Chapter 945 Figuring out solutions  

( Max's POV)

As Max entered his own soul space, he realized that the time that it took for him to condense one drop of his soul with his current technique was about 15 minutes per one ml.

His soul vessel was HUGE and a quick calculation suggested Max that there were atleast 5 liters of soul essence for him to condense which would roughly take him around 52 days to completely condense his entire soul.

This was a big problem since he had less than 14 days to complete this task as at this rate he was only going to be about 25% completed by the deadline.

The problem with his soul was that it was HUGE! About four times the average soul As he had devoured the soul energy of three tier8 beings.

In the memories of Angakok and Dracula their total soul essence was only 0.7 and 0.9 liters respectively whereas Bavuma had a larger soul with a capacity of 1.4 lires. Max had twice the soul capacity of all their souls combined and that presented a big challenge for him to condense it the traditional way.

Straight from the get-go, Max knew that he needed to spend some time devising a technique that would allow him to complete the challenge on time, even if that set him back a few hours.

He understood he was on the clock and that he had no time to really waste, however, he also knew that aimlessly working towards his goal was not going to help him achieve it.

His current method to condense the soul essence needed mastery over the void, darkness and gravity elements to some extent for the technique to work.

The soul existed in a semi-fourth dimension and for any force to interact or work on it, one needed to first interact with it in its own dimension using the void energy.

Then one needed to compress the soul by using extreme gravitational pressure, the kind which would usually only happen at the core of stars, however, doing so released immense amounts of energy which needed to be neutralized using the darkness element and recycled to fuel the gravitational force.

It was a complicated and intricate process that could only process about 5 cubic centimeters of soul at once and produced a single drop of soul essence at the end.

According to Bavuma, this metric was the absolute peak of what one could produce safely as if one tried to process a larger volume of gas at once, then the resulting shockwave from its compression would result in an energy wave that could slice through dimensions and distort reality which was why he highly suggested against doing so.

Max understood that he needed to at least process 22 cubic centimeters of soul vapors at once to produce 4.4ml of soul essence every 15 minutes to hit the target within 14 days and hence he tried to add the tier10 barrier technique to the soul compression process so that even if the fourth dimension was broken apart, the energy would not break past the tier10 barrier and could still be processed even if it meant suffering a slight energy loss in the process.

It was a radical idea and to do it continuously was going to put Max's brain under a lot of stress since he would be constantly dealing with tier10 moves while performing a delicate balance with dangerous energies, however, it was the only way that Max saw to the finish line and he was determined to do so. Upon putting his theory to practice, the first round ended in a complete failure since Max was unable to produce the necessary compression needed to liquify the soul, however, he did prevent the energy from leaking beyond the pink tier10 barrier which was at least a good thing.

A few modifications and tweaks to the compression technique later, Max yielded a result where was able to compress 3.6 ml for every 13 minutes that went by and by his calculations it was barely enough to finish the quest in time.

This speed gave him a margin of error of failing only twice everyday as even if he wasted 26 minutes everyday, he would fail the quest in total, making the margin of error next to none.

With 6 hours already passing since the test started, Max wasted not a single second more and turned his absolute attention to the process of compression as he was determined to not make a single mistake in his formulation.

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( Meanwhile, the vampire monarchy )

The various vampire lords were unhappy with Max's verdict on their refusal to participate in the final war.

Now that the biggest threat to vampire society was removed, nobody wanted to break away from the vampire society as a whole since they understood that together they were powerful and prosperous but alone they were weak. However, they also did not wish to be pushed down the clan rankings and be slapped with higher taxes just because they did not put their faith in the king.

Now that Max killed Dracula a being that was stronger than Regus Aurelius, nobody had the guts to declare a direct war on him, nor did they have the guts to rebel since they knew that their own citizens would not stand for it, however, the idea of giving up their lordship and stepping down for someone else to take their mantle was also difficult to digest as power was like a drug and it was not easy to relinquish what you once had.

Nonetheless, as news about the Lady Julia Caesar stepping down as clan Matriarch spread, many others followed suit and soon 22/25 lord's who did not follow Max into battle submitted to his punishment.

The remaining three were too proud to bow and wished to weather out the storm to get back into Max's good graces once this incident became old and forgotten, however, they had grossly underestimated Max's threats as the very next day after the deadline of them relinquishing power expired, the Bloodfall army stood at their door and declared them rebels, whereas the church of cowards organized a mass public protest against the ruling clan.

Entire palaces were burnt and the ruling clan were tomatoe'd through the streets with their personal wealth and territories seized through force.

There was no opportunity given to them to comply once the deadline passed as ruling through an iron fist, Max punished all those who did not fall in line in the worst way possible, earning the title ' Iron Fist Max ' from the common people.