Ball of Nothing 316 Mystery of Miasma 1

If there was a speed limit in the wilderness, Mii was very certainly that Zero was travelling way past it. Sadly, there weren't many rules in the abyss, especially the wilderness. Zero used the map to seek for the area with the least number of monsters because it meant that the density of the miasma in the area was too thick to support any form of life.

Once Zero reached a good spot, he noticed how the miasma's fog was so thick that he couldn't even see the tip of his fingers when he stretched his arm out. Wii quickly got into position and created a few Parallel Minds so that she could monitor Zero's status and cast recovery spells if needed. Mii also stationed herself in the control room with Lily to monitor the situation. Of all three fairies, she was the most experienced.

Zero inhaled deeply and almost choked on the disgusting air. The miasma didn't taste or smell any better than he remembered it to be. Choosing not to breathe it in, Zero opened his mouth wide and sucked everything in using absorption. The numbers on his status screen could barely be seen so Zero listened closely to what his assistants told him.

The numbers increased steadily as he absorbed miasma and Zero asked if the use of converted miasma could be halted. He wanted to know if normal miasma from the abyss could be used instead. Lily didn't know what perimeters to search for in the system so Mii took over while the flower fairy took care of commentary.

Zero decided to stop when his miasma units hit the hundred thousand mark. While doing that, he asked Wii to help him analyse the samples of the miasma absorbed and the samples of miasma converted using the system. For some reason, Zero felt as if the miasma he was absorbing from the abyss felt slightly different.

"Of course," Mii scoffed. "The miasma from the abyss is created by chaos energy that was attacking the plane and the combination of mana demons. It's a by-product, remember? There will surely be impurities in it."

Zero nodded. "How do we get rid of the impurities? Also, wasn't the production formula qi and sins? Why is it chaos energy and mana now?"

Wii quickly got to work and experimented on both formulas. In fact, thanks to her quick thinking, Zero got the full report of what exactly helps to create miasma.

"Unlike what everyone thought, miasma is actually just negatively charged energy. It doesn't matter if it is mana or qi, as long as sins are injected into it, miasma will be formed. Chaos energy is a type of very condensed negative energy from what we can conclude. The system has been concentrating a huge amount of negatively charged energy to convert pure energy into what we know as chaos energy."

Wii's explanation clarified many doubts. Zero was starting to understand why chaos energy could weaken him so much even if it couldn't harm him. Zero didn't produce mana or qi of his own to counter with chaos energy whose nature is to remove life. If something that doesn't possess life is filled with negative energy, they could only become puppets for the chaos energy to control. Unfortunately, Zero's true nature isn't his vessel but the void. It's the reason why he was only put to sleep and not manipulated.

"We're closing into the hundred thousand units," Lily told Zero who prepared to slow down and stop.

The miasma around Zero isn't as thick anymore after absorbing so much and Zero wondered if it was a good thing. With the plane's cracks and holes plugged by the Tree of Life, the chaos energy can no longer attack the broken off plane directly. The amount of miasma produced in the abyss is also significantly reduced. Given enough time, Zero thinks that it would stop entirely. He also hoped that by the time Baal wakes up, Hell would be transformed into a beautiful garden much like Heaven. The terraforming project will help ensure that no demons would starve. Food supplies will be secured if they have enough mana and good air. Wilderness monsters created from miasma poisoning wouldn't happen, clans like the Roth vampires wouldn't be wiped out, not everybody had to hide in towns of Demon Lord domains if they didn't want to without miasma, it would be a great place to be at.

Zero could now see his status as he stopped absorbing miasma. Mii had just finished implementing the new rules to the setting from the system's back end and told Zero that she was going to manually synthesize chaos energy using the miasma Zero just absorbed.

"I'm also going to cancel the auto-manufacturing function that was previously on. I don't know what changed or when the system had an update but this function wasn't here previously," she told Zero who nodded.

"It could be unlocked after Law and Isaben merged with the system. I think we need to thoroughly go through the system's function list after this to know what's going on," he told his assistants who agreed.

Without delaying the experiment further, Zero told Mii and Lily to start the synthesizing. The trio in the mindscape worked hard trying to stabilise the shaking from the system's overwork. Zero didn't know if he should add more qi or mana to stop the miasma from threatening to explode. Mii apologised profusely and wanted to cry. How could she make such a mistake?

"Thousand apologies, Zero! I forgot to set the unit of conversion back to normal after disabling the auto manufacture option!"

Wii quickly calculated the required mana and qi required to appease the miasma and told Lily to convert some energy to supplement the insufficient qi.

"Use sins if there isn't enough," she told the panicking flower fairy who was close to tears.

"Not enough!" Lily cried out even after converting the required amount of energy Wii told her to.

Wii started to panic when the calculations failed her. In theory, according to what they worked out earlier, this amount of energy and qi should be sufficient to deal with the miasma. What went wrong?

Mii shoved both fairies aside and took over the system's controls. She didn't really think too much and converted a quarter of the energy reserves into qi and another quarter into mana to suppress the violent miasma thrashing around in Zero's inventory.

Experience certainly contributed a lot when unexpected situations arose. Mii's quick action helped to settle the miasma's volatile reaction within the span of a few breaths, much to everyone's relief. Zero praised Mii about it and the strawcherry fairy blushed so much that she had to hide away in the library.

