The Big Bang System - Chapter 41

Leaving the house, Angela is both relieved and worried when she sees that Lenara is no longer present. Of course, she is embarrassed but at the same time, it’s not as if she was angry or trying to chase Lenara away.

Between chasing after her and not, Angela is unsure of how to proceed, this is a completely unfamiliar situation for her. With her personality leaning more towards being passive, she decides to not chase.

Instead she looks for something to distract herself, her eyes settling on the quest menu. With the addition of the last plant, she has successfully scanned five rank one plants, completing the quest.

[Register 5 rank one plants: 5/5, reward: herbalist’s bench]

Upon completing the quest a new tab appeared along with the others. along with it comes a popup explaining the basic function.

[The herbalist’s bench takes input plant genetic material and creates a new seed by process of accelerated evolution. Plants created this way are usually the same rank as the input plants but are occasionally one rank higher or lower. Plants cannot inherit traits absent in the parent plants but existing traits may be improved or can be combined for unpredictable results.]

This was exactly what she required right now, in order to finish creating the teleporter she so desperately desires she would require a type of wood with specific traits, ones not strong enough in the trees she has currently. With the wood taken care of all that she would have to do before being capable of creating one is to improve her runes to the required level.

That said, from the description it sounds like it is entirely chance based and, as such, would require luck to get the desired result. Even so, steps can clearly be taken to improve the chances, using plants with an initially strong characteristic will be more likely to give a good result than plants with a weak characteristic.

With this new discovery all other thoughts have flown out of the window, Angela is practically bouncing with excitement, her goal is within her sight. She immediately rushes towards her growing area, darting about between each plant and occasionally tearing a piece off.

Once she has gathered parts of trees with the strongest likeness to what she needs (strong but malleable) she starts to test out the function. Inputting two different plants, a progress bar pops up, increasing at about 1% per second.

After the bar reaches 100% it disappears, leaving behind an image of a seed with a description.

[With the traits of both the ironbark tree and the yew tree, this seed possesses greater than usual toughness while still retaining flexibility. While not quite at the rank 1 level, it has reached the peak of rank 0.]

In the interest of preventing regression, Angela does not immediately use the seed, instead putting it aside before working with her original materials; more haste does not achieve a faster result. And thus, she spends the rest of her time tinkering away with plants; some worse than others.

By the time she is starting to feel fatigued, Angela is confident enough to start working on the final product she requires. The first couple attempts are… dissapointing to say the least, giving similar or even worse results. Most likely there is a bottleneck making it difficult to advance to rank 1 or something along those lines but this doesn’t daunt her and she contnues trying. Five attempts, ten, the number of failures pile up and her supplies slowly dwindle, making her just a little worried.

Reaching her last few attempts, a frown starts to form on Angela’s face. If she didn’t get lucky she would have to go through the whole process again, and while she wasn’t exactly short on source materials it isn’t like they are infinite.

Three attempts. Two attempts. 50%, 75%, 99%. The bar for the last attempt slowly ticks up, seeming excruciatingly slowly. Finally it completes and Angela crosses her fingers, hoping for the best. Her sigh of relief was tremendous, it had succeeded, despite taking until the last possible moment.

[The epitome of commonly found traits, this tree possesses almost unnatural strength and flexibility, even having the increased growth speed. This is a textbook example of a rank 0 plant advancing to rank 1.]

While it may have had her on the edge of her seat, it certainly made up for it in its quality. One of the things she lacks most is time, and getting her teleporter constructed as soon as possible is her main priority.

She just has to plant the tree and while it is growing she can perfect the runes required. Though the time for the tree to grow is not specified, with the current rate at which the other rank 1 tree grows she should have roughly a week.