After advancing to Martial Sovereign, I wanted to exit seclusion immediately. However, I first needed to reform my toxic meridians and reconstruct my core, as leaving without these structures in place would have announced exactly what I had done to anyone who was watching. Thankfully, though, I had more than enough experience to get this done in a timely manner. And, by using pure Emperor-level Su Clan karmic energy, I was able to create a core that was a significant yet subtle step up from the one I had possessed before my advancement.

Once this was done, however, I didn’t waste any time. I immediately went back up the mountain and dedicated myself to developing a new pill for strengthening flower-type urgamal.

My goal was to appear as if I were a Peak Emperor who, having completed his final Return, had reached the end of his tether. To the average observer, it would look like I no longer cultivated because there was no longer any reason for me to do so. In truth, however, any time I had a few moments of isolation, I pulled out a fine thread of karmic energy and injected it into my body, allowing me to continue taking tiny steps toward my next advancement.

If someone saw me do this, they might figure out what I was up to. But anyone who was able to decipher the meaning behind my actions likely hadn’t fallen for my deception in the first place, so I didn’t need to worry about this. And, in any case, the strength that I gained from advancing was more than enough to offset the associated risks.

During my time in seclusion, my teams of alchemists and servants had continued their work. By the time I rejoined them, they had already perfected the Rank 1 tea recipe—creating a blend with 100% potency and 0% toxicity—and they were well on their way to developing similar brews using Rank 2 and 3 herbs.

However, while the development of new teas was proceeding smoothly, they had yet to solve the problem of converting these teas into pills. No matter what anyone tried, the pills always failed to condense. It wasn’t until two full years after I completed my breakthrough that we finally stumbled upon a solution.

“This is it,” said An XunFei, holding up a jade pill bottle, “we finally did it.”

Not waiting for the young woman to explain, I reached out, took the bottle, and examined its contents.

Rank 1 Flower Strengthening Pill, 74% Medicinal Efficacy, 0 Patterns, Value: –

I almost couldn’t believe my eyes. We had burned through so many herbs—a truly uncountable number of herbs—and we had tested every damn weed on the whole of the Western Island. All to no avail. Yet, somehow, now, it was finally done.

“How?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. “What was it?”

An XunFei grinned as she held up an oddly shaped plant that had a spindly, green stem and broad, variegated leaves. The entire length of its stalk was riddled with seed pods that clung to it like malignant, tumorous growths.

“We got this in the most recent shipment from the Myriad Herb Domain. I don’t have the slightest clue what it might be, but its seed pods are exactly what we’ve been looking for.”

Taking the plant in hand, I studied it carefully, paying more attention to the striated leaves than the all-important seed pods. Something about this plant felt familiar, but I couldn’t pin down what it was. So, I decided to head up the mountain and see if Enkhtuya could shed some light on the matter.

The moment Enkhtuya saw what I was holding, several of her lower branches bent in my direction. “Are you sure? This

is the key ingredient that you’ve been searching for?”

I nodded, slowly, unsure of the meaning behind her reaction. “Yes, do you know what it is?”

Enkhtuya waited for a long moment before releasing a light puff of qi. “It is one of the amigüi–the soulless. The descendant of an urgamal that was never able to achieve sentience.”

I blinked, confused, as I tried to process this. Setting aside the moral implications of Enkhtuya statement, if this plant were related the urgamal, then shouldn’t it only appear within the Myriad Herb Domain? Why did it feel so familiar?

After saying my goodbyes and departing the mountaintop, this question continued to nag at me. It wasn’t until I was halfway back to my workshop that the truth finally hit me: this plant–this… amigüi–was nearly identical to the unknown herbs that I had found hidden in the caverns deep beneath the Wastes—specifically, the cavern beneath the Verdant Fields Sect.

After injecting those herbs with a combination of essence and vital energy, Bao and I had been able to turn those unusual herbs into strong, vibrant plants that contained the barest hints of sentience. Was this why? Had those plants been remote offshoots of the urgamal?

This theory made sense, but it had one critical flaw: those plants had contained medicinal energy, which was a combination of both qi and wu.

Enkhtuya had been clear on this matter: urgamal were only able to cultivate one type of energy–never both. And, the plant that An XunFei had shown me? It didn’t contain any energy at all. So, how had the plants that were under the Wastes done something that should have been impossible? Also, how had the descendants of urgamal appeared in a cavern deep beneath the Nine Rivers Continent?