Wii who recovered some of her sanity started to work out the Math after seeing the results. Lily didn't know what she could do but read out the status to Zero. Apparently, there were many impurities within the miasma that Zero absorbed from the abyss causing a greater amount of qi required to purify them than the usual. Mana could only be used to ease the discordant behaviour of chaos energy within the miasma but without enough mana present, the miasma took it as a threat and became wild. Wii noticed that the amount of energy required to convert miasma into chaos energy remained constant even though the proportion of miasma used varied from time to time, depending on the level of impurities in the miasma.

"Can we work out a formula guideline for this? Also, it gets converted to chaos energy here. Is there any way to convert miasma into qi or mana with the help of technology or alchemy? I heard that Wiser and Steve are still struggling to understand the nature of miasma as well as chaos energy thanks to the lack of ability to freely study it in their natural environment."

Wii looked excited. "Master, if you give me permission to do some experimental works in the mindscape with access to your inventory for sampling, I might be able to create a list of findings of chaos energy and miasma. Although I don't know much about building machines or gadgets, I believe this will be very beneficial for their research."

Zero thought about it and asked if Lily could find a way to grant restricted access for Wii to share his inventory space and items. The flower fairy wasn't too sure but still dug around in the new system. Thankfully, she didn't have to search for long before finding something within the administrator's rights to allow or deny access.

Zero followed Lily's instructions to locate the administrator's menu and marvelled at the list powers he never knew he had.

"Listen to this," Zero grinned. "I can actually change the properties of the mindscape and partition it out to different rooms. It didn't actually have to be a library."

Wii didn't know if she should laugh at Zero's imagination of heaving a beach in one of his mindscape scenes. The fact that Zero seriously considered rearing fishes of all kinds instead of books in his mindscape made her worry for a moment. Thankfully, Zero dropped the idea after Mii told him that he would have to rear more than thirty billion fishes if he really preferred marine life to books. It was simply too much work for even the enthusiastic Zero and Wii silently gave her sister a look of gratitude. In terms of knowing how to handle their young master, Mii was the most experienced of the three fairies. Like Wii, Lily didn't know what to do without their bossy strawcherry senior.

After a little horsing around, Zero managed to create a partition to allow Wii and Lily to have their individual rooms apart from the library. Zoe also had a room but it was still undecorated because Zero didn't know what the zashikiwarashi liked.

The inventory sharing was allowed and Zero told Wii to try creating a request. The eggplant fairy did as told and Zero received a notification when Wii sent a withdrawal request. Zero quickly approved it and watched as boxes were automatically delivered to Wii's office with the items she requested.

Everyone crowded around the eggplant fairy when she opened the box that contained one unit of chaos energy. Mii was on standby in case something happened that made the chaos energy bite back.

Instead, nothing really happened even after the box was opened. The chaos energy looked lazy and swirled lethargically at the bottom of the box. Zero decided to leave the experiment to his assistants and fell back to his lamp so that he could physically meditate while he joined his assistants in the experiment.

Wii opened up the other boxes and Zero was amused to find that sins were in dark purple crystal forms while mana was in light blue orb forms. Qi was slightly more confusing because they flowed just about anywhere they wanted to go without a container. It was also difficult to capture escaped qi thanks to the lack of shape. Zero had no choice but to reabsorb the escaped qi and ask Wii to send him another withdrawal request. Now that they knew qi was a faint yellow coloured gas, they were more careful when opening it the next time it was delivered. Energy turned out to be a chargeable stone that would crumble away to dust when it ran out. Miasma wasn't gaseous like what Zero thought it would be. It turned out to be sticky goo that was difficult to remove.

Wii was left in charge of experimenting with how each type of energy form reacted with each other. Zero left her to her work while he browsed through the new system's back end in Lily's room with Mii's help.

"Indeed, there has been an upgrade," the strawcherry fairy confirmed.

Zero looked through the long list of commands and raised a brow. If merging successfully with a divine entity could cause his system to upgrade, what would happen when Zero completed merging with all the divine entities there were out there? Would that give him complete power over Mind's Eye and an edge over Solo if they ever had to fight it out?

Mii saw the strange hunger in Zero's eyes and shivered. The Zero she knew didn't look so ambitious. What could the young doctor be thinking about? Zero messed around with the controls and remodelled the space he had in the mindscape so that there was also a break room, some bedrooms for his hardworking assistants and a kitchen that was redundant in Mii's opinion because none of the fairies in the mindscape needed food.

"We feed on mana," she told him dryly and Zero grinned.

"I know."

"Why do we have a kitchen in the mindscape then?"

Zero turned to look at Mii and the strawcherry fairy felt like a bird being hunted by a cat. "Why, all the better to learn cooking recipes!"

Mii wanted to refuse it but Zero had already started listing the dishes he wanted to try. "Ah, but I cannot cook them if I do not know how it should be done. Ever since Wii has taken over with organising the library, shouldn't it be about time for you to help me with the compiling of recipes that Zoe has to be added to the cooking repertoire? It'll be nice if I can cook all these dishes so that Bib can learn them. Merlin needs a balanced diet and as his doctor, this should be the least I can do for him."

Mii was very red in the face and shook her fist at Zero. "Just you wait..." she swore. "The day will come when I will give you so much to do that you will regret ever knowing me!"

Zero only laughed as Mii flew away to sulk and most probably collect all the undocumented recipes.

Chapter end