Chapter 46: More Unique Body Tempering Pills
With a newfound sense of motivation to increase his strength before the inheritance opening, Yaan was now practising his sword arts almost all day every day.
He of course wanted to improve his body with resources, but the requirements of a 3-Star demonic body were simply too ridiculous. At his current level and with his current assets, he could barely afford to improve his vital energy by even 3-4%.
Yaan did, however, seek out the Rank 3 versions of the unique body tempering pills. The Rank 2 unique body tempering pills were so useful when it came to enhancing his physical body, that he absolutely needed to use these medicines at every rank, if possible. There were other body tempering medicines, but none were as powerful or as effective as these. Especially when it came to directly nourishing the physical flesh beyond his vital energy, these pills were a cut above any others that Yaan had come across.
Unfortunately, the Rank 3 versions were all exorbitantly priced.
He assumed the cost would be around 100 times higher, meaning that affording the bone strengthening and flesh nourishing pills should be within his means. If the price really was a hundred times greater, these pills should cost him a single Rank 4 recovery pill each, approximately speaking. However, reality was cruel.
"Rank 3 bone strengthening pill costs five Rank 4 recovery pills…Rank 3 flesh nourishing pill costs five Rank 4 recovery pills…Rank 3 organ hardening pill costs 20 Rank 4 recovery pills…and the other two don't exist in the city, neither the pills nor the recipes can be found anywhere."
Yaan now realised that these pills were not commonly used at all, so he would need to find a Rank 3 alchemist and request that they refine each pill specially. Only, no alchemist in the city was well versed with these pills, meaning they would definitely encounter at least a few failures. Failing in a pill refinement meant wasting materials, time and money. The pills were definitely not worth this, but there was no other way to procure them. Really though, value was determined by one's need for the item, and these medicines were more useful to Yaan right now than anything else.
Sighing and feeling depressed, Yaan arranged for someone to refine the bone and flesh pills for him…that was all he could afford without selling his spiritual treasures and other things. He only had 12 Rank 4 recovery pills remaining, but he spent 10 of them in one go, just like that…
"So wasteful, but this is really the best I can do to prepare for the inheritance." Yaan sighed and decided not to stress about it. It was better to waste some money and improve his strength right now, than to be a cheapskate and lose his life later on in the inheritance.
Especially given the nature of this inheritance, that seemed to give an unfair advantage to those with strong fleshly bodies. It was almost as if the inheritance favoured powerful fleshly bodies above vital energy attainments! Yaan would have to be stupid to not put his all into developing his fleshly body, with this information in mind.
After sending out the order, he forgot all about this matter and wholeheartedly focussed on his sword arts. Without spells, sword arts were the only ability that set him apart from the demonic beasts which relied solely on brute strength.
He performed his currently mastered stages to warm up, then continued to practise and comprehend the 3rd and 4th stages of Flowing River Blade. Out of Yaan's multiple sword arts, only this one was based purely on the water element. Although the art as a whole certainly wasn't up to par with the 3-stage Agile Sword Arts, if he mastered the first 4 stages of Flowing River Blade, it would definitely overtake his 1st stage mastery of the Agile Sword Arts!
Months passed by without Yaan even realising it. Winter cleared away and brought in the new season of spring. Crops and flowers sprouted up bountifully throughout Yaan's temple's back garden. He enjoyed practising outside, within the 20 feet wide circle of grass that was surrounded by a thin and shallow rocky stream. The sound and sight of the trickling water always seemed to help him feel the essence of the Flowing River Blade Art, helping Yaan to picture his blade and body as water itself.
Someone entered the garden a few minutes ago, but before they called out, they became entranced as they watched Yaan's movements in wonder.
It was as if Yaan had fused with his surroundings; the thin stream around him, his own body, and that metal sword, were all one and the same. This was clearly just an illusion, but it was still a thought that would flash through anyone's mind upon witnessing Yaan's current practise.
Swooooooosh…
His final strike was extremely gentle, yet shocking all the same. Despite the blade stabbing forwards through the air and never making contact with the water below, the circular stream parted for a moment. The water was held up in this unnatural position by an unknown force, only splashing down and returning to normal after Yaan lowered his sword and exhaled.
"I see, so it's like that. The 1st stage is to move the body like water. The 2nd stage is to move the sword like water. The 3rd stage is to move the surroundings like water.
He slowly stepped forwards and pressed out with his sword once again. The man waiting at the gate was completely stunned, watching in total disbelief as the soil around Yaan, travelling parallel to his either side, parted in an identical fashion to the water from just now!
The moment his foot landed, Yaan withdrew and sheathed the sword. An overjoyed look flashed through Yaan's gaze; he had mastered the 3rd stage of Flowing River Blade! He was now able to treat the surroundings like water, and with his strange ability to turn his sword outs into an illusory reality, he could quite literally part the earth as if it were water!
