Emperor Chan led me to an alchemy workshop hidden deep beneath the mountain's roots. Unlike the Palace’s other workshops, there were no side rooms, no sitting area, and no bookshelves—there were no comforts of any kind. It held only one thing: a colossal metal construct that was only barely recognizable as a pill furnace.

Its base was a cylinder that was large enough to hold a horse—not a mundane, mortal horse, either. A proper, full-sized demon horse.

Atop this cylinder, on a short pedestal, was an unadorned metal box that more closely resembled an ordinary pill furnace. However, the pipe that connected the top of the cylinder to the bottom of this box told me that these were two parts of a single device.

“Normal pill furnaces cannot be used to concoct Ascension Pills,” explained Emperor Chan. “They aren’t large enough to hold the necessary ingredients.”

Walking forward, Chan opened a porthole on the side of the cylinder, giving him access to the space inside. Then, reaching into his storage bag, he pulled out a jade coffin that contained the carcass of a massive boar.

“The core ingredient of every Ascension Pill is the carcass of a demon beast. Rank 4 Ascension Pills require a Peak Rank 3 demon beast. Rank 5 pills require Peak Rank 4 beasts. And, Rank 6 pills require Peak Rank 5 beasts. The type of beast you use doesn’t matter, but with Rank 5 and 6 pills, you must only use beasts that ascended by consuming the flesh of cultivators. Using a beast that ascended through the use of karmic energy will only result in a powerful explosion that you’d be lucky to survive.”

Outwardly, I nodded silently at Chan’s explanation, but internally, several questions were flitting through my mind.

Ascension Pills were a form of beast alchemy.

I had been under the assumption that I was the first person to discover beast alchemy, but this was clearly not the case. In retrospect, I could see that this assumption had been rather silly. If the Sovereigns on the Nine Rivers Continent were so eager to learn more about how to use beasts in alchemy, then they had to already know that some form of beast alchemy was possible.

Setting this issue aside, I focused on more important questions.

Why had Chan thrown an entire carcass into the furnace? In my experience, beast alchemy was typically done by first extracting the parts of a beast that contained the specific energy structures one wanted. Then, usually, these parts had to be processed in some way before they could be used to concoct a pill. The idea that Chan would just chuck an intact carcass into the furnace was baffling.

Also, it didn’t matter what type of beast one used? That didn’t make any sense at all. Beast parts were just medicinal ingredients—the same as herbs. This was like suggesting that one could substitute a wood herb with some random metal herb. Such an idea was absurd.

I allowed these thoughts to run through my head, but I didn’t voice them. I might be able to use my knowledge to improve upon whatever Emperor Chan was showing me, but that would come later. First, I needed to learn what my mentor had to teach. The source of thɪs content is novel-fire.net

After sealing the carcass of a Rank 3 boar in the bottom cylinder, Emperor Chan leapt up to the metal box on its roof and activated the giant furnace’s formations, causing an energy barrier to appear around the bottom cylinder’s inner chamber. Then, the formations released a wave of fire qi, incinerating the carcass in mere seconds. Once the carcass was little more than ash, a Qi Gathering Formation drained the inner chamber of energy, venting it into the surrounding environment.

Because of the filters on this formation, however, it only expelled the cylinder’s qi. The beast’s wu remained trapped within the barrier.

As a means of separating wu from a demon beast, this worked, but it seemed less than ideal. Burning away the carcass so violently would have damaged whatever medicinal properties the wu might have had, and mixing all the wu together like this would have destroyed whatever was left. Having been extracted from a beast, it would still be more structured than environmental wu or the energy that one might get from a spirit fire, but I doubted that such fragmented energy could have much of a medicinal effect.

Atop the cylinder, Emperor Chan activated the formations on the metal box, heating its inner chamber. As he did this, the energy barrier in the cylinder contracted, condensing the wu trapped within it.

When the bubble of energy was barely larger than the pipe that led up to the metal box, Chan pulled out a dozen Rank 4 herbs, stuffed them into the furnace, and began purifying them. Most of these were common ingredients that could be found in any number of pills, but a few of them were rare herbs that I had seen but had never actually used. Nearly all of the Palace’s Emperors supported my research into medicinal teas, but these herbs were among the rare few that they hadn’t been willing to waste.

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Once all the herbs were prepared, Chan merged them together, forming two structures that resembled two halves of a complete sphere.

So far, all of this was skillfully done, and it was clear that Chan was a talented Pill Emperor. So, I had to wonder why he had told me that he couldn’t make an Ascension Pill with more than two patterns. Even if he didn’t have the proper recipe for a six-patterned version, concocting a three-patterned pill should have been easy for him.

My confusion was resolved by what came next.

Using some kind of soul technique, Chan reached down into the bottom cylinder and pulled the wu up, through the pipe, and into the metal box to join the medicinal energy from his herbs.

