Chapter 92: Life 61, Age 35, Martial Grandmaster Peak

Upon returning to the island, my first stop was the Blue Wind Pavilion. The services offered in local Pavilion branches were generally more limited than in the capital, but since North Lake City was home to so many of the kingdom’s craftsmen, it had a robust system to serve the various tradesmen. “Hello, sir. How may I help you today?” asked an attendant as I entered. I felt slightly awkward but tried to appear confident. “I need to purchase a variety of parts from beast carcasses.” “Of course, right this way.” She led me to the back of the shop floor where there were several counters. These counters only held an assortment of jade boxes of various sizes. It seemed that what I needed had to be stored carefully to remain fresh. “This is the selection that we have in stock,” she said. “You can purchase anything here directly, but I must caution you that our selection is somewhat limited. If you need something specific, we may need to place an order with the branch in the capital, and if it is particularly unique, we will need to special order it.” I looked at the labels on the various boxes and saw that they were mostly parts from Rank 1 beasts. These included various parts from flames chickens, chicken heads, chicken wings, and chicken feet, as well as parts of various horses, sheep, bulls, bears, tigers, and several other beasts. The selection of higher parts from higher Rank beasts was much more limited, but my focus was only on Rank 1 anyway. “What about entire carcasses?” I asked her. “We don’t keep those in supply. That’s something that will need to be ordered.” I didn’t know what I needed, and from what I read about beast parts while in the library, they seemed to lose effectiveness relatively quickly. Storing them in Jade boxes helped, but they still couldn’t be maintained indefinitely. I needed to plan to use whatever I bought within a week. Coming to a decision, I returned my focus to the attendant. “Give me one of everything from Rank 1 beasts.” She confirmed my order and began working with the attendant assigned to these counters to arrange it. “Will there be anything else?” she asked once everything was handed over. “Yes, I want to order three complete flame chicken carcasses.” After arranging for delivery of the special order, I went upstairs and searched through the local pavilion library to see if there was anything about using parts from demon beasts in alchemy. As I expected, I didn’t find anything, but I submitted a request to the librarian to see if she could order any books on the topic. I didn’t expect to get any information from the kingdom branches, but I hoped that there might be something available in the main branch. With all my purchases stored away, I returned to the City Lord’s Complex to begin my research. To begin my research, I started with a straightforward idea. Parts for demon beasts were a type of herb. They were a strange herb that I knew nothing about, neither what types of pills they could make nor how to use them to make said pills, but they were definitely some kind of herb. So, I decided to treat them exactly how I would any other herb. Without the pressure from my soul and affinities keeping it in place, the energy expanded rapidly and then vanished in an instant without leaving a trace. I felt like I was on the right track. I had the energy, and I could purify energy. There might have been another way to do it, but as long as I had the energy isolated, I just needed to find the right combination of different energies that would compress down and form a proper pill. Since the energy from the moss bear heart alone wasn’t sufficient, I needed to start investigating other beast parts it could combine with. Rank 1 pills generally did not use the elemental cycle. Most of them focused on combining several herbs of the same element to create a pill, so that was the premise under which I began to experiment. Deciding to make this easy for myself, I chose to first work with wood-aligned parts since that was my highest affinity. I contacted the Pavilion and canceled my order for the chicken carcasses and instead placed an order for multiple parts from Rank 1 wood-aligned beasts. I gave them a sizeable upfront deposit and told them to bring me anything they could. Settling back into my workshop, I got to work. I focused hard on this project for several weeks, but I didn’t make any more progress than I did on the very first day. No matter what combinations of ingredients I tried, when I attempted to compress them into a pill, they all refused to crystalize. After exhausting the possibilities with wood, I tried branching out into the other elements. They were slightly harder to control, but my affinities were high enough that any Rank 1 beast’s energy was still within my capabilities, for the basic elements at least. However, it didn’t matter. No matter what element I tried. None of the energies were willing to condense and form a pill. Deciding to experiment with some other ideas, I started combining parts of different elements. I tried combining them within the elemental cycle. I tried using subsets of elements that were found in other recipes that I’d made in the past. I tried combinations that I thought might work for random reasons. None of this had any effect, and I was never able to make a single pill. This led me to the ultimate conclusion that it was impossible to make a pill from pure demonic energy. Demonic energy had to be usable in pills, but if I was going to use it, some extra ingredients were needed, something to act like a binder. Thinking about it more deeply, I realized a potential mistake. I was trying to make a pill out of demonic energy, but did that make any sense? While I hadn’t heard of making one from demonic energy before, I had also never heard of making pills out of qi. Instead, pills were made from medicinal energy which was a completely distinct form of energy. While demonic likely had different properties, it seemed to be more closely aligned with qi than medicinal energy. That pushed me on another path in my reasoning. There had to be pills that used demonic energy. If that were true, then it was also likely true that pills incorporating qi had to be possible. I remembered what Ouyang MengYao told me about spirit beasts. They were a rare type of beast that had used qi instead of demonic energy. That would mean my question about combining beast taming and alchemy could include both demonic energy pills and qi pills, depending on the beast used. So, how do I create such a pill? It seemed impossible based on all my experiments. Pure demonic energy did not want to form a pill. That meant there must be something missing. I decided that something must be medicinal energy. Instead of only making a pill out of pure demonic energy I began trying to use a blend of demonic and medicinal energies to form a pill. I spent another several weeks on this topic, combining beast parts with various herbs, but in the end, it got me no closer to my goal. Tapping my workbench in thought, I remembered asking the system about purchasing Rank 1 herbalism knowledge long ago. It had a price of 10 million credits, similar to the cost of Rank 1 alchemy. Was this where the trick was hidden? Were there Rank 1 herbs that were as unknown to herbalists as beast parts were to alchemists? If so, it was probably those herbs that I would need if I wanted to successfully concoct a pill using demonic energy. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any more ideas for how to proceed. I didn’t know what would be hidden under that herbalist purchase, and from all my experiments, I had no idea how to incorporate demonic energy. My cultivation technique drove me to focus on this topic, which was the only reason I was able to persist for as long as I had, but even I had a breaking point. After zero progress in my research, I had to call it quits. I had no way to make any further advances. Possibly the only real answer I got from my weeks of research was an answer as to why I had never found any information about using beast parts in alchemy. Such a thing was close to impossible. While this was a letdown, spending time on this topic did accomplish one thing important. It made me spend enough time that my factory building was complete. I wasn’t sure exactly where the Hu clan was in their research of my formation diagrams, but with the factory ready to go, I was ready to start implementing the more basic automated pill production lines.