raised a finger, waving it proudly in front of Eve: "There aren’t many alchemists with better taste or who enjoy life more than me. Making money is all about making life better, understand? One must learn to treat oneself well."

They walked past rows of long tables laden with experimental tools and scrolls, eventually settling opposite each other at a low yellow-wood table by the window. Gu Zhaoxi clapped her hands, and two vines instantly extended from the nearby wall. One vine presented a tea set, while the other poured tea with a dexterity that rivaled a human servant.

Eve watched this magical scene in amazement and exclaimed, "Wow! Are these alive, or is this achieved through alchemy?"

"Alchemy combined with the Spiritual State," Gu Zhaoxi explained. "First, alchemy is used to awaken the ancient tree’s spiritual energy, allowing it to comprehend commands. Then, the Spiritual State assists in communication and issuing instructions. However, my Spiritual State is quite unique—it has a strong affinity for communicating with plants. Others wouldn’t be able to do this."

This piqued Eve’s professional curiosity. "Do trees really possess spiritual energy? And how is it enhanced through alchemy? I’ve never encountered such an Alchemical Formula before."

"This isn’t an ordinary tree. I acquired it from the Tree People’s territory. The plants in their homeland differ from those outside—you could say they possess thoughts and emotions, though their cognitive capacity is roughly on par with human pets."

A flicker of nostalgia crossed Gu Zhaoxi’s face, but she quickly masked it by taking a sip of tea and changed the subject. "The alchemy used here is my own creation. Every alchemist has their own specialized field, and mine is the study of the Spiritual State and spiritual energy."

"I thought Five-Star Alchemists were practically omnipotent," Eve said.

"Only gods are omnipotent. We merely claim to have no weaknesses. I chose to focus on spiritual research because I needed it urgently—after all, I was born with an innate spiritual disability."

"…"

Wait.

A Grand Alchemist with a congenital spiritual disability—Eve felt a jolt of recognition. She looked up at the green-haired woman sitting casually across from her and asked incredulously, "Are you the against-all-odds alchemist from the textbooks?"

"That’s me! You’ve actually heard of my story? Oh, that’s wonderful," Gu Zhaoxi said, pleased. "And this inspiring story was personally authorized by me to the Imperial Ministry of Education. They pay me a substantial annual copyright fee. I’ll always uphold the empire’s laws, especially intellectual property laws. Without that money, I wouldn’t be able to live such a comfortable life."

Eve: "...You’ve really shattered my perfect image of a Five-Star Alchemist."

Instead of diligently working to earn money by selling potions, this person had chosen the path of least resistance. It lacked the gravitas expected of a master.

But what Eve found more perplexing was: Could spiritual energy truly be enhanced through medication? The human spiritual world fully develops by the age of twenty, and it seemed unlikely Gu Zhaoxi had become a Five-Star Alchemist before then.

Yet, debating science with an alchemist seemed futile. If trees could be trained into magical butlers, surely there were ways to evolve spiritual energy even after twenty.

Eve recalled Cionanado’s notes on how High-Level Alchemists often had imperfections. She couldn’t help but wonder what Gu Zhaoxi’s specific flaw was.

Compared to Louis’s eye condition and Agnes’s non-human nature, Eve suspected Gu Zhaoxi’s imperfection was an innate disability. Rather than the half of her face she covered, a congenital spiritual disability seemed to fit the definition better.

But was such a disability curable?

If it were treatable, wouldn’t Louis’s eye condition be easier to solve? Why was he still blind?

Gu Zhaoxi had a habit of raising questions without providing answers. Eve had no response to this teasing nature, but she hadn’t forgotten why she’d come to see Gu Zhaoxi today.

Scanning the room, Eve didn’t see any container that might hold the Zerg Extract. She tapped her fingers on the table and said directly, "Alright, enough small talk. You know why I’m here today. Where’s the Zerg Extract? I’d like to see it first."

"You’re quite direct," Gu Zhaoxi said with a dissatisfied click of her tongue.

