Chapter 415 – Life 109, Age 37, Martial Emperor 4

With the competition over, Yargui returned me and my team to the Palace in the Heroes Domain. However, we weren’t alone. The young noble that Mandakh had become smitten with, as well as all of Jon’s teammates, joined us. I didn’t have any desire to get close to these women, but I would fulfill Jon’s dying request and offer them my protection.

For Mandakh, Lau CoiHung, and my other two teammates, though, this return didn’t last too long. Shortly after we arrived, they were all whisked away to the Myriad Herb Domain. As Enkhtuya had warned me, two of the five slots that we had won were given to descendants of the urgamal elders. However, I had chosen to remain behind, and Mandakh was being taken as Yargui’s protégé. So, we still had enough open slots for all of my team members to make the journey.

As for myself, the day after my teammates’ departure, Enkhtuya summoned me to her hill atop the mountain’s summit, where she presented me with three storage bags.

“Alchemist Su, these bags come directly from the Temple of the Herb Saint. The first contains a gift that will assist you in your advancement. The second contains samples of every Rank 1 and 2 herb that is native to the Myriad Herb Domain. And the third… The third bag contains corpses.”

A stiff breeze blew across the top of the mountain, yet Enkhtuya’s leaves barely moved. 

“Your first, most important task is to develop a pill that can strengthen the physical body of a tsetseg urgamal—one of the flower-type urgamal. These… ingredients should allow you to get started, but your ultimate goal is to concoct something at the level of a nine-patterned Rank 6 pill. All of the Palace’s resources will be at your disposal. Talk to the head of the Assignment Hall. They will assist you with whatever you require, including coordinating with every Hall and Palace on the Western Island.”

A quick check proved that the supplies the Temple had given me were severely lacking. For any normal pill, they might have been sufficient, but whoever had prepared these ingredients clearly knew nothing about beast alchemy. The bag of… corpses, for example, was almost entirely unusable.

So, I spent the next hour providing Enkhtuya with a detailed list of everything that I would need to make this pill a reality. Under any other circumstances, it would have been more appropriate to discuss such matters with the head of the Assignment Hall. However, considering the obvious importance that the Temple was placing on this pill, I needed to inform Enkhtuya of my concerns directly.

After noting everything down, Enkhtuya finally allowed the mountain’s breeze to touch her leaves and branches. 

“Su Fang, the tallest tree catches the most wind. Word of your capabilities has spread throughout the continent, and factions loyal to several other Saints have already requested your assistance. For now, do not concern yourself with this. The Temple will keep them at bay. All you need to do is focus on developing a flower-strengthening pill as swiftly as possible.”

Even though I still didn’t know why this pill was important, the sheer number of resources that the Temple was willing to commit to its development told me that it could only be for one of two people—either Yargui… or the Saint of Myriad Herbs.

I had never met the Saint before, and while Yargui had appeared amiable enough, I didn’t necessarily have any reason to dedicate my time and energy toward assisting her. However, if the Temple wanted to funnel endless resources into developing this pill, I might as well accept them. 

Also, while a nine-patterned Rank 6 pill was the Temple’s minimum requirement, nothing said that I couldn’t push things even further. Why not use this as an opportunity to let the Temple fund my rise to Pill Sovereign? 

---------------------------------------------------

Upon returning to my workshop, I investigated the herbs that Enkhtuya had given me more closely. I didn’t recognize most of them, but thanks to my herb analysis ability, I was at least able to learn their names and the types of energy they contained.

First, there were herbs of elements that I was familiar with—water, wood, and light. A few of these were slight variations on herbs that I had used ever since first becoming an alchemist, but a few were entirely new to me. Still, even if I had never seen these herbs before, I had enough experience with their elements to have a decent guess as to what their effects might be.

The other herbs, though… Sap, leaf, bark, branch, vine, and growth. Was it even right to call these elements? What effects would a pill concocted from sap-based herbs have? What would leaf-based herbs do?

My goal was to make pills that would strengthen the physical body of flowers. Did that mean I should focus on leaf-based herbs? Flowers didn’t have bark or branches, so would using these herbs be counterproductive?

More concerning than the herbs, though, was the third bag that Enkhtuya had given me. “Corpses,” she had said. Yet, when I opened the bag, all I found was an assortment of trees, shrubs, and flowers. I had been expecting the carcasses of demon beasts, but no, these were corpses. The corpses of dead urgamal.

