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I felt slightly awkward but tried to appear confident. “I need to purchase a variety of parts from beast carcasses.”

“Of course, right this way.”

She led me to the back of the shop floor where there were several counters. These counters only held an assortment of jade boxes of various sizes. It seemed that what I needed had to be stored carefully to remain fresh.

“This is the selection that we have in stock,” she said. “You can purchase anything here directly, but I must caution you that our selection is somewhat limited. If you need something specific, we may need to place an order with the branch in the capital, and if it is particularly unique, we will need to special order it.”

I looked at the labels on the various boxes and saw that they were mostly parts from Rank 1 beasts. These included various parts from flames chickens, chicken heads, chicken wings, and chicken feet, as well as parts of various horses, sheep, bulls, bears, tigers, and several other beasts. The selection of higher parts from higher Rank beasts was much more limited, but my focus was only on Rank 1 anyway.

“What about entire carcasses?” I asked her.

“We don’t keep those in supply. That’s something that will need to be ordered.”

I didn’t know what I needed, and from what I read about beast parts while in the library, they seemed to lose effectiveness relatively quickly. Storing them in Jade boxes helped, but they still couldn’t be maintained indefinitely. I needed to plan to use whatever I bought within a week. Coming to a decision, I returned my focus to the attendant.

“Give me one of everything from Rank 1 beasts.”

She confirmed my order and began working with the attendant assigned to these counters to arrange it.

“Will there be anything else?” she asked once everything was handed over.

“Yes, I want to order three complete flame chicken carcasses.”

After arranging for delivery of the special order, I went upstairs and searched through the local pavilion library to see if there was anything about using parts from demon beasts in alchemy. As I expected, I didn’t find anything, but I submitted a request to the librarian to see if she could order any books on the topic. I didn’t expect to get any information from the kingdom branches, but I hoped that there might be something available in the main branch.

With all my purchases stored away, I returned to the City Lord’s Complex to begin my research.

To begin my research, I started with a straightforward idea. Parts for demon beasts were a type of herb. They were a strange herb that I knew nothing about, neither what types of pills they could make nor how to use them to make said pills, but they were definitely some kind of herb. So, I decided to treat them exactly how I would any other herb.

Since I was most comfortable working with fire, I decided to start with the feet of a flame chicken. Using my qi vision, I looked and saw potent demonic fire energy trapped within each foot. Setting myself, I began treating them exactly how I would treat any normal fire herb.

I placed the feet into my cauldron and began heating them. The first step of the alchemy process is to melt the herb’s outer shell, exposing the medicinal energy inside, so that is what I did. The bones and cartilage of the foot took significantly more energy to melt than a plant, but with a little care, I was able to complete the process without disturbing the demonic energy. However, the moment the physical chicken feet dissolved, the demonic energy also began to dissipate.

When a normal herb is melted, only its physical presence would dissipate, but the energy body would stay entirely intact. This didn’t seem to be the case with these demonic beast parts. I tried once more, just to be sure, but on the second try, I got exactly the same result. When the physical body dispersed, the energy body went with it.

I would need to come up with a different method to work with this energy. Trying to melt the physical body of this energy first seemed like it wasn’t going to work, so I came up with a bit of a strange idea. I would attack the toxins directly and eliminate them first instead. I wasn’t sure if it was possible, but it was worth giving a shot.

I decided to use a paw from a wildfire tiger for this experiment.

As I studied the toxins, I realized that they were very different from what I was used to, and based only on my previous experience with herbs, it was hard to immediately know what was or wasn’t toxic energy. Since I knew the most prominent energy that I could see was the demonic fire energy I wanted to preserve, I used that as a reference and worked on destroying anything different.

I started slowly carving up the apparent toxic energy. Even though the paw was theoretically a Rank 1 herb, removing the toxic energy while the physical shell remained intact consumed far more energy than normal. Still, my level of control and power at this point was high enough that it was well within my limits. If I hadn’t been so focused on ensuring there were no mistakes, I might not have even noticed the additional drain.

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Once the toxic energy was removed, I wasn’t sure what to do. My first thought was to try and eliminate the physical paw so I would be left with pure demonic fire energy. The moment I tried that, though, the demonic energy collapsed, suggesting this path was not viable.

Choosing a paw from another type of beast, I tried again. This time, when the paw’s energy was completely purified, I decided to try physically grinding it into a powder to see what would happen. I used a small mortar and pestle to do the work, but after only a little grinding, the energy body of the paw collapsed once more.

Next, I attempted to extract the energy by pulling it out using my affinities. My thought was to take the stable energy and quickly force it into a pill before its instability could cause a complete collapse. However, I barely started before concluding that this method was once again a complete failure.

Running out of ideas, I decided to attempt what Pill Emperor Li said was the way to concoct Rank 4 pills. My fire affinity was low six-star, and my wood affinity was a six-star peak. Deciding to use the higher one for added safety, I searched through the materials I had purchased and found the heart of a Rank 1 moss bear.

Using my wood affinity, I concentrated on the demonic energy inside the heart and focused. I used all my strength of will to keep the demonic wood energy locked into place. I didn’t have the will of a Ruler to help me, but my affinities far surpassed what should be required for a lowly Rank 1 herb.

