The Undying Immortal System

My working theory was that medicinal energy was not a unique form of energy. Instead, it was simply a blend of qi and wu. This blended energy was then shaped into specific structures to give medicinal herbs their unique properties.

If this was true, then learning to grow and tend herbs might be entirely unnecessary. If I could fully memorize the correct structure of an herb, then I should be able to create it from nothing but pure energy.

While this opened up some intriguing possibilities, I doubted there would be any way to exploit this knowledge in practice. Aside from the difficulty involved in fully memorizing an herb’s energy structure, the time and effort required to recreate it from scratch would be hard to justify. How long would it take me to meticulously reconstruct the energy pattern of a blue peony? Also, why do this myself when I can have a plant do it for me?

Still, while there may or may not be a way to exploit this knowledge directly, it potentially gave me the information I needed to finally make a breakthrough in learning to use parts from demon beasts in alchemy.

The key was that medicinal energy wasn’t a unique form of energy. It was structured qi and wu.

When I had attempted to use beast parts long ago, I had focused on the parts of the body that had the highest concentration of demonic energy. For demonic flame chickens, these were the claws and beak since those were what they used for attack and defense. However, just because these were the parts with the most abundant energy didn’t mean that these were the parts with the most structured energy, and structure was what I needed.

To test this, I needed access to demon beast carcasses. While a few members of my clan had begun raising animals to learn beast taming, it would still be some time yet before our herds were large enough that we could slaughter them for research purposes.

In my mind, ideally, I would use Peak Rank 1 demon beasts when concocting a Rank 1 pill, but after a bit of looking around, I found that such beasts were extremely scarce in the Wastes. While there were farmers who raised livestock for food, these were all simple mortal animals.

As I soon found out, the lack of true demon beasts wasn’t a function of the animals the farmers raised or the environment in the Wastes. Instead, it was because the farmers ruthlessly slaughtered any animal that showed signs of absorbing demonic energy.

The reason for this was rather simple. If a farmer’s chicken somehow advanced to Mid-Rank 1, it would be powerful enough to kill an entire village of normal mortals. If it advanced to Rank 2, then only a Martial Master would be able to stop it.

That being the case, I needed to look elsewhere for my research materials.

Fortunately, Mount Jiang wasn’t too far from the eastern border of the Wastes, and I was able to reach the Red Sun Kingdom, part of the Rising Sun Empire, in less than a day. After crossing the border, I searched the various villages in the area for farmers with high-quality livestock.

Unfortunately, the average farmer in the Red Sun Kingdom felt the same way about their animals turning into demon beasts that the farmers in the Wastes did. While cultivators were more common in the kingdom, and while these cultivators tended to have deeper cultivation bases, the majority of the people in these villages were still normal mortals who were unable to deal with even Mid-Rank 1 demon beasts. So, even in the kingdom, allowing one’s livestock to cultivate was not just reckless, it was a crime.

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Therefore, I needed to find a farm that specialized in rearing demon beasts. I needed a farm owned and operated by trained beast tamers. I needed the Red Hen Farms.

While there weren’t any other alchemists out there attempting to source demon beasts for alchemy purposes, the fact that consuming meat from a demon beast could improve one’s constitution meant that anyone who had sufficient money would do their best to dine on demon beast meat as often as possible. More powerful, wealthier patrons preferred to dine on the meat of wild high-Rank beasts, but such meals were far out of a normal person’s price range. Instead, they relied on various beast tamer-run farms to produce ample, low-cost meals that even a moderately wealthy mortal could afford.

Red Hen Farms was the largest supplier of such beasts for Red Sun City, the capital city of the Red Sun Kingdom.

After meeting with one of the farm’s representatives, I chose to start by purchasing 15 Peak Rank 1 flame chickens, 10 hens and 5 roosters. They had a few other animals for sale as well, but I held off for the moment as I didn’t want to spread my attention too thin.

The farm offered to slaughter and prepare these chickens for me, but I declined. Aside from any concerns with spoilage, I didn’t want to risk the energy in these animals being depleted. Without knowing which parts were important or how to preserve them, it was better to keep the animals alive until I was ready to use them, so I brought them back and left them in the care of my clan’s beast tamers.

Finally, with ‘ingredients’ in hand, I got to work.

To keep things from getting too messy, I didn’t go directly to an alchemy workshop. Instead, I went to a nearby village and paid a few coins to commandeer a mortal’s slaughterhouse. RÅ

Then, before beginning my work, I took some time to closely examine the flame chicken as it moved about and ate some grains. As I had seen in the past, most of its energy was contained in its claws and beak, but this energy didn’t have the rigid structure that I had come to associate with most medicinal herbs. It could be used to send out gouts of flames, but it felt raw and uncontrollable.

With this thought in mind, I ‘put the bird to sleep,’ and then started dissecting it while looking for anything that more closely resembled what I would expect from a medicinal herb.

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Most of the chicken’s internal organs had trace amounts of demonic energy coursing through them, but like with the beak and claws, none of it appeared to be structured in a usable form. The more I cut the bird apart, the more disappointed I felt. Nothing I found, from comb to cloaca, none of it looked usable in alchemy.

However, just as I was about to give up, I stumbled upon exactly what I was looking for.

After cutting open the bird’s gizzard, I found several small stones. The energy contained in these stones was extremely limited, but it had the structure I was looking for.

Later, when talking to one of my clan’s beast tamers, I found out that the chickens used these stones to grind up their food. After they became true demonic beasts, these stones would help them convert the demonic energy in their feed into a form that could be more easily absorbed by their bodies.