These urgamal were strange, though. The ones I had met—elders of the Temple, Palace, and Halls—were all using a form of qi-based cultivation. These, however, were using a form of wu-based body cultivation. These were urgamal body cultivators. But if the urgamal had body cultivators, then why were they so concerned about my pills?

This confused me so much that I had to go back up the mountain and confront Enkhtuya.

“These are the followers of the Willow Saint,” she explained. “They are demons born with the ability to cultivate wu. We are born with the ability to cultivate qi. None are able to cultivate both.”

That was… odd, but I reasoned that these urgamal were like demon beasts. They didn’t use a technique to cultivate wu. They did it instinctively. So, it wasn’t something that other urgamal could copy. More strange was the fact that these creatures couldn’t learn to cultivate qi, but, possibly, it was the same situation in reverse.

Still, why wouldn’t normal Strengthening Pills work on urgamal? Even if they hadn’t known about such a pill before the competition, Yargui and the others had seen the ingredients Jon used, and they had watched him make it. Running back to the Temple and concocting one of their own was probably the first thing they did. So, why hadn’t it worked?

Without a better understanding of urgamal biology, I couldn’t answer these questions. Luckily, though, I had the Palace’s Assignment Hall to assist me with this.

There, I set up several missions that would allow me to develop any number of new pill recipes both quickly and easily.

First, I assembled a team of alchemists and taught them everything I could about both herbal teas and beast alchemy. These alchemists were then placed in charge of recording the effects of each tea, breaking down the results to figure out which herb had which effect, and using this information to come up with the next round of teas to be tested.

Then, I recruited a group of servants and gave them the task of collecting, storing, and processing the herbs that we would need. Once a week, they would brew these herbs into hundreds of teas following the instructions of the alchemists, and after these tests were over, they would clean out the pots and prepare them for the following round of experiments.

Next, there were Jon’s former teammates. These women were all highly skilled Pill Emperors, but they didn’t yet have a place in our Palace. So, I tasked them with coordinating both the servants and the alchemists, double-checking the alchemists’ work, and performing a final sign-off on each round of experiments. Basically, I made them my managers, responsible for ensuring that everything continued to run smoothly.

Finally, there were the… test subjects. We needed to know how these teas would affect an actual urgamal, and my analysis ability could only do so much. So, I had the Palace recruit a group of tsetseg urgamal, most of whom ended up being natives of the Myriad Herb Domain who were brought to the Palace to assist us. I didn’t like the idea of testing teas on living beings, even if they were just flowers, but we didn’t have any other choice. If we were going to develop a working pill, we needed to fully understand the effects of our herbs and teas.

With these four groups taking care of everything, all I needed to do was visit the research center once a week, analyze the teas, and read out the results. Everything else was taken care of by my subordinates.

This was efficient, and we made several new teas with promising effects, but unfortunately, we weren’t able to condense a single one of them into a pill.

Partly, this was due to a problem with the urgamal corpses—they were too old. To make a proper beast alchemy pill, one typically needed to process a carcass immediately after the animal’s death. We solved this issue by recruiting wu-based urgamal who willingly donated their leaves, limbs, and sap, but even then, we still weren’t successful. All of the effects were correct—we had teas capable of boosting the strength and durability of any flower-type urgamal—but they just wouldn’t condense into a pill.

Why not? The herbs were correct, and we had identified which parts of the wu-based urgamal we needed, but we couldn’t find the right “useless weeds” that would allow these ingredients to coalesce. I had people from all the Palaces on the Western Island hunting for a solution, but after months of effort, they were still coming up short.

There was no reason to let this stop us, however. We might not have had everything we needed to make a pill, but we did have nearly perfect Rank 1 teas. So, I ordered my people to go ahead and begin work on the Rank 2 teas. And, while they did that, I focused on improving my cultivation base.

---------------------------------------------------

Enkhtuya had said that one of the storage bags contained a ‘gift.’ Upon opening this bag, however, I found that it actually held three gifts: an assortment of plants that I could use to upgrade my workshop, a jade box that held a rather unique spirit fire, and, most important of all, an aged scroll detailing an urgan’s advancement to Martial Sovereign.

