Emperor Chan looked at me with a pensive expression. “That would be… less than ideal.”

Before I could ask for more information, Chan explained.

“Zero- and one-patterned Ascension Pills are practically worthless, since they can only help people ascend to False Lord. Two-patterned pills are better, but their effects are barely equivalent to ascending through the Lord realm without the use of karmic energy. Three-patterned pills improve on this, but only marginally. To gain access to the full power of the Lord realm—and to be able to continue ascending into the King and Emperor realms—one must only use four-patterned pills.”

“I see.” Chan didn’t want to give anyone the two-patterned pill that he had made because he was hoping that I would be able to make him something better. “And above four patterns?”

“The fifth and sixth patterns are nice, but they aren’t essential. They make the ascension process smoother, and the extra energy increases the likelihood that the ascension will be a success, but this is a double-edged sword. The additional power in these stronger pills is more difficult to control, and if you lose your grip on it, it can cause severe damage to your foundations.”

That was strange. Usually, pills just worked. When I took a Healing Pill, for example, I didn’t need to control its energy and direct it toward my wounds—I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. Yet again, Ascension Pills proved to be outliers.

“At seven patterns,” continued Chan, “Ascension Pills have enough energy to produce a qualitative change in one’s breakthrough. Instead of normal ascensions, these breakthroughs are more akin to what happens when one uses King-level energy during their Lord-level ascensions. Not only will the chains snap more easily, but fewer remnants will be left behind. Seven-patterned pills are like ascending with King-level energy, eight-patterned pills are like ascending with Emperor-level energy, and nine-patterned pills are like ascending with Sovereign-level energy. The advantages provided by these cleaner breakthroughs are marginal, but to members of one- and two-star sects, even small improvements are priceless.”

A long time ago, back before I had joined the Nine Rivers Sect, Ning ChenKun had given me high-level energy to use during my ascension as a Martial Lord. I could remember it being harder to control, and I could remember the breakthroughs being somewhat cleaner, but that was all. Since then, I had considered ascending with higher-level energies to be a needless extravagance. Maybe I should revisit this topic.

After taking the time I needed to think everything through, I nodded. “So, what level of Ascension Pill would you need before you would feel comfortable using it on someone?”

Chan’s response was instantaneous. “Four-patterns. If possible, five would be better, but six would be too much.”

“Alright then, do you have any spare sets of ingredients?”

Chan paused briefly before stepping out of the room. Then, only a few minutes later, he returned and handed me a storage bag. “Ten sets. That’s all I have. You can get started with these while I try to procure more.”

While most young alchemists might have wanted their mentors in the room when they first attempted to concoct a new pill, Emperor Chan was tactful enough to know that I would prefer my privacy. However, while he left me alone, I was under no illusion that anything I did in this workshop would remain secret. I had been rather high-profile during my time in the Palace, and I was certain that several of the elders would be interested in observing my first attempt at concocting an Ascension Pill.

So, I not only had to worry about learning to concoct a complicated new pill, but I also had to worry about the image I was presenting to my observers.

I took a deep breath and focused. What did I need to do first?

First, I needed to understand my ingredients.

Walking to the side of the room, I reached into Emperor Chan’s storage bag and fished out the ten jade coffins that he had left for me. Opening them one by one, I could only sigh at how much I still had to learn.

Two of the beasts that Chan had given me contained ‘hoof wu,’ like the beast that he had used in his own pill. The rest were divided between three other new forms of energy. Based on how these energies were concentrated within the beasts’ bodies, my best guess was that these energies represented something along the lines of fang, antler, and fur wu, but they could just as easily have been tooth, horn, and skin wu.

Of course, these were only guesses based on how the energies were concentrated. They could have been something else entirely.

How did I want to handle this?

Emperor Chan was expecting me to use my overwhelming soul power to force these energies to behave, and he had left me copies of various soul techniques to aid in this. But would raw power be sufficient? Without the appropriate affinities, I wouldn’t have the deft control that was typically needed for concocting highly-patterned pills. Sure, I might be able to concoct a four-patterned pill easily enough, but a nine-patterned? Not a chance. To make something like that, I needed help.

I took out a chair and sat down as I pretended to review a few of the technique manuals that Chan had left behind in his storage bag. Then, I connected to an avatar in my inner world.

“System, how much would it cost to purchase permanent peak four-star affinities for every type of energy commonly used by demon beasts in the Heroes Domain?”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Cost 10 credits.

10 credits was equivalent to what I would get from resetting as a Peak Emperor, so it wasn’t exactly cheap, but it also wasn’t too exorbitant. The only problem was that there might be beasts in other domains that this purchase wouldn’t work on. I could try purchasing every affinity used by every beast in the world, but was it even necessary? I had already purchased a peak six-star affinity for generic wu, which should be enough to deal with the energy contained in Rank 3 beasts.

Still, my goal was to concoct Rank 6 Ascension Pills, and that would require me to work with energy from Rank 5 beasts. To do that, I would need to raise my affinities eventually, so I might as well go ahead and do it now. I just needed to figure out the best way to go about it.

“How much to purchase a permanent peak five-star wu affinity?”

Cost 16 credits.

That should be more than sufficient for the task in front of me, but no reason not to add in a small safety margin, right?

