Chapter 69: [Five Elements Flesh-Refinement Pill]
After returning to the city, Alaric was accompanied by Hundao, who was visibly embarrassed by recent events. Without pausing to address the situation or discuss what had happened, Alaric immediately immersed himself in his alchemical pursuits, focusing entirely on his work.
Meanwhile, he entrusted Eva with the responsibility of managing any issues or unexpected situations that might arise in his absence, relying on her to keep everything under control.
Over the course of a week, Alaric maintained his reclusive routine, rarely leaving the confines of his alchemy chamber. During this time, Eva made several thoughtful gestures, sending him a variety of gifts that reflected her understanding of his interests and needs.
One evening, Alaric sat cross-legged on the cold, stony floor of his alchemy room, surrounded by the faint scent of herbal concoctions and the soft glow of alchemical lamps. In his hands was a new book—one of the gifts Eva had procured for him.
She had managed to trade his prized [Flesh-refinement compound] to acquire this rare tome, which offered an in-depth exploration of the Body Refinement Realm and its critical significance in the broader path of cultivation.
As Alaric absorbed the newfound information, a sense of revelation washed over him. ’This changes things a little,’ he mused, realizing that the knowledge contained within the pages could significantly alter his approach to cultivation.
Alaric had always understood that the Body Refinement Realm served as a foundational stage before advancing to the Core Formation Realm, but he had never grasped the true depth of its importance. Armed with this new perspective, he recognized that his previous assumptions had underestimated the profound impact of this stage on future progress.
According to the information he’s currently seeing, the level of refinement of each stage of the body refinement realm would determine the level of martial soul a person would awaken, and therefore, how far they would go in their journey.
That he already figured out, but what he didn’t know was how unique refinements at this stage could enhance one’s talent and affinity with certain elements or aspects of reality, depending on one’s luck.
This information seems to enlighten Alaric; his worldview seems to expand by an unfathomable degree. ’Thankfully, I haven’t had a breakthrough to the next realm. I guess I have to thank Eva for holding me back a little.’
Until Eva was ready for a breakthrough, he couldn’t advance to the next realm, as they were intricately linked by a force beyond normal, conventional relationships.
Now, with this revelation, Alaric realized he could continue to refine his body and boost his elemental affinities, provided he could secure the necessary resources for further advancement. The simplicity of the idea made him wonder why it had never occurred to him before, but he was grateful to have discovered it before it was too late.
’Those nobles are truly knowledgeable,’ he thought, reflecting on the source of the book. ’I wonder why old Tian never shared this with me. He must have had his reasons, I should ask him the next time I see him.’
He smiled, pushing that thought to the back of his mind, ’Thankfully, she brought some resources with it.’
He looked at the ingredients placed on the table: Emeraldwood Heartroot, Golden Sun Root, Golden Earth Lotus, Heavenly Spring water, and Diamondleaf ore. These were elements containing enormous amounts of the five elements: Wood, Fire/Yang, Earth, Water, and Metal.
With these, he could formulate a unique flesh-refinement pill to tamper with his flesh, boosting his natural affinity with the elements.
He stood over the table and looked at them for a long moment without touching anything.
The logic was clear enough once the book had laid out the principle. The Body Refinement Realm did not simply toughen the flesh. At its deeper levels, it made the flesh receptive, the tissues, meridians, and bone becoming something closer to an instrument tuned to the cultivator’s nature. Just like how it changed Hundao. What that instrument could receive depended on what it had been exposed to during refinement. Affinity was not fixed at birth. It was, at this stage, still being written.
Maybe Hundao had come in contact with such profound body-altering resources without even knowing, or it could just be from his manifesting bloodline.
He moved to the furnace.
The process he had used for the compound served as the basis, but the compound was topical, designed to work inward from the surface over time. A pill worked from the center outward, absorbed through the digestive system, and carried by the blood to every layer simultaneously. The difference in delivery changed almost everything about the preparation.
He began with the Heartroot.
It was the structural element, the one that would hold the others in a coherent relationship once the pill was formed. Without a matrix, the five elements introduced into the same medium would simply repel one another. Wood was the natural mediator, the element that grew between things, that connected soil to sky, water to air.
He prepared the root slowly, working with more care than the compound had required, reducing it through a process that took longer than it should have because the Heartroot’s fibrous interior had to be broken down without losing the structural compounds that made it useful. Rush it, and you had paste. Do it correctly, and you have something that retains its binding properties even under significant heat.
He introduced it to the vessel first and let it stabilize.
The Golden Sun Root went in second. It ran hot even in its raw form, the cut surface radiating a faint warmth against his palm, and in the vessel it made itself immediately known, the temperature climbing in a way the furnace formations registered and began compensating for. He lowered the external heat and let the Root provide its own.
This was the fire element and the yang principle together, which meant that, left unmanaged, it would dominate everything else in the vessel. He managed it the same way one manages any outsized presence, not by suppressing it but by giving it something to do. He directed it against the Heartroot matrix, letting the heat drive the bonding process rather than working against it.
The two elements reached an arrangement. He watched the surface of the mixture until he was satisfied.
The Golden Earth Lotus required different handling. He separated the petals individually, each one released into the vessel at an interval, not because the intervals were specified anywhere in his knowledge but because the Lotus was dense and the density needed to be introduced gradually, or the matrix would reject it. Earth resisted rapid change. It needed time to be convinced.
He gave it time.
The Heavenly Spring Water, he added last among the elemental components. It went against instinct, adding water to an already heated mixture, but water at this purity level behaved differently from ordinary water under alchemical conditions.
Rather than creating conflict with the fire element already present, it distributed itself through the medium, cooling nothing and diluting nothing, finding the spaces between the other materials and filling them. The effect on the mixture’s appearance was immediate and strange, a faint luminescence rising through the medium that had not been there before, as if something in the combination had become briefly, faintly alive.
He noted this without comment and continued working.
The Diamondleaf Ore he prepared separately while the rest cohered. It was the most resistant material on the table, the metal element in its most consolidated form, and it required grinding down to a fineness well past what the Jade Skin Ore had needed for the compound. Metal did not dissolve. Metal had to be convinced to participate.
He worked at it steadily, checking the consistency at intervals, until the powder was fine enough that it caught the lamplight like ground glass and the individual particles were no longer distinguishable to the eye.
He introduced it to the vessel through a long, slow pour.
The resistance was visible. The metal element moved through the mixture like something reluctant, the luminescence from the water-and-lotus combination flickering once as the ore settled into it. Then the Heartroot matrix did what it was there to do, and the five components found, not harmony exactly, but tolerance. Each element remained itself. They simply agreed, under the mediation of the wood principle, to occupy the same space without dismantling each other.
What remained after the final stage of refinement was not a liquid and not quite a solid. He worked it with both hands and the appropriate tools through the condensation process, the medium compressing under sustained, even pressure into something that held its shape.
Small. Dark at the surface with a faint iridescence beneath, the five elements present in the coloration, if you knew what you were looking for. Green-gold at one angle. Something warmer at another. A faint metallic sheen at the edge.
He held the finished pill between two fingers and looked at it in the lamplight.
It was not elegant, as finished pills went. He could see where the metal element had created a slight unevenness in the surface, a texture that a more experienced alchemist might have smoothed. He cataloged the imperfection and set it aside.
He placed the pill in a small ceramic dish on the cleared preparation table.
Then he sat back down on the cold floor, picked up the book, and continued reading.
There was more to understand before he put anything in his body.
