Brain Worms
The brain flash spirit looked like a small orb of light, it was easy enough to activate this expendable spirit and didn't take more than a few minutes to fully recover from its use. After Deon used ten of these spirits, he was able to recover quickly after each use.
By the end of the week, Deon was able to refine this spirit over 120 times each day, using all of the refined spirits and quickly bringing his mind to a higher level.
He used this expendable spirit over 500 times before it became useless to him. Each use ever so slightly remodelled and altered the physical structure of his brain, turning it into something more efficient, more effective.
With his brain strengthened by the brain flash spirit, he began to use the brain light spirit, another expendable consciousness tempering spirit, but a more effective one due to it being gold class.
Deon spent the day using this spirit, until it quickly became ineffective. At this point, his brain's efficiency was extremely high, but he pushed it even further by using the 1-Star platinum class brain flare spirit. This was also an expendable spirit that improved the brain's efficiency. Naturally, the effect was much more powerful. If Deon hadn't built up slowly to this point, he would have likely died on the spot.
The next step was the usage of the brain worm spirits.
The brain worm spirits could be considered the core and foundation of the entire consciousness tempering pursuit. In fact, most consciousness tempering shamans would ignore the other spirits and use only the brain worms to strengthen their physical brain.
"Frenzied brain worm spirit…the only way I can use all of the 1-Star brain worm spirits before we depart is by accelerating the progress with this slightly terrifying method…"
Even Deon grimaced slightly when he thought about what he was going to do.
Unfortunately, the suffering for time spirit was only effective on body tempering spirits. To accelerate his usage of the brain worm spirits, he needed to rely on the frenzied brain worm spirit.
Despite its relatively simple refinement, almost nobody was willing to use the frenzied brain worm spirit. This expendable gold class 1-Star spirit sent the brain worm into a frenzy, accelerating its rate of effect, but heavily worsening the side effects.
But with this, the brain worm spirit could be used within just 6 hours compared to three days… with the six spirits from ordinary to mythril class, Deon could save 18 and a half days this way.
This was why he spent the past week strengthening his brains foundation. The frenzied brain worm would chaotically vibrate and wriggle around with much more ferocity, whilst draining over ten times more mental energy.
In preparation for this, Deon refined another seven shimmering bed bugs. As it turned out, the bed bug spirit lineage was actually the best when it came to passive spirits that improved mental stamina. The effect stacked when using greater numbers of this spirit, but any more than ten wouldn't be of additional use.
Aside from the shimmering bed bugs, the only other spirit in Deon's soul space right now was his core spirit.
Looking at the frenzied brain worm spirit, this red glowing and anger filled vibrating ball of slime, Deon sighed, but steeled his resolve and showed his determination through his actions.
He resolutely bound the 1-Star ordinary class brain worm and the 1-Star gold class frenzied brain worm spirit. He activated the brain worm, keeping a straight face even as the worm shot out from his soul space and entered his brain. His eye twitched slightly as it wriggled its way through his brain, but there actually weren't any pain receptors in the brain, though the vibrations certainly felt disconcerting.
Once the brain worm was in place, it began to wriggle. Deon felt his mental energy quickly drop. After he adjusted to this peculiar sensation, he activated the frenzied brain worm.
A single frenzied brain worm spirit was enough to send the ordinary to gold class brain worms into a frenzy, but the platinum class brain worm could require up to ten activations whilst the mythril class worm needed at least 50 activations.
Flash!
A bright red light covered Deon's body for a moment as the frenzied brain worm detonated. For half a second, Deon felt an intense anger fill his heart, but he quickly suppressed this feeling before it could take root. This was a known side effect of the frenzied brain worm's activation, he was already prepared for this minor inconvenience.
As the light passed through the brain worm, it paused for a moment. The light lingered on the worm for a second before suddenly storming towards the worm, causing its body to convulse and turn a bright red colour. Even after the light was fully absorbed, the worm remained red, whilst it took on the intense anger held within that light.
Deon felt himself droop and had to force himself to sit up. He grimaced and resisted the urge to lie down…falling unconscious would reduce his mental resistance, causing the brain worm to devour all of his mental energy, leading to his death.
The brain worm instantly became ten times more ferocious, but the ferocity only increased over the coming hours. By the fifth hour, Deon was visibly sweating and his gaze was dull.
Finally, six hours after its activation, the brain worm spirit suddenly paused. All of the frenzied vibrations and movements stopped abruptly, before the worm started to break apart, forming countless specs of light that drifted through Deon's brain.
In an instant, Deon's exhaustion was swept away and he suddenly felt wide awake. His eyes widened as an intense searing migraine filled his brain. Fortunately, the absorption of the red specks of frenzied hot light only lasted for a single minute.
"It's over…" Deon exhaled deeply. "That was way worse that I expected it to be…it actually wasn't nearly as uncomfortable or painful as I anticipated, but the mental exhaustion is almost too strong to resist! I fear that succeeding with the platinum and mythril class versions will be difficult."
