Earth's Greatest Magus

Chapter 2972: The Charm

Emery forced his attention back to the work in front of him.

While the apothecary circle gathered within the Cosmic Palace, refining sequence and testing recipes in distant safety, Emery handled the part no one else could. Assisted by his light avatar, he ran each refined formula against living subjects — the dozen purple rune parasites the team had captured on-site, now sealed and writhing inside layered containment arrays at the corner of the chamber. The avatar fed in each new sedative; Emery watched the results unfold through his divine sense, reading the parasites’ resistance, their decay, the precise moment their corrupted vitality faltered or held.

Two hours passed.

In that time, they tested over five hundred sequences and produced a dozen genuinely effective sedatives. The strongest remained Kayelin’s original — the one derived from the Elysian leaf. Against ordinary parasites, its effect was outright lethal. But against these enhanced purple variants, its potency collapsed to barely thirty percent. It could weaken them by no more than a third, buying an infected host perhaps sixty percent longer before the corruption fully took hold.

"We will keep going," Kayelin’s voice came through the transmission array, calm and unhurried despite the strain. "Move on to the alternate recipes."

Linnaeus joined the circle soon after, and the two veteran apothecarists worked in tandem. Another two hours, another five hundred sequences deduced — and at last, a sedative reaching sixty percent potency.

By every apothecary standard, it was a remarkable result. Two hours of work for a sixty-percent compound against a mutated strain would have been celebrated in any laboratory in the sector.

It was also nowhere near enough.

Sixty percent would slow the infection. It would not stop it. And there were still more than five thousand sequences left undeduced, each one a possible path toward something stronger.

The problem was no longer skill.

It was time.

Across the chamber, Grand Magus Hubert had been watching the whole process from a chair tipped against the wall, his black cane balanced idly across his knees. He had said little for hours. Now he straightened, listening to something through his own communication rune, and the casual amusement faded from his face.

"General Anderson just sent word," he said. "The hordes have begun moving toward Maren City."

Emery’s hands stilled over the cauldron.

Maren was the second-largest city on Baeldum, and the disaster had swollen its numbers far beyond anything its walls were built for — refugees from a dozen fallen settlements had poured in until the population pressed past thirty million souls. Of the nine operational groups, four had already converged there, alongside Group Nine and Supreme Lord Dunadan himself.

"It seems Maren is where this will be decided," Hubert murmured.

The moment the name registered, Emery’s chest tightened for an entirely different reason.

Maren City was Julian’s deployment.

He had no time to dwell on the worry, but it lodged itself there all the same. He kept his voice level. "How long until they clash?"

Hubert tilted his head, as though reluctant to answer. "Don’t worry. You still have plenty of time..."

"How long?"

"Mm." A small, apologetic pause. "Their projections put the engagement at roughly four hours from now."

For a moment, Emery genuinely thought he might cough up blood.

The news struck the entire project like a hammer. Everyone — the circle in the Cosmic Palace, the apothecarists, Emery himself — had been working against an estimated ten-to eight-hour window. Eight hours was tight, but survivable: barely enough to perfect the formula, brew a full batch, and deliver it. The Alliance had even committed one of its treasured transfer artifacts to the effort, capable of teleporting a finished item directly into Emery’s hands within the hour.

Four hours changed everything.

Emery closed his eyes, exhaled once, and let the panic burn itself out in a single breath.

"We still have time," he said. "Let’s do our best with what we have."

The next hour proved how thin that hope was. Despite redoubled effort across both teams, the potency crept up by a meager ten percent before the work slammed into a wall. They had reached a depth of complexity where conventional refinement simply stopped yielding returns — where adding more hands and more ingredients no longer moved the needle at all.

So Emery changed his approach.

While the Cosmic Palace circle continued hunting for better formulas and screening new ingredients, Emery turned VIA loose on the raw mathematics behind the parasite, directly discarding any sequences with negligible chances of success. Desperate times demanded desperate measures. By combining VIA’s extraordinary calculation speed with his own apothecary expertise, he managed to analyze and eliminate more than a thousand potential sequences within a single hour.

Even so, three thousand still waited.

It was then that Hubert stepped forward.

"I don’t know the first thing about apothecary work," the elegant man admitted, rolling up his sleeves. "But deduction... probability... those I understand." A faint, knowing smile crossed his face. "This is my purpose here."

