My new workshop had its advantages, but it also came with a couple of drawbacks—other than placing me directly under the thumb of the local Sovereign, of course. While taking care of the room’s plants had the potential to raise my wood affinity, it was guaranteed to cut into my practice time. Also, being located behind that maze of overgrown corridors meant that every time I wanted to give my teammates an alchemy lesson, I needed to spend precious hours trudging up and down the mountain.
If I wanted any hope of raising my wood affinity, there wasn’t much that could be done about this first concern, but thankfully, Enkhtuya had already taken care of the latter.
My teammates had all been moved to the floor right below me, and a short tunnel connected our workshops together, giving us quick access to one another’s rooms. Their new accommodations weren’t quite at the level of what I had been given, but they were still among the best workshops the Palace had to offer.
Still, while having our rooms so close together would make it easier for us to work together, I was worried that I didn’t have enough time for everything I needed to do. How was I supposed to raise my alchemy skills to the point where I could defeat anything Jon’s blessing might throw at me while also training my teammates and taking care of a room full of plants?
The moment I asked myself this question, I laughed. The answer seemed so obvious.
When Mandakh and the others entered my workshop, they were greeted by a rather strange sight. I opened the door, welcomed them inside, and guided them to the room's sitting area. Then, I went back to tending the room’s plants, completely ignoring them.
Simultaneously, ‘I’ sat on one of the room’s plush chairs in a meditative posture, waiting for everyone to arrive. Once my teammates were all in position, ‘I’ smiled at them. “Thank you for taking the time to meet with me. I’ll keep this short.”
‘I’ gestured over to where I was taking care of the room’s plants. “Compared to my alchemy skills, my horticulture skills are somewhat lacking. So, if I want the plants in this room to survive, I’ll need to spend at least a couple of hours a day tending to them. That’s time I don’t want to waste. This avatar of mine is incorporeal, so I can’t use it to perform alchemy myself, but I can use it to give one of you a lesson while I tend to my plants.”
Originally, having an avatar that could interact with others while my real body was focused on an intricate task of its own would have been impossible. However, after several years of using eight different avatars to monitor eight separate alchemists, my ability to control them had increased significantly. Giving all my teammates simultaneous independent lessons would still be rather difficult, but giving one person a lesson while my real body focused on a bit of gardening was well within my capabilities.
As soon as I finished talking, Mandakh cupped his fists and bowed his head. “Thank you for your guidance, Teacher. I have been attempting to master a new Rank 6 technique, and I could use your assistance. Also, I have a few questions about a passage that I recently read in the Soul Cultivation Library.”
Mandakh might have had his faults, but I had to give the man credit for one thing. He never passed up on an opportunity to grow stronger.
I remained locked away in my workshop as the months passed me by with ever-increasing frequency.
My gains during this time were barely worth mentioning. After several millennia of growth, a few extra years of occasional soul cultivation barely had any effect, and while I continued to improve my ability to make highly-patterned Rank 5 pills, these improvements didn’t have much real-world value.
That said, this lack of progress was mostly due to the fact that, whenever I felt my cultivation base stabilize, I entered seclusion and pushed for the next breakthrough. When Enkhtuya gave me this room, the competition against Jon was five years away, and I was a first-level Martial King. So, I began advancing slightly faster than was advisable and broke through to Peak King after only two years.
Then, I swallowed a Rank 5 Cicada Pill, wiping out my cultivation base in its entirety.
Considering that I was in a rush to reach Peak Emperor before the upcoming competition, destroying my cultivation base like this was risky, but my Rank 9 pill furnace was my most important trump card. I needed to be as powerful as possible.
Luckily, this risk was mitigated by the way Cicada Pills worked on Rulers. They only drained a person of qi—they didn’t destroy a person’s core or restore the world’s chains. So, all I had to do was climb back up to Peak Grandmaster, and my cultivation base would be completely restored.
As I worked on this, a thought popped into my mind.
What if, after taking a Cicada Pill, I went in and pulled apart my karmic core, allowing the energy to dissipate? To all appearances, I would be nothing more than a simple mortal, but with the chains of the world still broken, I would still have the full power of a King’s will-lock. I should also retain a Martial King’s 500-year lifespan.
Would there be any point to this? Maybe not, but it made me wonder if any of the ‘mortals’ in the City of Selfless Courage were hidden Emperors who had destroyed their cores. This idea held intriguing possibilities for the future, but at the moment, I needed to focus on the task in front of me.
After consuming the Cicada Pill, I spent six months carefully restoring my cultivation base. Then, I pushed forward and broke through to Martial Emperor.
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With only two and a half years to go, I put aside the idea of rushing forward to Peak Emperor. Making a few extra minor breakthroughs would be useful, but improving my understanding of patterned Rank 6 pills was far more important.
While I was hard at work, doing everything I could to prepare for my showdown against Jon, my teammates… had concerns of their own.
For the most part, I didn’t pay much attention to this. The four of them had their own plans and goals, and as long as they were diligent in the workshop, I couldn't care less what they got up to outside of it. However…
Mandakh… Mandakh wasn’t a problem
, not exactly. But… Well… Even though Mandakh was an urgan, I got the sense that his mentor had given him the same lecture that Chan had given me. Unlike me, though, Mandakh was fully on board with the idea of leaving a flourishing clan behind when he went off to join the Temple.His first target for this was Lau CoiHung. However, when she didn’t return his advances, he switched his focus to the other female member of our group… and the young woman who didn’t make the cut for our final team… and several other young women in the Palace.
