Heir of Synthesis: The World Mage

Priam walked without hurry. At a calm pace, he emerged from the dense vegetation of the forest, heading directly toward a figure approaching from the opposite direction.

Dioma appeared before him—the chief disciple and leader of the 8th Branch disciples on this mission.

Upon sensing someone’s presence, Dioma stopped. He narrowed his eyes, trying to identify the figure walking so casually toward him. When he recognized Priam’s face, a sadistic and excited smile spread across his face.

He seemed delighted by his own luck.

"Looks like fate really does have a twisted sense of humor..." Dioma sneered, crossing his arms arrogantly. "To think you’d walk straight into your own grave. You saved me the trouble of hunting you down."

Priam merely stared at him with a cold, indifferent gaze and asked calmly, "Were you looking for someone?"

Dioma let out a deep laugh, immediately understanding the subtext of the question. "Ah, so you ran into those three? That Zagnior... had acceptable strength, but his intelligence and cunning were pathetic. I gave him a ridiculously simple task, and the useless bastard couldn’t even accomplish that."

Priam showed a faint, indifferent smile.

Priam’s reaction seemed to irritate Dioma, but he simply laughed excitedly. "Let’s see if you’re still smiling like that afterward!"

With a fluid motion, Dioma pulled a silver saber from his spatial ring. Without wasting any time, he took out a crimson-colored pill and swallowed it in one gulp.

*Wooooosh!*

The next second, his body underwent a violent transformation. Veins bulged beneath his skin, his eyes glowed with a fascinating spectral blue, and scorching blue flames erupted from his pores.

Priam calmly stared at him and understood.

He was a Catalyst Mage specialized in pill consumption.

Unlike traditional alchemists who dedicated their lives to creating and refining pills, Dioma belonged to an extremely rare branch focused purely on destructive combat. He used the power of a Catalyst Mage to maximize and amplify the effects of pills directly inside his own body.

Priam had read about this in the basic knowledge records he had obtained from the 8th Branch.

Alchemist Catalyst Mages were, by nature, the best recipients for medicinal pills, as their energies could extract power beyond the normal limits from each pill.

Compared to an ordinary mage, it was as if, with the right training and techniques, this type of specialization could extract 150% of the power from each pill and even use it for combat.

However, almost nobody specialized in combat based on this for two simple reasons: it was absurdly expensive, and the body quickly developed resistance if the same pill was used repeatedly.

To fight this way, an individual needed to be ridiculously wealthy, possessing an almost infinite stockpile of rare and varied pills to alternate between in every battle. Without pills, the power of a mage like this became mediocre.

And Dioma? He took this specialization to the extreme. He probably barely knew how to create a basic pill, but as a combatant fueled by drugs, he was a true monster.

"Die!"

Dioma charged forward with terrifying speed.

Blue flames, sparks of lightning, and an extremely violent Yang energy exploded from his body like a volcano—the pure power of the consumed pill flowing completely under his control.

The saber descended in a slashing arc, loaded with pure destruction.

*WHOOSH!*

The blade cut through the air... but struck nothing but empty space.

The shockwave and blue flames from the attack continued onward, incinerating and reducing dozens of trees to ashes hundreds of meters behind Priam. But Priam himself wasn’t even scratched.

Dioma’s eyes widened as he stared at the empty space before him.

When he looked to the side, Priam was standing only a few centimeters away, wearing the same indifferent expression, his hands behind his back as if he were merely watching a terrible theater performance.

"Is that all?" Priam’s voice didn’t even sound mocking. It was as though, to him, Dioma wasn’t worth a single thought.

Furious, Dioma spun around and unleashed a wild sequence of attacks.

The saber carved trails of blue flames and thunder through the air.

*Clang! Swish! Wooosh!*

A horizontal slash, a thrust, a downward strike—Dioma attacked frantically, exhausting his energy as he tried to hit Priam. However...

Priam merely tilted his body slightly, taking small steps backward or to the side with mathematical precision. Not even a single strand of Priam’s hair was touched.

He still looked at the idiot with the same expression, his hands behind his back.

Dioma’s anger boiled over. The blue aura in his eyes seemed ready to explode.

"STOP MOVING, YOU RAT!"

When Dioma raised the saber with both hands for an even more devastating strike...

*POW!*

Out of nowhere, a completely black branch appeared in the air and cracked hard against the middle of Dioma’s face.

