Chapter 572 - 403: Ten Years (Part 2)

Chapter 572: Chapter 403: Ten Years (Part 2)

Just as Isaac expected, the error tolerance rate climbed to eighty-one percent before it started to slowly decline. The optimization plans offered by the panel could, at best, only stabilize it.

In other words, even if he followed the panel’s suggestions, there was still a twenty percent chance of failure!

Of course, this success rate wasn’t low by any means. For a normal brewing process, reaching this stage was already a great success, as no High Level Magic Potion could ever guarantee a one hundred percent success rate.

Most Alchemists would be considered masters of their craft if they could achieve a fifty percent success rate!

Of course, this fifty percent rate was for methods where material loss upon failure was extremely low, allowing the ingredients to be reused for a second attempt. Without this safety measure, the success rate for a High Level Magic Potion could typically reach eighty or ninety percent.

But generally, no Alchemist would do that.

For one, no one could guarantee they wouldn’t make a mistake, and losing High Level magic ingredients even once was a catastrophic loss, akin to severing a major artery.

For another, there was a Legend in the Magic Potion Realm—that the success of a Magic Potion is a fixed quantity!

This meant the overall success rate for brewing Magic Potions was constant, thus requiring some failures to balance things out.

To this day, no one has been able to verify the truth of this Legend. But to a Legendary Mage, its veracity was irrelevant. It was so widespread that even if it wasn’t true, it had become true!

So, while no one knew the exact constant success rate the Legend demanded, Legendary Mages still created brewing methods that had lower success rates but offered extremely high material preservation.

This was to ensure there were enough failed brewing attempts, while also preserving materials to the greatest extent and saving costs.

Getting back to the matter at hand, under normal circumstances, a Magic Potion with this success rate would be considered complete. However, this was no normal situation. Isaac was creating a new Magic Potion—and a legendary one, at that.

Therefore, even though the error tolerance rate was over eighty percent, the slightest misstep would cause it to plummet dramatically!

Because the subsequent brewing techniques and ratios were completely uncharted territory. The current eighty-three percent was less an error tolerance or success rate, and more accurately a completion percentage.

And for a Magic Potion, ninety-nine percent completion was no different from zero percent completion.

Not to mention, it was only at eighty-three percent.

When the panel could no longer advance it further, it meant that Isaac’s current Knowledge and skills had reached their limit.

The rest would require Isaac to continuously experiment, learn, and explore...

...until it was complete. This should have been a long process, but now, Isaac possessed an incredibly wondrous power!

When the panel could no longer offer any improvements, Isaac knew it was time.

While still stirring the Magic Cauldron with a ladle in one hand, he held up the other, his index and middle fingers pressed together. A vibrant green leaf appeared at his fingertips, and Isaac swept it gently past his eyes...

The next moment, a miraculous scene unfolded...

The instant the leaf passed in front of his eyes, a net-like pattern, like the veins of a leaf, appeared before him. Then, countless possible futures for the Magic Potion he was developing flashed before his eyes.

Each branch of this net represented a possibility for the Magic Potion. However, just as the veins of a leaf have a start and an end, the net before Isaac’s eyes also had a beginning and an end, just like a leaf.

As the net spread, the future of the Magic Potion began to converge on a single, core point. The future was anchored!

With the future anchored, the leaf at Isaac’s fingertips dissipated. A slight smile graced his lips. He no longer paid attention to the data from his Golden Finger. Instead, as if guided by inspiration, he casually tossed all sorts of ingredients into the Magic Cauldron and stirred as his heart desired.

The consequence of this was that the numbers in Isaac’s vision began to rise and fall like a drop tower ride!

The fluctuations were massive!

However, just as the futures in Isaac’s vision gradually converged, the number also began to slowly inch its way toward one hundred.

Time slowly passed. Soon, another three months had gone by. Unlike the laboratory from before, which was filled with Magic Potions, this time the lab held only a single bottle of gray Magic Potion.

That’s right. In a full three months, Isaac had only brewed this one Magic Potion.

But although there was only one bottle, the light in Isaac’s eyes was far brighter than when he had brewed the previous batch!

Because the difficulty of the two was on a completely different level!

And although this experiment was only completed with the help of the Future Tree’s ability to anchor the future, its method of anchoring was not a simple, crude delivery of a future "result" to the present.

Instead, it worked by deduction, selecting one of the few successful outcomes from the countless possibilities in the Magic Potion’s research, and then allowing Isaac to complete it through a series of what seemed like extreme coincidences.

In other words, although the experiment succeeded because the "result" was locked in beforehand, Isaac had fully experienced the entire process in between.

For Isaac, the only regret was perhaps not being able to see the failed futures he had glimpsed during the anchoring process. Experiments, whether successful or not, always held meaning.

’So, perhaps this is the price of the Core of Time?’

Isaac wasn’t sure yet, but his experiment was complete!

Of course, it wasn’t completely finished yet. There were still many areas to optimize. But the rest was just a matter of refinement. Angel’s commission was also complete. Now, he just needed to roughly perfect it, give it a simple refinement, and this phase of the research could be considered temporarily concluded.

At least for the remaining time, Isaac didn’t plan to focus his energy on it.

And so, another month passed. In less than a tenth of the total time, Isaac had completed a study of immense impact!

Looking back, it seemed unbelievably fast, but in reality, this was a completely normal level of efficiency. Isaac’s research efficiency was already far beyond ordinary people’s thanks to his Golden Finger, and now he had an item that could anchor the future and guarantee a successful outcome for his research. Such speed was only to be expected.

After all, when it came to ensuring an experiment’s completion, anchoring the future was far more sophisticated than Isaac’s previous crude method of stacking error tolerance. The former resulted in a very complete study; the process might be a bit bloated at first, but as long as one’s abilities met the standard, there was a high probability of replicating it.

The latter, however, was different. Its success was entirely due to Isaac’s Golden Finger unreasonably forcing the success rate to one hundred percent. Without Isaac’s Golden Finger, it would be impossible for others to replicate it.

The Divine Fragment, for example.

But this speed was only temporary. The future-anchoring ability could only be used three times, and he had already used it once. And it was this one time that made Isaac truly realize it couldn’t anchor just any future. If a successful future didn’t exist, or was too distant, a single leaf was not enough to anchor it.

So, he shouldn’t get his hopes up too much.

That being said, Isaac’s next two experiments were still perfectly successful...

They were the [Divine Code] and the [Inference of Soul Structure].

Actually, Isaac had originally reserved that use for the Mad Witch Traits. Unfortunately, he tried it and found the hope was too slim. The leaf’s power was not enough to anchor that future. So, with the idea of maximizing benefits, Isaac used it for the [Divine Code] instead.

Since the difference between a Virtual Deity and a real Deity was actually very small, completing the research on the [Divine Code] also meant completing the research on the [Virtual Divine Code]. It was truly killing two birds with one stone!

If this was all within Isaac’s calculations, then the [Inference of Soul Structure] research was quite a surprise, because it succeeded on the first try!

To Isaac’s surprise, he had originally thought the soul structure would be perfected at Tier Three, because that was when most Mad Witch Traits awakened. But that wasn’t the case.

Looking at the overall composition of the soul structure, it was already complete at Tier Two!