The answer to this last question, at least, was obvious. Either the Nine River Saint or one of his predecessors had placed them there.

As for how this Saint had achieved the impossible… I could only assume that it was the result of whatever experiments they had been conducting down there. Unfortunately, though, considering the age of those caverns, the details were likely lost to time.

More important than the past, however, were the implications that such plants would have going forward. Would the urgamal be able to ‘breed’ with them, producing offspring that possessed a combination of both qi and wu? Could this be a path beyond the limits of their natural biology?

Possibly. But at the moment, I was the only person who knew those plants existed, and I had no intention of changing this. For now, I just needed to use what I had learned to help in the development of new pill recipes.

With a working Rank 1 pill recipe in hand, my teams and I had two tasks in front of us: we needed to economize the existing recipe, and we needed to push further, developing new recipes for higher Ranks.

We were still only working with low-level ingredients, so there was little value I could add to the development of new Rank 2 or 3 recipes. Therefore, I instead turned my personal efforts toward economizing what we already had.

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Our recipe for a Rank 1 Flower Strengthening Pill was based on an herbal tea that used 19 different herbs, creating a brew with 100% potency and 0% toxicity. After including the seed pods of an amigüi, our Rank 1 pill contained 20 different ingredients—far too many.

I didn’t want to harm our pill’s potency, but many of the herbs that we were using did little more than reduce the toxicity of the herbal tea. Since, when making a pill, an alchemist would need to burn away the toxins anyway, these extra herbs could simply be removed.

Then, there were the herbs that only boosted the tea’s potency by the slightest of margins. Most of those could likely be removed if we made better use of sympathetic bonds.

After separating out all the chaff, I was left with only six herbs–one of which was a seed pod from the amigüi. I still wasn’t sure how to feel about using the seed of what could be considered an urgamal child, but considering that two of the other ingredients were limbs and sap that had been extracted from a living, adult urgamal, I didn’t allow my mind to dwell on this issue for long.

Taking these herbs in hand, I first used the new Synthetic Herbal Bond skill that I got from Jon. Then, I concocted my first Rank 1 Flower Strengthening Pill.

It… wasn’t good. After imbuing the pill with its fifth pattern, the repulsive effects of the patterns’ energies were so great that they nearly tore the pill to pieces. So, I went back to the drawing board.

In the original recipe, certain herbs had only served to reduce the tea’s toxicity, but if certain other herbs were removed, then these would instead become vital ingredients for increasing the brew’s potency. With this in mind, I stripped out a few of the more questionable herbs and replaced them with others that I had previously removed.

This time, I was able to concoct a seven-patterned pill. It was better, but it wasn’t good enough.

Face set in a mask of pure determination, I began iterating through every combination that I felt might work. Then, when this still didn’t result in a satisfactory recipe, I referred to the log of previously tested teas to come up with new ideas.

Was all this necessary? No. No, it wasn’t. But I wanted to use this Rank 1 pill to push the idea of herbal teas to its limits, just to see what might be possible.

Why this pill? Because Rank 1 herbs were cheap, and because I knew I had the Palace’s–the Temple’s–support in making it as good as possible. So, while my teams worked on developing newer and better recipes, I slaved away in solitude, working to make a pill that was both perfect and economical.

After creating a Perfect Nine-Pattern Rank 1 pill with 200% efficacy using only six herbs, I moved on to Rank 2. After perfecting that one to where it used only eight herbs, I moved on to Rank 3. Here, I couldn’t find anything that would work with fewer than twelve, but considering the Rank of this pill, twelve wasn’t too bad.

Unfortunately, at the same time my progress was speeding up, the progress of my teams was slowing to a crawl. And, eventually, as they were working to transform a Rank 5 tea into a Rank 5 pill, it came to a halt entirely. The reason? They couldn’t find the right “useless weed” to bind the medicinal energy of the herbs to the demonic energy of the leaves and sap from wu-based urgamal.

So, I climbed the mountain to discuss this problem with Enkhtuya.

Less than a week later, Enkhtuya’s leaves were practically chattering as she presented me with a storage bag. “This contains samples of all the amigüi the Temple could locate. If you let me know which ones prove useful, then we will provide you with more seedlings once they become available.”

The eagerness in Enkhtuya’s voice was… disturbing. Wasn’t she the least bit concerned about urgamal offspring being used to concoct pills? “Are you sure you’re okay with this? With me using these… ‘amigüi’ to concoct pills?”