The impact was so sharp and violent that the blue flames surrounding Dioma flickered. He began spinning through the air at high speed, literally looking like an out-of-control spinning top, before stabilizing himself and landing on his knees.

Priam didn’t follow up. He simply stood there with the black branch resting on his shoulder, waiting with a bored expression.

"YOU... YOU BASTARD!"

Dioma rose in a fit of blind rage, ignoring the pain in his face and the blood running from his nose. The pill’s energy roared through his body, and then he...

*POW!*

He had barely gotten back up when the black branch once again cut through the air and struck the same cheek on Dioma’s face.

The leader of the 8th Branch flew away miserably, tumbling several times across the dirt.

From that moment on, the "battle" turned into a spectacle of absolute humiliation.

Dioma got back up in fury.

He tried something...

*POW!*

The black branch sent him crashing back to the ground.

He couldn’t even stand up.

Meanwhile, Priam made a point of simply watching the idiot try to get back up as quickly as he could, only to smack him in the face the very next second.

The tremendous energy from the pills... none of it was of any use against a simple black branch.

After the tenth fall, the desperate reality check finally reached Dioma’s mind. Fear overcame his anger. He realized that the difference between them wasn’t something any of his pills could bridge.

’I’m going to die! I need to get out of here right now!’

With trembling hands and his face completely deformed by black marks and swelling, Dioma pulled out a gleaming Spatial Escape Talisman.

"Y-you monster... you’ll never get aw—"

Before he could channel his energy to activate the talisman, Priam’s figure simply disappeared.

*CRACK! CRACK!*

Two sharp cracks echoed through the silence of the forest. Priam appeared right in front of him and, with two direct and precise kicks, instantly broke both of Dioma’s arms.

The Spatial Escape Talisman fell uselessly onto the dirt.

"AHHHHHHH! MY ARMS!" Dioma howled, dropping to his knees as his arms hung at bizarre angles.

Priam didn’t even bother answering. He began slowly beating him with the black branch. Every time Dioma tried to channel energy, draw on some residual pill power, or even crawl away in an attempt to do something, the branch cracked against his back, shoulders, or legs, making him kiss the dirt all over again.

*Pow! Pow! Pow!*

"Guaaah! Stop! Please, stop!"

The once-arrogant, wealthy, and haughty leader of the 8th Branch now lay face-down on the ground, covered in dust and blood, whimpering like a beaten dog, completely unable to get back up beneath the shadow of Priam’s branch.

Pity? Priam didn’t even know what that was. He kept bringing the wood down without mercy, blow after blow, until the idiot passed out from the pain.

"Tch... what a hassle. I’m really not cut out to be a torturer."

Priam muttered, letting out a tired sigh. But there was no helping it: for the Power Rune to read memories accurately, the target needed to be completely broken inside and out.

Dragging Dioma across the ground like a sack of garbage, Priam took him to the well where Zagnior was already ’resting.’

*Slap!*

Once there, he gave Dioma a sharp slap across the face, jolting the man awake from the pain.

As soon as he opened his eyes, Dioma found himself staring at a young, perfectly sculpted face wearing a radiant smile. It was the kind of angelic smile capable of warming even the coldest heart.

However, Dioma felt no warmth at all. Quite the opposite—a visceral chill ran down his spine.

"What... what are you going to do to me?" Dioma’s voice trembled with pure terror.

He recoiled, desperately trying to get away from that devilish face. With both arms broken, he awkwardly struggled backward. Then he noticed something was missing and looked at his fingers, seeing that they were bare. His panicked expression turned into outrage.

"You... you stole my spatial ring!"

*SLAP!*

The answer came in the form of a sharp slap. Dioma’s face caved in slightly on one side from the impact.

Priam frowned, slightly annoyed. He realized he didn’t have very good control over his strength when slapping—if it were a punch, his precision would be perfect. Slapping was a strange thing to calibrate.

But... he had just gained a valuable training dummy to practice his techniques on.

"Steal? What slander. This ring has always been mine."

*Slap! Slap! Slap!*

Priam continued handing out slaps while training his own control over his strength, taking extreme care not to blow the guy’s head off before the time came.

When Dioma’s mind and spirit finally shattered completely, reducing him to a rag with no will left to resist, Priam gave him exactly the same special treatment he had given Zagnior: the cocktail of dissolved black pill and a one-way trip to the bottom of the well.

A few hours later, when the humiliation, pain, and corrosive effect of the elixir reached their absolute peak... Priam finally smiled.

It was time to harvest the valuable memories of those scumbags.

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