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 official teammates, joined us. While I didn’t have any desire to get close to these women, I would fulfill Jon’s dying request and provide them what protection I could.

For Mandakh, Lau CoiHung, and my other two teammates, this return didn’t last long. Shortly after we arrived, all four of them were 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 had been taken in as Yargui’s protégé, so there were still plenty of slots to go around.

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—the flower-type urgamal. These ingredients should allow you to get started, but your ultimate goal is to concoct a nine-patterned Rank 6 pill. All of the Palace’s resources are at your disposal, and the head of the Assignment Hall can help you coordinate with every Hall and Palace on the Western Island.”

As I accepted these storage bags, 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, however, 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.

After all, while a nine-patterned Rank 6 pill was the Temple’s minimum requirement, nothing said that I couldn’t push things further. Why not use this 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 them before, I had enough experience with their elements to have a decent guess as to what their effects would 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 a pill that would strengthen the physical body of a flower. 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 energy 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 enough 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.

Returning to my workshop, I sat down and focused on the task in front of me.

Why wouldn’t normal

Strengthening Pills work on urgamal? Even if they hadn’t known about such a pill before, 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. 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 teas, 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.

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Then, I recruited a group of servants and gave them the task of collecting, storing, and processing all 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 from the Myriad Herb Domain 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 wanted to develop a working pill, then we needed to fully understand the effects of our herbs and teas.

Once these teams were set up, 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, and we were able to brew teas capable of boosting an urgamal’s strength and durability, 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 she gave me contained a ‘gift.’ Upon opening this bag, however, I found that it actually held threegifts: 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 willing to hand over a copy of this spirit fire, then they almost certainly had 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 about the Temple or the Palace knowing about my previously purchased Soft Moon Fire. I still didn’t want to reveal the 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, exiting only once a 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 rather interesting 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 also 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.

The formations on this room probably wouldn’t 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 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 until it was on the verge of rupturing. Then, I pulled out a thread of karmic energy and wrapped it carefully around each of my toxic meridians, binding them together in a faint, golden glow. Only when that was complete did I send a final surge of energy into my core, forcing it to burst apart.

Normally, this explosion would destroy everything it touched—qi, wu, and toxic energy included. Then, the karmic bonds of the energy that I had used during my advancements would pull everything back together, giving me an entirely new body, free from any of the 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 fill my body with these needless toxins?

Because, doing so denatured the karmic energy that formed this new energy body, causing its appearance to become muted. This meant that, without studying me 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.