The plants were nice. After they were integrated into the walls of my workshop, it would be capable of raising my wood affinity to peak two-star. The latent talent that I had purchased almost certainly wouldn’t be enough to reach this level, but I hadn’t even expected it to reach peak three-star, so what did I know? Either way, I stashed away enough of the seeds in my inner world that I would be able to recreate a similar environment later, when my latent talent was high enough to take advantage of it.

As for the spirit fire… It was the Ashless Pill Fire, an Earth-Rank flame that could consume either matter or energy to produce pure pill qi. Unlike a seed, I couldn’t use this fire to imbue my world with any new or unique Laws, but if the Temple of the Herb Saint was so willing to hand over a copy of the spirit fire, then they were almost certainly holding onto its seed. Eventually, I would need to find a way to get my hands on it and make it my own.

That said, just having a copy of the Earth-Rank spirit fire put my current position into sharper focus, and I no longer worried so much about the Temple or the Palace knowing about my previously purchased Soft Moon Fire. I still wouldn’t reveal its seed, but I didn’t hesitate to pull out a copy of its spirit fire.

With these two flames combined, I had access to as much pill and moon spade qi as I could desire. So, after arranging things with both Jon’s teammates and the Palace’s alchemists, I entered long-term secluded cultivation, leaving only one day each week to analyze the newest batch of teas. 

Five years later, I reached the Peak of the Martial Emperor realm and was ready for my next breakthrough. This was where the final part of the Temple’s gift came into play.

The Saint of Myriad Herbs—and I was absolutely certain that it was the Saint—had sent me the record of an urgan’s advancement to Martial Sovereign. Why? Was it just to keep me safe, or did the Saint already know far more than they were supposed to? Considering that the Saints were supposed to be the “Chosen of Khörs,” I couldn’t rule out the possibility that the Earthly Dao had passed along a bit more information than I would have liked.

In any case, this record told me what I needed to do to advance while keeping my advancement hidden. So, after informing Enkhtuya that I would need several months to consolidate my cultivation base, I journeyed down to the base of the mountain, where a large chamber had already been prepared for me. There, I took out one of the conference rooms that I had procured on the Nine Rivers Continent and activated its formation, blocking any portals from forming within its walls.

It was questionable whether the formations on this room would be able to stop a Spirit or an Ancestor, and they damn sure couldn’t stop a Saint, but limited protections from spying were better than no protection at all.

Once inside, I sat down and tapped into the stores of Sovereign-level karmic energy that I had slowly built up over the past several millennia. Before, I had always chosen to advance using Emperor-level energy, so this would be my first true advancement to Martial Sovereign.

This, however, was going to be slightly different from a ‘normal’ advancement.

First, I filled my core with energy. But then, just as the pressure was about to rip my core apart, I pulled out a long thread of Sovereign-level karmic energy and wrapped it around all of my toxic meridians. Then, with one final shove, I forced the core at the center of my dantian to burst apart.

What this was supposed to do was cause an explosion that destroyed everything it touched—qi, wu, and toxic energy included. Then, the karmic bonds of the energy that I had used were supposed to pull everything back together. This would have given me an entirely new energy body, free of any impurities or toxins that had previously plagued me.

Wrapping my toxic meridians in karmic energy, however, prevented them from being completely destroyed. They were still pulverized and turned into specks of discorporate energy, but these toxic particles were still present when my energy body reformed, causing every inch of what should have been a pristine new body to instead become tainted.

Why would I want to do this? Why would I inject my body with needless toxins?

Because, doing so denatured the karmic energy that formed my new energy body, causing its appearance to become muted. This meant that, without studying me extremely closely, no one would be able to detect my advancement, and no one would have any idea that I had received Sovereign-level energy from some entirely unknown clan.

I would have liked to have undergone a Return before advancing, allowing my furnace to become even more powerful, but doing so would have invited inconvenient questions. With no sign of karmic energy in my energy body, and having only remained secluded for long enough to reset my cultivation base a single time, most people would assume that I had, indeed, used this opportunity to perform Return. Only a handful of the continent’s most powerful cultivators had enough knowledge to understand what I had truly done.

Would this ruse be successful? Maybe not, but for the moment, the fewer people who knew about my advancement, the safer I would be.