Gizzard stones in hand, I wanted to rush to an alchemy workshop and see what I could do with them, but I held myself in check. I had found one potential ingredient, but there might still be others hidden away somewhere.

However, after cutting open and searching every organ, I still didn’t find anything else that looked usable. I thought I was out of luck, but that was when I noticed a few puddles of dried blood.

I had already noticed that chicken blood had a decent amount of demonic energy in it, but it was no more structured than any other energy. What I hadn’t realized, though, was that as this blood congealed, the energy it contained transformed into a state that looked like it might be usable.

With no other potential demon beast herb in sight, I collected the gizzard stones and a small bucket of blood and headed to an alchemy workshop.

As a preliminary test, I took one of the gizzard stones and tried to use it to create a pill on its own.

I first burned away its physical shell, leaving only faint traces of demonic energy behind, and then used my fire affinity to condense this energy into a pill. To my surprise, the energy did condense, but the final product was a worthless pebble without even the faintest hint of medicinal energy.

I next tried doing the same thing with a portion of chicken blood, but the result was the same, a worthless pebble.

Then, I tried combining the two energies together. However, the energies from the chicken blood and gizzard stones resisted fusing in any way. When I used my high affinity to overpower them and force the issue, the structure of these energies simply broke apart.

After a few more basic experiments, I began to get a sense of what was going on.

The medicinal energy in pills was a blend of qi and wu. This was true even of Basic Qi Gathering Pills. The blue peonies cultivated by Bao in the Verdant Forest Sect were weak and fragile from a lack of wu in their medicinal energy, but they still had to have had some amount of wu in them. Otherwise, when I condensed the energy into a pill, it would have evaporated. The energy needed a portion of wu to retain its physical form.

Making a pill out of pure qi wouldn’t work.

Likewise, if I tried to make a pill out of pure wu, there would be a problem with its energy. It would want to completely solidify instead of staying in a usable form. So, while the highly concentrated wu found in demonic beasts might be usable, I needed to pair it with other ingredients that contained a modicum of qi.

With this in mind, I turned my attention to finding herbs that I could combine with chicken blood to form a viable pill, but this was far more difficult than I thought it would be.

Typically, if I encountered a new herb, I could get a good sense of what other herbs might mix well with it just by looking at it. I might not know exactly what an herb did, but healing herbs, for example, had a particular feel to them based on the mix and structure of their medicinal energy. If I saw a new herb with healing properties, I would be able to identify it pretty easily, and then, I would just need to try matching it up with other healing herbs.

Dealing with this chicken blood was a different story. Its energy structure was entirely new to me, and I had no clue what it could be used for, so I had no idea which herbs would pair well with it. All I could do was try random herbs and see if anything worked.

Over the next several months, I performed countless experiments. I tried combining chicken blood with every Rank 1 and 2 herb I could get my hands on, but nothing worked. The demonic energy in the blood simply refused to combine with the medicinal energy in the herbs. I could sometimes force the issue, but the result was never a usable pill.

I was still missing something.

By this point, Bao had completed the initial phase of cultivating the Path through the Silent Night technique, and he was eager to return to his work with herbalism. In a vain hope that his blessing might be able to save me, I showed Bao the gizzard stones and chicken blood, but as expected, he wasn’t able to pull any information from them.

I was nearing my wits end, and I was about ready to give up. Purchasing the information Rank 1 beast alchemy from the System would cost me nearly nothing at this point, and it was looking like that might be the only way I would ever learn what I was doing wrong.

I didn’t want to give up. I wanted to figure this out on my own. But it was starting to look like that wasn’t going to happen.

However, with Bao coming out of seclusion and returning to his study of herbalism, I had an excuse to step back and focus on other topics for a time. Instead of allowing my alchemy studies to consume me, I shifted to help Bao with herbalism.Nôv(el)B\\jnn

While Bao was starting to get his soul under control, I didn’t want him to put it under too much pressure too soon, so I asked him to focus on perfecting Rank 1 herbs instead of growing anything more powerful.

In a flash of inspiration, I remembered the stock of rare and valuable seeds that I had collected over the years. There weren’t many Rank 1 seeds in the bunch, but these seeds, most of which focused on the secondary elements, might provide new and interesting challenges for Bao.

After planting these Rank 1 seeds, Bao worked with me to improve my plant growth formation. He had multiple complaints about what I had put together earlier, and he requested several changes that could help him maintain the plants without needing to exert himself so much.

As we worked on the formation, the days began to slip by, and the plants in his garden quickly grew.

Most of these were common enough herbs, but one stood out to me. It wasn’t that this herb was rare or unusual. It was that it was a common weed found nearly everywhere in the Wastes with no medicinal properties to speak of. I had no idea why I even had the seeds for such a plant. When had I collected it?

After checking the various bags in my storage space, I found that this seed had come from an old, tattered canvas sack. It wasn’t a bag of seeds that I had collected myself. It was a bag that had been given to me by SuYin at the end of my time in the Eight Flower Kingdom.

Looking at the weed in Bao’s garden, I noticed that he had been able to impart a faint wisp of medicinal energy into it. While I was certain this herb didn’t usually have medicinal properties, its energy in it felt faintly familiar. It was somewhat similar to the energy found in red lichen, a common fire-based herb used in certain healing pills.

On a hunch, I harvested this weed, ran to an alchemy workshop, and attempted to combine it with a portion of red lichen and a block of congealed chicken blood.

My heart was pounding in my chest when the three ingredients combined to form a small red pill.

At that moment, an alarm sounded in my mind.

System Alert: A novel pill recipe has been created.

Rank 1 Strengthening Pill. Would you like to submit this recipe to the Dao?