“System, go ahead and purchase both a permanent peak five-star affinity for wu and permanent peak four-star affinities in the types of demonic energy used locally.”

Purchase confirmed. Cost 26 credits. 1,151 credits remaining.

A strange sensation overtook me, and I instinctively looked down at my hands as I spent several minutes just standing there, flexing them, inspecting each of their muscles. For just a moment, they felt… wrong.

I looked up to see the remains of the prey that Emperor Chan had left for me, and this also felt wrong.

It had been quite some time since raising an affinity had affected me this deeply, and these feelings lingered far longer than I was comfortable with. I could only be thankful that I hadn’t tried to raise every possible beast-related affinity at once.

After giving myself some time to settle down, I turned my attention back to the energies contained within the beast carcasses in front of me. I still didn’t know what to call these different energies, but I was supremely confident in my ability to wield them properly. So, after returning most of the coffins to Chan’s storage bag, I took out a demon pig and placed it in the cylinder that sat at the bottom of the room’s giant pill furnace.

Leaping up to the metal box on top of the cylinder, I first studied the furnace's formations to make sure that I understood how they were supposed to work. Then, I activated them.

Could I improve upon the concoction process used by Emperor Chan? Maybe. What he had done had been messy, and I could certainly clean up a few inefficiencies. But reworking the entire thing? It might be possible to design a new type of Ascension Pill that took advantage of the structured portions of a demon beast’s energy, but this wouldn’t be much different from designing an entirely new pill from scratch. So, for the moment, I could only follow Chan’s example.

Like before, the furnace’s formations first created an energy barrier. Then, they incinerated the carcass of the demon pig that I had left behind. At this point, if I were to follow Chan’s lead exactly, I would prepare my herbs while condensing the energy barrier. However, I felt compelled to clean up one of Chan’s larger messes.

The incineration formation had destroyed most of the demonic energy’s structure, but what it had left behind was a lumpy mess. Such uneven energy might be beneficial in some way, but if it were, I failed to see how. So, reaching out with my soul, I refined this energy into an even, smooth consistency.

To any outside observers, it would look like I was doing this by utilizing the soul techniques that Chan had left for me, but in truth, I was relying almost entirely on my newly purchased affinities.

Once this was completed, I studied the demonic energy more closely.

The Qi Gathering Formation had cleansed the bottom cylinder of qi, and what it had left behind was mostly hoof wu, but this process hadn’t been perfect. The energy in the cylinder still contained a considerable number of random impurities.

Unfortunately, without a filter for hoof wu, these impurities were somewhat difficult to deal with. The best idea I could come up with was to burn them away with a spirit fire, but fully cleansing so much energy could take days. Also, I still didn’t want the Palace’s elders to know about my hoard of spirit fires.

After thinking through the situation carefully, I decided that cleansing the energy likely wasn’t necessary. These were simple impurities, not pill toxins. A Purifying Pill should be able to take care of them. Therefore, I moved on and began preparing my herbs.

For this part, there wasn’t much for me to improve upon. After all, Chan was a competent Pill Emperor, and he knew how to handle basic herbs—he just wasn’t good at working with wu.

I couldn’t help but notice, however, that the structures formed from the ingredients he had given me seemed incomplete. What I had would work, but would I be able to form it into a nine-patterned pill? No, I wouldn’t. He had only given me the herbs needed for the six-patterned version.

Chan had cheaped out on me, but this was probably for the best. He didn’t want anything better than a five-patterned pill, and I didn’t exactly want to show the elders my full capabilities—not yet. So, I focused on concocting the five-patterned pill that Chan had asked for.

The outer shell of this Ascension Pill was more interesting than I had given it credit for. It was riddled with dozens of hollow channels that were clearly intended as places to store demonic energy. Chan had struggled just to keep the demonic energy contained within his furnace, so he hadn’t been able to take advantage of these channels, but since they had already been prepared for me, I saw no reason not to use them.

Once both halves of my pill were complete, I used a combination of Emperor Chan’s soul techniques and my new hoof affinity to pull a thin streamer of wu up from the cylinder and threaded it into my pill. Then, once the medicinal energy was full to bursting with demonic energy, I melded everything together into a complete pill.

The instant I did this, I felt the medicinal energy wanting to pull together on its own, and with hardly any input from my side, the pill gained its first pattern.

This disrupted the pill’s wu, but by forcing this energy to flow through the structure’s hollow channels, I was able to calm it down.

Once the demonic energy was stable, the pill again began pulling itself together without my input, and I realized that this was the doing of the demonic energy. When stable, the energy acted like a binding force, pulling the pill together. But once disturbed, it wanted to explode outward. So, I just needed to keep the pill stable, and the demonic energy would take care of the rest.

In this manner, the energy smoothly gained its second, third, fourth, and fifth patterns.

I knew that I could go further, giving it a sixth, but five was what Chan had asked for, so five was what I intended to give him. Google seaʀᴄh novel•fire.net

Concentrating, I condensed the energy into a pill.

Like Chan had done, the moment my pill formed, I reached into the furnace and snatched it before it could fall into the cylinder below. Then, I examined it.

High-Quality Rank 4 Ascension Pill, 176% Medicinal Efficacy, 5 Patterns, Effective Rank: Peak Lord. Value: 600 mid-grade spirit stones.