I melted the heart using a high-temperature fire, but I made sure to keep it away from the heart’s energy body. When the heart disintegrated, I felt a strong tug from the demonic energy. It wanted to dissipate as well, but with my high affinity, I was able to keep it trapped in place. I began cleaning up the chaotic, toxic energy that was spread throughout the demonic energy until it was pristine.

Unsure of how to continue, I decided to treat it like any other pill. I didn’t have a recipe to work from, so my first thought was to try and create a single-ingredient pill. I began condensing the heart’s demonic energy. It kept wanting to fight me, but I slowly coaxed it down into an ever-smaller size.

During the normal concoction process, once the pill energy is condensed sufficiently, it crystallizes into a solid pill. That is what I hoped would happen here, but it didn’t. I pushed more and more, making the heart’s energy smaller and smaller, but even after I reached my limit, it still refused to crystalize. Sighing in disappointment, I began releasing my hold.

Without the pressure from my soul and affinities keeping it in place, the energy expanded rapidly and then vanished in an instant without leaving a trace.

I felt like I was on the right track. I had the energy, and I could purify energy. There might have been another way to do it, but as long as I had the energy isolated, I just needed to find the right combination of different energies that would compress down and form a proper pill. Since the energy from the moss bear heart alone wasn’t sufficient, I needed to start investigating other beast parts it could combine with.

Rank 1 pills generally did not use the elemental cycle. Most of them focused on combining several herbs of the same element to create a pill, so that was the premise under which I began to experiment.

Deciding to make this easy for myself, I chose to first work with wood-aligned parts since that was my highest affinity. I contacted the Pavilion and canceled my order for the chicken carcasses and instead placed an order for multiple parts from Rank 1 wood-aligned beasts. I gave them a sizeable upfront deposit and told them to bring me anything they could.

Settling back into my workshop, I got to work.

I focused hard on this project for several weeks, but I didn’t make any more progress than I did on the very first day. No matter what combinations of ingredients I tried, when I attempted to compress them into a pill, they all refused to crystalize.

After exhausting the possibilities with wood, I tried branching out into the other elements. They were slightly harder to control, but my affinities were high enough that any Rank 1 beast’s energy was still within my capabilities, for the basic elements at least. However, it didn’t matter. No matter what element I tried. None of the energies were willing to condense and form a pill.

Deciding to experiment with some other ideas, I started combining parts of different elements. I tried combining them within the elemental cycle. I tried using subsets of elements that were found in other recipes that I’d made in the past. I tried combinations that I thought might work for random reasons. None of this had any effect, and I was never able to make a single pill.

This led me to the ultimate conclusion that it was impossible to make a pill from pure demonic energy. Demonic energy had to be usable in pills, but if I was going to use it, some extra ingredients were needed, something to act like a binder.

Thinking about it more deeply, I realized a potential mistake. I was trying to make a pill out of demonic energy, but did that make any sense? While I hadn’t heard of making one from demonic energy before, I had also never heard of making pills out of qi. Instead, pills were made from medicinal energy which was a completely distinct form of energy. While demonic likely had different properties, it seemed to be more closely aligned with qi than medicinal energy.

That pushed me on another path in my reasoning. There had to be pills that used demonic energy. If that were true, then it was also likely true that pills incorporating qi had to be possible. I remembered what Ouyang MengYao told me about spirit beasts. They were a rare type of beast that had used qi instead of demonic energy. That would mean my question about combining beast taming and alchemy could include both demonic energy pills and qi pills, depending on the beast used.

So, how do I create such a pill? It seemed impossible based on all my experiments. Pure demonic energy did not want to form a pill. That meant there must be something missing. I decided that something must be medicinal energy. Instead of only making a pill out of pure demonic energy I began trying to use a blend of demonic and medicinal energies to form a pill.

I spent another several weeks on this topic, combining beast parts with various herbs, but in the end, it got me no closer to my goal. Tapping my workbench in thought, I remembered asking the system about purchasing Rank 1 herbalism knowledge long ago. It had a price of 10 million credits, similar to the cost of Rank 1 alchemy. Was this where the trick was hidden? Were there Rank 1 herbs that were as unknown to herbalists as beast parts were to alchemists? If so, it was probably those herbs that I would need if I wanted to successfully concoct a pill using demonic energy.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have any more ideas for how to proceed. I didn’t know what would be hidden under that herbalist purchase, and from all my experiments, I had no idea how to incorporate demonic energy. My cultivation technique drove me to focus on this topic, which was the only reason I was able to persist for as long as I had, but even I had a breaking point. After zero progress in my research, I had to call it quits. I had no way to make any further advances.

Possibly the only real answer I got from my weeks of research was an answer as to why I had never found any information about using beast parts in alchemy. Such a thing was close to impossible.

While this was a letdown, spending time on this topic did accomplish one thing important. It made me spend enough time that my factory building was complete. I wasn’t sure exactly where the Hu clan was in their research of my formation diagrams, but with the factory ready to go, I was ready to start implementing the more basic automated pill production lines.