He never forced anything, but whenever a talented young woman gave him the time of day, he would do his best to… pull them into his clan.
Why target so many? Because, “A powerful man should have three wives and four concubines. Anything less, and my ancestors would never forgive me.”
This behavior worried me, but as long as it didn’t affect his performance, I would hold my peace. I had more important things to focus on.
During the competition between the Palaces, we would only be allowed to concoct Rank 6 pills. So, if I wanted to achieve the highest score possible, I would need to concoct a nine-patterned version of the most valuable Rank 6 pill.
This was, unfortunately, far more difficult than I had been hoping.
As a general rule, to successfully concoct a nine-patterned pill using one of the common, basic recipes, an alchemist needed their affinities to be two stars higher than the Rank of the pill. To concoct a nine-patterned Rank 1 pill, one needed seven-star affinities. To concoct a nine-patterned Rank 2 pill, one needed six-star affinities. So, to concoct a nine-patterned Rank 6 pill, one would usually need two-star affinities.
I had sensed movement in my wood affinity, and I could only assume this meant my latent talent was being converted into essence—or something like that—but even if my new workshop room could somehow grant me a two-star wood affinity, I didn’t have any way to acquire similar affinities for any other elements.
Therefore, if I wanted to be able to concoct a nine-patterned Rank 6 pill, my only option was to use a better recipe.
With my ‘complete’ recipes, I only needed affinities that were one step higher than the Rank of the pill that I was trying to make. Concocting the most difficult of Rank 6 pills with high three-star affinities would still be difficult, but with the help of my pill furnace, it should be possible.
The only problem was that Rank 6 herbs were incredibly valuable, so purchasing enough to develop a brand-new Rank 6 pill recipe was extremely expensive. Sovereign Enkhtuya was able to help me gain access to the herbs I needed, but I still had to pay for them.
To brew thousands of worthless pots of Rank 6 tea, I was forced to sell hundreds of valuable pills. This, again, ate into my practice time, but I at least didn’t need to brew all the tea myself. I could let the Palace’s attendants do that. I just needed to check each pot with my ability and note down the results.
Using this setup to improve the recipe for Ascension Pills, however, was still a problem. While a few of the herbs in these pills were rare and difficult to grow, they could
be grown, so they could be purchased. I just needed a sufficient number of spirit stones. The final component of this pill, however, was significantly more difficult to acquire.Rank 6 Ascension Pills required the carcass of a Peak Rank 5 demon beast that had ascended by feasting on the flesh of cultivators. With the Heroes Domain in a constant struggle against such beasts, these carcasses were available, but they weren’t common. So, considering the importance of Ascension Pills, the idea of wasting thousands of these carcasses on worthless teas was anathema to pretty much every cultivator in the entire domain.
Thankfully, after a few experiments, I found that the carcasses weren’t actually necessary.
Ascension Pills might have been powered by the energy from beast carcasses, but that energy was almost entirely raw. It didn’t form any part of the pill’s structure. So, I was able to test out herbal teas using pure herbs. I only needed to use a beast carcass when concocting a complete, working pill.
Improving the recipe for Ascension Pills was still difficult, since none of the effects that my ability listed were anything even remotely close to “allows cultivators to ascend”—they were, instead, all focused around energy control. However, over time, I was eventually able to start making a few improvements. I wasn’t able to do much, but I would take whatever advantages I could get.
As a bonus, this work gave me an excellent idea for how to approach the team portion of the alchemy competition. After performing a few simple tests, I ran down the mountain and found Tuguldor, the refiner who had once destroyed my moon spade.
When I gave him a detailed diagram of the pill furnace that I wanted him to make, he looked at me like I was crazy. But when I handed him a storage bag filled with spirit stones, he accepted the diagram without a word of complaint.
This done, all that was left for me to do was figure out how to purchase a few demon beast carcasses that contained element energy. As far as I could tell, the only ‘legitimate’ source of such carcasses was the Nine Rivers’ Zhu Clan, but considering the value of such beasts, they would almost certainly be available on the black market somewhere—as long as one was willing to pay the price.
Four and a half years after I started training in my new workshop, during just a normal, average day, I was tending to the room’s plants when I felt the world around me freeze. Then, it shattered, and I was flooded with countless new sensations.
Hunger. Thirst. Cold. Hot. Dark. Bright.
Whenever I turned my head, new feelings poured into my mind.
This strange state only lasted a few seconds, but those few seconds left me terrified. What had happened? Had someone attacked me? Could it have been some form of soul attack?
After several minutes of frantically searching my surroundings, I noticed another anomaly. When I studied the nearby plants, I could almost feel what they needed from me.
This sensation wasn’t entirely new. After caring for these plants for several years, I had begun to develop a strange connection with them, but now… something had changed. And it had changed suddenly, with no warning.
A thought crept into my mind, and before I even had time to process what I was doing, I pulled out one of the affinity orbs that I had gotten from the Nine Rivers Continent and flooded it with qi.
After I constricted my acupoints, the chaotic lines in the orb resolved into the image of a tree, and as more of my energy poured into the orb, this tree rapidly changed colors.
Low five-star wood affinity. Low four-star. Low three-star. Mid three-star. High three-star. Peak three-star. Then… the color of the tree shifted from a bright blue to a dark violet.
Low two-star.
How? I had no idea. But, somehow… Somehow, it was true.