Enkhtuya’s leaves clacked together, creating a strange barking noise. “Of course, Alchemist Su. Until now, the amigüi were considered worthless—failures that needed to be expunged from this continent. Now, though, they have a purpose. This is good, no?”

I slowly nodded. “I… see. I guess it is.”

With these new… samples, my teams were able to develop a working Rank 5 version of the Flower Strengthening Pill.

By being the first person to concoct this pill, I earned my Rank 5 enlightenment in beast alchemy. But sadly, the ‘discount’ I received was, once again, meaningless, only being effective on purchases worth less than 1 credit. Still, there was nothing to do but press on.

At this point, I was forced to shift my focus away from economizing pills and take a more active role in their initial development. Rank 6 herbs were just too expensive to continue burning through them at the rate we had with the lower-Rank herbs.

Twenty years after the competition between the three Palaces, we developed our first working Rank 6 prototype, giving me both an enlightenment and the message that I had been hoping for.

Submission successful. Contribution confirmed. Calculating… Reward: 50% discount for the next purchase below 100 credits.

A discount on my next 100 credit purchase wasn’t anything too amazing, but it was a discount that I still had enough credits to take full advantage of. In a way, this almost made it better than a 10,000 credit discount, since if I had one of those, I would be hesitant to buy anything. Of course, this didn’t mean that I didn’t want to develop a novel Rank 7 pill, but there was a long road ahead of us, and we needed to take things one step at a time.

Even with the help of my enlightenment, it took us another five full years before we were able to concoct our first nine-patterned Rank 6 Flower Strengthening Pill.

Raising the pill to this level was more difficult than it should have been, since a few of the herbs seemed to be questionable substitutes for other, unknown herbs that we didn’t possess. However, thanks to the blessing that I had recently taken from Jon, and thanks to the help of the Ashless Pill Fire, I was able to make this recipe work. Our final pill was far from economical, containing fragments of medicinal energy from a total of 32 different Rank 6 herbs, but it was an absolutely perfect nine-patterned Rank 6 Flower Strengthening Pill.

When I presented this completed pill to Enkhtuya, her leaves chittered in pure excitement, giving me the impression of an excited little girl. However, knowing that this excitement wouldn’t last, I quickly transitioned into developing a Rank 7 recipe.

Sadly, this effort was plagued with countless, unforeseen roadblocks.

Sovereign-level wu-based urgamal were far less willing to hand over parts of their bodies. The extra-dimensional nature of Rank 7+ materials meant that brewing a tea was no longer as simple as chucking everything into a pot and pouring water over it. And, I had yet to take even the first step toward becoming a Pill Sovereign.

Altogether, this meant that developing a new Rank 7 pill was out of the question. So, I set a new task for my teams. Instead of designing more potent general strengthening pills, I wanted them to look into new ways to strengthen specific areas of a tsetseg urgamal’s body. Could we make a pill that poured all of its energy into strengthening an urgamal’s petals? What about its roots? If so, would a combination of more specific pills result in a more powerful urgamal?

Partially, I had my teams study these things because I was interested in the answer, but I was also worried about what might happen if we were no longer needed for designing new pills. I doubted that the Temple would just decide to get rid of us, but I couldn’t rule out the possibility of either the Saint of Myriad Herbs or the Willow Saint deciding that they should prevent us from developing pills that would be useful to other species. So, I had my people continue to work on bigger and better pills for the urgamal.

In the meantime, I began my exploration of Rank 7 alchemy.

Like Rank 7 formations, the structure of a Rank 7 herb’s medicinal energy existed in four dimensions. So, when cleansing and melding these herbs together, I had to account for pieces of an herb’s structure that weren't normally visible. The Temple provided me with several techniques that were supposed to make this possible, but none were easy to master.

This led to me spending all my days secluded away in my workshop, playing around with the simplest and most common of Rank 7 herbs. At the same time, of course, I used this opportunity to continue infusing my body with strands of karmic energy, steadily making my way to the Peak of the Martial Sovereign realm.

Fifty years after the conclusion of the competition between the Palaces, Enkhtuya summoned me to the top of the mountain.

The air split apart, forming a massive black portal, and Enkhtuya strode forward on slithering roots, disappearing into the darkness. Shortly thereafter, the Palace’s two other urgamal elders followed behind her. Then, it was my turn.

It was finally time for me to take my first steps off the Western Island. It was time to visit the Myriad Herb Domain.