She stood up and walked over to a bookshelf, pulled down a specific book, and suddenly a rumbling mechanical sound echoed through the room. The heavy bookshelf, along with the wall, parted like the Red Sea, revealing a spiral staircase leading upward.

Standing at the entrance, she extended her right hand palm-up and said with a smile, "Come on, follow me up."

Eve didn’t move. She stared at the sophisticated setup for a long moment before asking suspiciously, "Do you need a favor from me…? Otherwise, why provide such high-end service?"

She’d felt things were overly formal since riding the capsule-elevator, and now even a hidden second floor was being revealed. Honestly, Eve didn’t think their relationship warranted this level of treatment.

She had assumed Gu Zhaoxi’s help would simply involve handing over the goods and providing a storage place!

"...Why would you think that?" Gu Zhaoxi looked at her as if she were foolish. "Zerg Extract is quite special. Keeping it on the first floor could contaminate my other precious materials, and I’m also worried students might accidentally touch it. It’s out of caution that I specifically stored it on the second floor."

Eve exclaimed, "The contamination is that strong!"

If it couldn’t even be touched carelessly, the Oliver Family was truly insane to use it for making poison.

As if reading her thoughts, Gu Zhaoxi led the way upstairs and said, "The Oliver Family has always been extreme. The more toxic something is, the more they believe it can be used to create powerful poison. As for whether it harms the maker... let’s just say many of their poison masters have died by their own creations."

"However, they’re just a bit crazy, not suicidal. So they only use low-level Zerg Extract to make poison," she finally stopped walking as they reached the second floor of the treehouse. On a table across from them sat the legendary Zerg Extract.

"Your friend is quite capable to have gotten you Intermediate Zerg Extract."

The layout of the second floor was similar to the first, but with fewer tables, chairs, and bookshelves, making it more of a storeroom. In the center of the room stood a half-person-high glass box, specially designed to block radiation and most contaminants. Behind the glass, a bottle of pale gray liquid stood quietly.

The container holding the gray liquid was made of natural transparent crystal, specially processed to be demagnetized, to maximize the preservation of the material’s activity.

The gray liquid appeared calm, but when Eve reached out with her spiritual energy, she could sense the familiar polluting power emanating from it.

—This was indeed Zerg Extract.

Not everything extracted from Zerg could be used to make Zerg Extract. Things like blood, flesh, or shells from ordinary Zerg, though useful materials, had limited contaminating power and weren’t suitable for extract production.

Extracts were typically made from the most contaminating and infectious parts of a Zerg. For Intermediate Zerg and below, extracts were usually made from their brain matter. For Advanced Zerg, it depended on their functional attributes—some had the highest contamination in their saliva, others in their blood.

For example, the two Advanced Zerg Eve had encountered in a field project, the rove beetle and the Death Worm: the former relied on its hidden wings for transformation, so its high-contamination area was the special live blood near the wing roots.

As for the latter, which ranked as an Advanced Zerg due to its size and physical attack power, it was among the less potent Advanced Zerg. Like lower-level Zerg, only its brain matter could be used for extracts, though the quality would far surpass that of Intermediate or lower Zerg.

This bottle of gray substance, which Gu Zhaoxi referred to as Intermediate Zerg Extract, was only slightly more active than the gray substance in Lorca’s system. This suggested that the toxin in Lorca’s system was likely made from Intermediate Zerg Extract.

Considering this, Eve’s eyes widened in surprise.

...Honestly, the fact that Lorca was still alive and well, albeit frail, was quite extraordinary, given that the poison came from an Intermediate Zerg.

Gu Zhaoxi continued explaining details about the Intermediate Zerg Extract. Given her years of dedicated research in spiritual energy, which aligned well with Zerg contamination, her understanding of Zerg Extract was no less than that of the Oliver Family’s specialized poison makers.

"Don’t touch it casually, don’t reach beyond the protection of this special glass box, and definitely don’t test the power of the Zerg Extract directly with your spiritual energy," she said sternly.

"I know you young folks are curious, but this isn’t something to play around with. Don’t think your strong spiritual energy makes you reckless. If you get poisoned, I can’t save you."

