Chapter 70: [Gluttony]
It took three more tries before he could make something he could consider passable. The first pill he had created felt wrong in a sense. He didn’t know why, but they felt impure and inedible. This last set, though, brought a certain level of satisfaction to him.
Looking at the perfectly round pill settling in his palm, he looked at his work with admiration. ’It’s beautiful.’ He could see and feel the amount of balanced energy within the pill, and felt the pores of his flesh scream with excitement at the prospect. ’Oh well, here goes nothing.’ He popped the pill into his mouth.
On entry, the pill instantly melted, releasing its vast mellow energy into every corner of his flesh.
He felt a warmth all over his flesh, spreading from the center of his chest outward through his torso in a slow, even tide. He felt it reach his shoulders, arms, down through his abdomen, and into his legs, moving with the unhurried certainty of something that knew exactly where it was going and had no reason to rush.
He kept his eyes open for the first few seconds. Then, they closed.
The wood-infused element came first.
He felt it in the meridians, the channels that ran through his flesh like the grain through timber, and what the Heartroot’s essence did to them was gentle. Through constant adaptation, he thought his meridians would be at the limit by now, but this energy expanded his meridians in a way that adaptation seemed to have missed.
A cultivator who had never felt clean meridians would not have had the language for the difference, but Alaric had spent enough time studying his own internal architecture to recognize the change precisely. The pathways that carried energy through his flesh were being renovated from within, each one expanded and smoothed with the patient thoroughness of something that did not know how to do partial work.
This process took days before it finally stopped.
Then the fire came.
It arrived the way it always announced itself, with an absence of warning and a surplus of intention. Where the wood had been gradual, the Sun Root’s essence was immediate, flooding the flesh with a heat that had no interest in being comfortable.
He felt it in his skin first, the surface layers responding before the deeper tissue, prickling and then burning, and then something past burning that was not quite pain. His jaw tightened once, and he breathed through his nose, slow and measured, the exhale long, and decided not to resist it.
Resistance would have been the wrong instinct, and his intuition warned him that resistance is fatal.
Fire element ran itself through the newly expanded meridians and measured their capacity. Where the channels held, the heat moved on. Where they were still adjusting, it paused and applied pressure until they did. It was, he understood distantly, the most efficient way to complete what the wood had started. One element is preparing the ground. The other was ensuring the preparation had taken place.
His skin felt several degrees warmer than it should have.
He felt the earth energy stir before moving like the first two, leaving the remaining two to their own devices.
He felt it affecting his bones first, the density in them changing in a way that was more sensation than event, a solidity that compounded on itself without spectacle. Then the muscle, the deeper tissue, something shifting in the texture of what he was made of at a level that had nothing to do with cultivation technique and everything to do with fundamental composition. The flesh was becoming more itself. Denser. More present. As before, it had been slightly approximate and now was precise.
The refinement of each stage determines the grade of your martial soul.
He understood it differently now, with the earth element working through him, than he had when he read it.
The water followed as if it had been waiting politely for the earth to finish.
It moved through him the way actual water moves, finding every low place, every gap the previous three elements had not addressed, filling them with a coolness that was not the absence of heat but a distinct quality of its own. He felt his organs settle into the temperature shift the way a man settles into sleep, tension leaving without being consciously released.
The water element touched things the others had not reached, worked into spaces between tissue and bone, between the meridian walls and the flesh surrounding them, lubricating the work that had already been done so that it would last.
His breathing had slowed considerably. He noticed this the way one notices weather, as a fact about the environment rather than anything requiring action.
The metal came last.
He had expected hardness, but what he received was precision. The Diamondleaf Ore’s essence moved through the flesh like a craftsman’s final pass over finished work, not adding material but defining edges, clarifying boundaries, making permanent what the other four elements had built.
Where the earth had densified, the metal element set. Where the water had smoothed, the metal drew the line of the thing exactly. He felt it in the surface of his skin as a faint, cool certainty, felt it along the bones as a resonance that sat just below the threshold of sound, felt it in the meridians as the last degree of precision that made the channels feel like they had been cut to specification rather than grown.
The pill had long since dissolved. What remained was its consequence.