He set down his cane and began unpacking a strange assortment from his storage ring — a cluster of tall candles, and a small selection of high-grade materials, several of them Tier 6, a few of them Tier 7. With practiced, almost ceremonial movements, he arranged them and set them alight, murmuring beneath his breath as the flames took on impossible colors.

The ritual lasted perhaps ten minutes.

What it produced left Emery momentarily speechless.

A single talisman lay where the materials had burned away — and the dense, layered aura radiating from it was unmistakable. No fabrication could counterfeit the bearing of a genuine Tier 8 talisman.

"What is that?" Emery asked.

Hubert’s smile widened. "This is a Luck Charm."

"...Luck?"

He explained, and Emery found himself baffled all over again. Luck, as a concept, seemed to sit above any known law — a force that bent outcomes rather than energies. Emery needed only to absorb the talisman, and for the next few hours, his fortune would be drastically magnified.

"That’s all I can do for now," Hubert said, already drifting back toward his corner. "Wake me when it’s time to leave." He lay down with the unbothered ease of a man taking an afternoon nap, hat tipped over his eyes.

Emery glanced at Morgana and Twik, who stood guard at the chamber’s edge, then made his decision and activated the talisman.

Golden runes flared across its surface and sank into him — and beyond a faint warmth, nothing happened. No surge of perception. No fluctuation in his core. No new clarity in his mind. If Morgana hadn’t quietly noted the small golden mark that had surfaced on his forehead, he would not have believed anything had changed at all.

He didn’t waste a second wondering. He returned to the deduction.

By then, the Cosmic Palace circle had cleared another five hundred sequences, leaving him with just over two thousand and less than an hour on the clock.

That was when the fortune began to show itself.

A few minutes in, several hundred parasite gene samples were accidentally ruined — spoiled, rendered untestable. The old Emery would have shouted in dismay; those samples were irreplaceable. But with the clock under thirty minutes, he forced himself to simply trust the charm. Believing that every ruined sample corresponded to a sequence-path that would have led nowhere.

It kept happening. A containment array failed at exactly the right moment. A bundle of forgotten research surfaced from an old archive — dragged up by one of the apothecarists in the Cosmic Palace — and instantly invalidated dozens more sequences in a single stroke.

The Luck Charm, Emery slowly understood, did not just affect him. It worked on the world around the goal itself, clearing the wrong answers out of his path so that only the right ones remained.

Time ran out.

The pre-prepared materials arrived through the Alliance transfer artifact, many of them already partially refined by the apothecarists working in parallel within the Cosmic Palace. Hours of preparation had condensed everything down to this single step.

The final concoction.

And that was something only Emery could do.

He drew out his treasured high-grade cauldron and immediately ignited the spirit flames beneath it. One ingredient after another entered the vessel in precise sequence. Elysian Leaf essence. Purified parasite suppressants. Three separate stabilizing compounds were developed during the last few hours. Every drop was measured to perfection.

His divine sense remained fully extended throughout the process.

Inside the cauldron, dozens of reactions unfolded simultaneously. Some ingredients attempted to reject each other. Others fused too aggressively, producing dangerous fluctuations that threatened to ruin the entire batch.

Twice, Emery was forced to intervene.

The first time, a cluster of medicinal essences destabilized and nearly exploded inside the cauldron. The second time, the parasite suppressants began devouring the sedative components instead of merging with them.

Sweat slowly formed on his forehead.

Then, during the final sequence, something changed.

The various medicinal energies that had resisted one another throughout the entire process suddenly entered perfect harmony.

A brilliant emerald glow erupted from the cauldron.

The rich medicinal aroma instantly filled the chamber.

Emery’s eyes brightened.

Success.

Several minutes later, the lid opened.

Twenty pills rested within the heart of the cauldron, each one smooth, flawless, and radiating dense medicinal energy.

Superior quality.

Eighty percent potency.

Enough to increase the host’s resistance by four times. Where a person might normally fall to the parasites within five minutes, these pills could stretch that window to twenty.

Hubert, roused by the surge of spirit energy filling the chamber, sat upright with a grin.

"Hah! Magnificent. Let’s go!"

Emery’s Dark Avatar already stood beside a forming spatial gate, prepared to carry the pills directly to the battlefield. Yet as the others began moving toward it, Emery suddenly raised a hand.

"Go ahead first," he said. "I’ll follow right behind you."

The Luck Charm still hadn’t burned out.

Five hundred sequences remained unexplored.

And Emery intended to use every remaining minute to create something even stronger.