Upon returning to the island, my first stop was the Blue Wind Pavilion. The services offered in local Pavilion branches were generally more limited than those in the capital, but since North Lake City was home to so many of the kingdom’s craftsmen, it had a robust system in place that was designed to serve their needs.

“Hello, sir. How may I help you today?” asked an attendant as I entered.

“Yes, I uh… I would like to purchase a variety of… ‘pieces’ from the carcasses of demon beasts.”

Without batting an eye, she nodded and motioned to the back of the store. “Of course, right this way.”

She led me to a group of counters that held an assortment of jade boxes of various sizes. Was this how they keep such ‘ingredients’ fresh?

“This limited selection is all that we currently have in stock. If you need anything specific, we can request it from the capital, but depending upon its rarity, you may need to place a special order.”

I looked at the labels on the assorted boxes and saw that they were mostly the remains of Rank 1 beasts. There were various parts of flame chickens—chicken heads, chicken wings, and chicken feet—as well as parts of various horses, sheep, bulls, bears, tigers, and several other beasts. For higher-Rank beasts, the selection was much more limited, but at the moment, my focus was only on Rank 1 anyway.

“What about complete carcasses?” I asked.

“We don’t keep those in stock. They will need to be ordered from the capital.”

According to what I had read about using beast parts in formations, the energy in a beast’s carcass would dissipate after its death. Storing them in jade boxes should help, but this would only slow the process. It wouldn’t stop it. So, 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 the Rank 1 beasts.”

After confirming my order, she worked with the attendant who oversaw this section to process the transaction, and I tucked everything away in my storage bag.

“Will there be anything else?” she asked.

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

After arranging for delivery of this order, I went upstairs and searched through the library to see if there was any information on using demon beasts in alchemy. As I had expected, I didn’t find anything, but I submitted a request to the librarian for any books on the topic. I didn’t expect to get any information from the branches in Eight Flower, but I hoped that there might be something available at the main branch in Blue Wind City.

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: 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 treat any other herb.

Since I was the most comfortable when working with fire, I started with the feet of a flame chicken. Using qi vision, I saw potent demonic fire energy trapped within each foot, so I treated them exactly the same as I would treat any normal fire herb.

I placed the feet into my pill furnace and heated them up. The first step of the alchemy process was to melt the herb’s outer shell, exposing the medicinal energy inside, so that was 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 dissipated.

When a normal herb is melted, only its physical presence would dissipate—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.

Since melting the physical bodies of these ‘herbs’ seemed like it wasn’t going to work, I came up with a bit of a strange idea. What if I just attacked the toxins directly and eliminated them before doing anything else? I wasn’t sure if this was possible, but it was worth a shot.

I chose a paw from a wildfire tiger for this experiment.

As I studied the toxins, I realized that they were 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. However, since the most prominent energy in the paw was the demonic fire energy that I wanted to preserve, I used that as a reference and worked to destroy everything else.

Even though this paw was theoretically a Rank 1 herb, removing its toxic energy while the physical shell remained intact consumed far more energy than normal. Still, my level of control and power by this point was high enough that this 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 eliminate the physical paw so that only pure demonic fire energy would remain. But the moment I tried this, the demonic energy collapsed, suggesting this wasn’t a viable path.

Choosing a paw from another type of beast, I tried again. This time, when the paw’s energy was completely purified, I tried physically grinding it into a paste using a mortar and pestle. I was hoping that this might provide me with new insights, but after only a little grinding, the energy body of the paw simply 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 had said was the way to concoct Rank 4 pills. My current fire affinity was low six-star, and my wood affinity was peak six-star. Deciding to use the higher one for added safety, I searched through my materials until I found the heart of a Rank 1 moss bear.

I concentrated on the demonic energy inside the heart and focused, using my wood affinity and strength of will to keep the demonic wood energy locked in 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. Then, I cleaned 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 this energy like any other herb. I didn’t have a recipe to work from, so my first thought was to create a single-ingredient pill, so I began condensing the heart’s demonic energy on its own. The energy kept wanting to fight me, but I slowly coaxed it down into an ever-smaller size.

During the normal concoction process, once medicinal energy was condensed sufficiently, it would crystallize into a solid pill. That was 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 crystallize.

Sighing in disappointment, I released my hold.

Without the pressure from my soul and affinities keeping it in place, the heart’s demonic energy expanded rapidly and vanished into the environment without leaving a trace.

I felt like I was on the right track. I could extract the energy, and I could purify the energy. There might have been another way to do this, but as long as I had the energy isolated, I just needed to find the right combination of energies that would crystallize into a proper pill. Since the energy from the moss bear heart wasn’t sufficient on its own, I needed to start investigating other beast parts that I could combine it 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 things easy on myself, I chose to first work with wood-aligned beasts, since that was my highest affinity. I contacted the Pavilion and canceled my order for the chicken carcasses. Instead, I placed an order for multiple parts from Rank 1 wood-aligned beasts. I then gave them a sizable 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 had on the very first day. No matter what combination of ingredients I tried, when I attempted to compress them into a pill, they all refused to crystallize.

After exhausting the possibilities with wood, I branched 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 from 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 other combinations at random. None of this had any effect, and I was never able to make a single pill.

This led me to my ultimate conclusion: 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, I needed to add other ingredients. I needed something that would act as a binder.

Thinking about this 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 energy had unique properties, it seemed to be more closely aligned with qi than medicinal energy.

So, what if I combined demonic energy and medicinal energy? Instead of using only the remains of demon beasts, I could try combining them with herbs.

I spent another several weeks on this topic, 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 demon 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 herbalism purchase, and even after all my experiments, I was no closer to forming a pill from demonic energy. My cultivation technique drove me to focus on this topic, which was the only reason that I had been able to persist for as long as I had, but even I had a breaking point. After weeks with zero progress, I had to call it quits.

While this was a letdown, a message from Minister Tang was enough to cheer me up. The construction of the building for my factory was complete. I wasn’t sure where the Hu Clan was in their research of my formation diagrams, but the factory was ready to go, and I could go ahead and implement the basic designs for my automated pill production lines.