For a time, he could not have said how long, the quality of his attention had changed — he existed inside the work, the five elements completing their arrangement within him, each one occupying its proper domain while the wood principle held them in relationship. Not fused. Not uniform. Five distinct forces maintain a coherent presence in the same system, the way five instruments can occupy the same key without ceasing to be themselves.
He became aware of something else.
It arrived at the edges of his perception first, vague, the way peripheral vision registers movement before the eye fully turns. He held still and let it resolve. The awareness of the room changed, not his vision, his eyes were closed, but the perception that surpasses any form of visual prowess, a sensitivity in the skin and the meridians and the bones themselves that had not existed twenty minutes ago.
The lamp was on fire. He knew this already, had known it with his eyes. But now he felt it, the nature of the flame present at a distance in a way that registered in his flesh rather than his mind, the yang energy in it recognizable the way a sound is recognizable, as something specific rather than something general.
The cold of the stone floor was water and metal. He felt the mineral composition of it through his palms, not as temperature alone but as character, the dense inertia of the earth element in the stone, the water locked within it in its ancient, geological form.
The air moved through the ventilation formations, and it was wood, the principle of movement and growth and connection, the element that existed between things.
He opened his eyes.
The room looked exactly as it had. The lamp, the table, the cleared preparation surface, the ceramic dish now empty in the corner. Nothing had changed in any visible sense. But his relationship to the room had shifted in a way he did not have precise language for, as if the five elements in the world around him had acquired a kind of legibility they had lacked before. They were not new; they had always been there. He was simply now something that could read them.
’I wonder how many things about the world I currently can’t perceive.’ He wondered silently. The world was so vast, with several laws governing reality and others governing spirituality, but he saw nothing about how it operated. ’Maybe in the future.’
He sat with this for a moment.
Then he looked at his hands.
The skin looked the same. He pressed two fingers against his opposite palm and felt the density beneath, the quiet solidity of what the earth and metal elements had done to the tissue. He rolled his shoulders and felt the meridians move with a smoothness that still surprised him slightly, the absence of resistance where resistance had been so ordinary he had stopped noticing it.
’And this is just flesh refinement. I wonder how powerful I will become after I finish refining my body. Before that, I will take as many flesh refinement pills as possible. I want refinement to the absolute limit.’
His first thoughts were, ’This is the floor, not the ceiling.’
That was just one pill. For many cultivators, obtaining a single [Five-Elements Flesh-Refinement Pill] would be a life-changing blessing, an opportunity to strengthen their bodies far beyond what they could achieve on their own. For some, it would be more than enough to propel them into a higher realm of cultivation.
However, Alaric’s standards were much higher than most. He knew that in a world where the weak perish without mercy, settling for mediocrity meant certain death. He was determined never to let that be his fate; he would push himself as far as possible.
After some time had passed, he decided to check on the world outside his secluded alchemy room. To his surprise, only a single week had elapsed. He paused in disbelief. ’A week?’ he thought.
Normally, by his estimation, it would take an ordinary cultivator at least two months, even with talent and preparation, to fully digest and assimilate the power of a [Five-Elements Flesh-Refinement Pill]. For him to complete the process in just seven days was nearly unbelievable. A slow, pleased smile spread across his lips. ’I was right then,’ he smirked, feeling a surge of satisfaction at his own progress.
He quickly attributed this accelerated assimilation to the [Gluttony] trait he shared with Eva. The trait allowed him to devour and process resources at a rate far beyond what was typical, and it had once again proven its worth.
His curiosity about Eva’s true nature deepened; the mysteries surrounding her origin became ever more intriguing. He briefly considered asking her directly about it, but decided against it. ’Forget it. I’m sure she’ll tell me when she’s ready,’ he thought, trusting that answers would come in time.
Returning to the moment, Alaric picked up the book that he had set beside him before beginning his refinement. He flipped to the place he had marked, eager to revisit the passage about elemental affinity. The text explained that, during Core Formation, the elements one had refined into their flesh became the very essence of their core, shaping their abilities and future potential in profound ways.
He read in silence for a long time, absorbing every word. Outside the sealed alchemy room, faint footsteps echoed from somewhere in the building above him, footsteps he recognized as Eva’s. He turned the page, patiently waiting for her arrival, his mind still turning over everything he had just experienced.