After resting, Deon continued.
Bronze class brain worm, silver class brain worm, gold class brain worm…
Deon managed to successfully get through each of these tempering trials without needing to resort to his trump cards, but when he activated the platinum class brain worm, there was a clear change.
This brain worm was ten times more difficult to endure right from the get go. Deon used seven frenzied brain worm spirits to send it into a frenzy, but quickly found that his mental energy had depleted by a dangerous amount. At a certain point, he was forced to use the mental surge shoot spirit.
Mental surge shoot spirit, silver class 1-Star, this spirit gave a large and very forceful boost to a shaman's mental alertness for one hour, but then they would fall into a state of extreme exhaustion. This state could be alleviated by activating another one of these expendable spirits once again, and the enhanced mental state could be re-established for another half hour by using yet another one.
Deon did exactly this and managed to successfully complete his usage of the platinum brain worm. He passed out afterwards and slept for a full day due to the backlash from overusing the mental surge shoot spirit.
"Mythril class…I haven't yet successfully refined a mythril class spirit. The consciousness tempering spirits are more difficult to refine than most, but the refinement is actually relatively inexpensive…let's give it a go."
The first attempt was a pitiful failure, the normal cauldron exploded very early on in the refinement. He smiled wryly, this was a bit worse than his expectations…no matter, he was confident that so long as he kept at it, he would succeed eventually.
Every higher class of spirit was more difficult to refine than the last, but the gap between silver and gold was larger than the previous gaps, whilst each gap after that only widened further and further. Mythril class spirits were the peak of all typical spirits. Whilst there was the holy class above this, they were thousands of times more difficult to refine than mythril class spirits!
In fact, Blood God even stated that in order to refine a 1-Star holy class spirit, it required a 4-Star shaman spirit refiner to even have a chance at success!
1-Star, 2-Star and 3-Star shamans could be grouped together, but 4-Star shamans were in a league of their own. The difference between the first three ranks was large, but it was not completely unsurpassable. However, there was an extreme qualitative change between 3-Star and 4-Star.
That was too far off for Deon right now, so he focussed on what was right in front of him.
Mythril class 1-Star spirits were often more valuable than ordinary class 2-Star spirits, but the difficulty in their refinement was even greater than normal 2-Star spirits! The only reason they weren't valued even higher, was because their effect simply wasn't good enough to justify the cost.
Failure, failure, failure…
Deon spent half a day, failing time and time again. He lost track of the hours and focussed the entirety of his efforts on this endeavour.
10 failures, 20 failures, 30, 40…50 failures!
This was actually a record, Deon had never failed in a refinement this many times before!
But mythril class spirits were notoriously difficult to refine. If other spirit refiners were to learn that an initial stage 2-Star shaman was attempting to refine a 1-Star mythril class spirit, they would laugh in disdain. Such a thing was impossible!
And then, Deon succeeded on his 52nd attempt. He was so exhausted that he directly fell asleep, but he didn't sleep for long. When he awoke, he activated the mythril brain worm spirit.
"This…" Deon furrowed his brows.
It was multiple times more exhausting than the platinum brain worm, it would be suicidal to activate the frenzied brain worm spirit alongside it.
Deon was slightly disappointed. He discovered early on that sending the brain worm into a frenzied state actually improved the enhancement! Each brain worm should usually increase his IQ by around 2-3 points, but the first five worms all improved his IQ by 3-4 points!
In the end, he knew that his only choice was to wait out these three days.
Three days later, the brain worm dissolved into countless specks of red light. After forcing himself to wake up from a short nap, Deon examined his final progress.
"Haha, it really is just as Blood God stated! Each worm individually improves a shaman's IQ by 2-3 points, but after using all six brain worms, the total improvement instantly doubles! I should have improved my IQ by around 40, just by using the brain worms! And of course, IQ is only a simple measure of one facet of intelligence…but the brain worms have the effect of improving every aspect of the brain's mental processing ability!"
Deon was extremely pleased with his improvements. His intellect, memory, mental endurance and stamina, even his ability to resist pain, had all improved drastically! He was an intelligent person in the first place, but now, he was simply monstrous. If placed amongst mortals, Deon's intelligence would be enough to stun everyone around him, he would be labelled as an inhuman super genius with an intellect never before seen in this world.
The brain worm really was the core of consciousness tempering. In fact, aside from the brain, it also improved the connection between the brain and soul space. This improved connection gave Deon better fine control over his origin energy and spirits.
For now, Deon decided to stop here with his consciousness training. To improve his brain any further he would need to use 2-Star spirits, he had already more or less reached the limit for what was possible with 1-Star spirits. Before using any 2-Star consciousness tempering spirits, it was essential to further temper the soul space first. This could be achieved either by progressing his rank, or by using special spirits. Unfortunately, neither of those options were particularly viable right now.
Before he refined anything else, Deon suddenly felt an impulse; to read through Blood God's books once again. With his newly enhanced intelligence, he felt it quite likely that he would be able to comprehend something new!