Eve, who had already secretly tested it with her spiritual energy: "..."

She awkwardly rubbed her nose and asked, "Alright, Senior, but if it’s so dangerous, how did my friend deliver it?"

"Good question. It’s because he knows how to handle dangerous experimental items safely."

"So, how should it be done?" Eve asked.

A minute later, she stared speechlessly at the pair of white lab gloves Gu Zhaoxi handed her. After a long moment of mutual staring, Gu Zhaoxi asked puzzledly, "Why are you looking at me like that? Isn’t it common sense that you must wear isolation gloves when handling hazardous materials?"

"……" Eve said sincerely, "Don’t you think it looks strange for an alchemist to wear lab gloves?"

Gu Zhaoxi looked baffled: "So many alchemists get knocked out by their own materials every year too, right? Don’t be unreasonable—try to be a bit more scientific once in a while!"

...Talk about ridiculous. A Five-Star Alchemist, capable of turning stone into gold and brewing elixirs of immortality—practically the poster child for superstition—was actually telling her to be scientific. In a place where trees could work as butlers, just whose existence was less scientific?!

Despite how bizarre it felt, Eve obediently put on the gloves, then reached into the glass case and carefully picked up the bottle of Zerg extract.

Even through the crystal bottle wall and the thin gloves, she could still feel the icy temperature inside the bottle.

She closed her eyes and, under Gu Zhaoxi’s guidance, gradually enveloped the gray substance with her psychic energy, carefully avoiding direct contact while observing its movement and activity from a higher-dimensional perspective.

Through her psychic "eyes," Eve saw the Zerg extract churning like floodwaters, relentlessly attempting to infect her mental world.

Why did Zerg extract display such intense aggression the moment it encountered psychic energy?

"Senior," she said thoughtfully, "since it’s all about polluting the human mental world, is the contamination from Zerg extract necessarily one-way? Aside from damaging and weakening psychic energy, is it possible that it could also offer an opportunity for advancement and evolution?"

"Maybe. I’ve never tried it myself. If you’re interested, you can research it."

From the reflection in the glass, Eve saw Gu Zhaoxi’s eyebrow twitch slightly, followed by an enigmatic smile spreading across her half-elf-like, ethereal face.

"But I can tell you this," she said, curling her lip slowly, "even with Alchemy and every means available to humanity, we can only push psychic energy to A-rank. Anything beyond that—S-rank, or even S+—is considered a god-given gift. But these murky origins... who knows where they truly come from?"

Eve’s expression was hidden behind her mask, so she only watched her with a subtle gaze.

The concept of S+ wasn’t a clearly defined rank; its relationship to S-rank was akin to that between a PhD and a postdoc. In reality, the maximum strength measurable by instruments was S-rank, and when certain S-rank powerhouses were universally acknowledged to have surpassed ordinary S-ranks, they were designated as S+.

Although combat was the fastest way to hone one’s abilities, to this day, every S+ powerhouse recorded in the empire had been on the battlefield and fought against the Zerg. That fact alone was worth deep contemplation.

A pair of light blue, double-pupiled eyes suddenly flashed through Eve’s mind. It occurred to her that, if she had to say, she had indeed seen an S+ powerhouse before.

The last Zerg war was also the period in recent centuries when the most S+ powerhouses emerged. Among the constellation of experts, a few shone the brightest, and it was impossible not to mention the supreme commander of that war—Maria de' Medici.

If only she could get her hands on the genetic fragments Maria had stored in the military’s simulation system.

With a sigh, Eve exhaled, withdrew her psychic energy, and carefully placed the gray Zerg extract back behind the isolation glass.

Hearing this, Gu Zhaoxi turned to her: "What’s wrong?"

"I have a feeling what's behind this might run deeper than I thought," Eve said gravely.

On the surface, the four great families seemed unrelated, but in reality, they were interconnected, their interests deeply intertwined. With the Zerg extract’s effects being so miraculous, was it really possible that there wasn’t a supply chain behind it?

A vague sense of unease stirred within her.