This was only partially successful, however, as it was immediately obvious that Emperor Chan had absolutely no affinity for whatever type of energy the demon beast had possessed. Considering that, when I studied this energy, I didn’t even know what kind of wu it might be, Chan’s lack of affinity for it was understandable. But this only made me wonder why he hadn’t chosen to use something simpler, like fire wu.

With a ‘normal’ pill, this wouldn’t have been an option, since ingredients had to be carefully chosen. But Chan had already said that, with Ascension Pills, the type of beast didn’t matter. So, why use one that was filled with an exotic form of energy?

Whatever the reason, I knew that explanations would come later, so I just stood back and watched.

Emperor Chan was able to manhandle most of the wu from the bottom cylinder up to the metal box, but due to his inept handling, he lost a large portion of it in the process. Once it was there, he formed the wu into a tight ball, then surrounded this ball with the two half-spheres of medicinal energy that he had made previously.

I couldn’t help but wince as barely contained wu leaked out and corroded the medicinal energy around it, but once both half-spheres were in place, they locked together and prevented the wu from causing any further damage.

Taking a deep breath, Emperor Chan concentrated and pulled the medicinal energy together, giving it its first pattern.

As energy erupted from the medicinal energy, it interacted with the ball of wu, causing the contained energy to lash out. Chan used a soul technique to suppress this wu, but without an affinity to help him, he was struggling.

Pulling the medicinal energy tighter, Chan forced it to take on its second pattern.

This released a second burst of energy, but before it could cause the wu to go wild, Chan shoved with all his strength, forcing the energy to condense into a pill.

The moment the pill was fully formed, it wanted to fall to the bottom of the furnace, but before it could, Chan reached in and snatched it, preventing it from dropping down the pipe and into the cylinder below. Then, he showed it to me.

The whole scene was… somewhat pathetic. Chan was a talented Pill Emperor, but he had a satisfied look on his face after having concocted a simple Rank 4 pill.

“Why didn’t you use a beast with energy that you could better control?”

Chan shook his head, sadly. “It’s not that easy, I’m afraid. Beasts cultivate entirely unique forms of energy. That boar I used cultivated ‘hoof’ energy. Even if I had a latent hoof talent, how would I train it? I don’t have hooves.”

I furrowed my brow. “But… why not just use a beast that cultivated fire wu?”

“Because they don’t exist.” Chan paused and backed up. “No, that’s not right. I’ve heard the Nine Rivers Domain has a way of breeding such beasts, but I don’t know of anyone in the Heroes Domain who has been able to copy them. Unless we’re willing to import beasts at exorbitant prices, we can only use what’s available, and none of the beasts I’ve seen—neither those from the Isle of Beasts nor those from the Domain’s Secret Realms—have any form of energy that’s usable by humans.”

“I see…”

As I bobbed my head silently in thought, Emperor Chan continued his explanation.

“Without affinities, creating highly patterned Ascension Pills is all about the strength of one’s soul. Even as a four-hundred-year-old Martial Emperor, my soul is only strong enough to concoct this two-patterned pill. I can sometimes concoct Rank 5 pills, but I’m not capable of imbuing them with any patterns, and Rank 6 pills are far beyond me. This is why I need… someone like you. Someone whose soul is… unusually powerful.”

Even putting aside the hundreds of demon beasts that lived within my inner world, using the System to purchase one of these beast-specific affinities would be simple enough. So, concocting a high-quality Ascension Pill shouldn’t pose any problem at all. But I had to wonder about these beast-specific affinities. Would a ‘hoof affinity’ be of any use to me? It would obviously be useful for beast alchemy, but was that it? Probably, but I couldn’t help but wonder what I might be able to do with ‘hoof qi.’

In any case, as I studied Emperor Chan’s pill and thought through his concoction process, I figured out the answers to my previous questions.

Why had he used the entire carcass instead of the specific parts that had the exact structures he needed? Why had he said the type of beast didn’t matter?

Because nothing about the specifics of the wu he had used mattered. The Ascension Pill was just a carrier for unstructured wu in a semi-refined state. It didn’t actually take advantage of any of the energy’s medicinal properties.

Was this why the Central Continent was having such a hard time developing real beast alchemy? Had the creation of the Ascension Pill given the alchemists here an entirely wrong understanding of what they were supposed to be doing? I couldn’t be sure, but this explanation seemed plausible. After all, if I had already known about the rather crude process of making Ascension Pills, would I have even contemplated employing some of the complicated procedures that RuLan had invented?

Still, even if Ascension Pills were ‘crude,’ they were able to accomplish something that I had longed for: they allowed cultivators to ascend to Martial Lord without the need for karmic energy.

But… how? Even if the pill created some kind of false core in a person’s body, a core wasn’t what defined a Ruler Tier cultivator. No, ascending as a Ruler was about “breaking the chains of the world.” How did this pill help one accomplish that?

I looked at Emperor Chan, a slight smile crossing my face. “Can I see how it works?”