The man by the gate blinked and rubbed his eyes, only to find that the grass and soil was perfectly intact. Not a single change could be seen, nor were there any signs of damage.
'Did I imagine it…?' He wondered. In the end he shook his head and called out.
"Young master Yaan, I have a delivery from alchemist Handi!"
Yaan's eyes lit up and his body blurred, stopping besides the gate and quickly grabbing the box.
"Thanks." He nodded, then flicked the person a Rank 2 recovery pill.
Such a tip was considered really extravagant. The delivery boy thanked him profusely and internally promised to deliver this person's things as quickly and carefully as possible in the future.
Once he was alone, Yaan sat down in the middle of his garden and opened the box. The two Rank 3 pills were nothing special to look at, he had seen higher ranked pills than these after all.
He probably paid around 3 times what they were actually worth, but there was no other way to obtain these things on such short notice.
Yaan didn't hesitated to swallow the first, Rank 3 bone strengthening pill. He felt a bit nostalgic as that familiar, though much stronger effect coursed through his body.
The pill was extremely heavy, weighing at least ten pounds. This mass seemed to be a form of compressed energy which charged into his bones in a single rapid burst as soon as it entered his stomach. An ordinary person would be taken by surprise and waste most of this burst, but Yaan had already endured this once before, as well as many other body tempering pills. It could be said that he was experienced when it came to efficiently absorbing body tempering medicinal energy.
Instead of rejecting the damaging force, he circulated his vital energy and used it to force every scrap of the power into his bone marrow. Now that Yaan had attained the 3-Star realm, his control over his vital energy was much superior compared to his control at the 2-Star realm. Before, he could barely manage to accelerate, halt and ever so slightly shift the natural movement of his vital energy through his body. Now, whilst it took some effort, he was able to manipulate the vital energy through his flesh and blood. Only at the 4-Star realm did it become possible to shift the vital energy outside of the body.
Once the scolding medicinal energy was trapped within his bone marrow, he kept his body tense and stiff. Yaan coated his bones in vital energy, using this shield of energy to push down and apply even more pressure on the medicinal energy within his bone marrow.
Every now and then, he recovered his vital energy with a Rank 3 vital recovery pill, but this wasn't too costly or difficult. The difficulty was in sustaining this effort for as long as possible…preferably, until the full extent of the power was entirely absorbed into his bone.
It was inevitable that some of the boiling power would escape into the outer bone, but this was fine. Yaan just used this escaping energy to temper the outer bone. Enough escaped his grip that the outer bone was being thoroughly hardened, whilst the marrow was growing in density, reaching a state that allowed it to regenerate his vital energy more rapidly.
Time passed by painfully. The normal usage of this pill would only last for a period of 2 hours. A sane person would merely consume the pill, then allow it to run its course through the body. Even just this was extremely painful, but Yaan refused to let a single scrap of medicinal energy escape his grasp. As such, Yaan's method of forcefully retaining as much of the medicinal energy within his bone marrow for as long as possible, was excruciatingly painful!
Well, he wasn't quite successful with his goal of retaining 100% of the medicinal energy, but he managed to absorb 92% of the pill's total power! Compared to the norm which was around 20-30%, the difference was like night and day.
Yaan wasn't just a masochist for doing this, he was holding on to a hope…a hope that came true the moment the pill's effect finally wore out!
His bones, previously covered in a faint grey sheen, now resembled a dull, unpolished bronze.
"Bronze bones!" Yaan laughed loudly. He was overjoyed that his speculation turned out to actually come true!
He guessed that because his progressive bones constitution developed after using the Rank 2 bone strengthening pill, that it should have a decent chance of improving further by using the higher ranked pill!
There was of course no certainty with this, but by absorbing 92% of the pill's effect, he really did manage to increase the rank of his bones constitution!
There were many different types of constitution in this world. Some affected talent, some provided the being with an immediate and powerful, but set and unchangeable effect. Other constitutions could progress and evolve.
The divine light constitution that Elia possessed was the type that affected her talent regarding anything to do with light. Light spells, cultivating in areas of extreme light, light attribute in her very Yuan Qi, and more. Because it was a 'divine' constitution, the highest class of constitution that a living creature could be born with, it was particularly impressive.
Yaan's constitution was clearly the evolution type. It started off weak, barely even noticeable, but it had endless potential and could be upgraded time and time again given the right conditions. That said, these constitutions were far more common than divine constitutions, yet not nearly as highly valued. Just because they had the high potential for growth, didn't mean that they would actually ever progress beyond the initial stage.
But anyway, with these bronze rank bones, Yaan's bones wouldn't break even if a house collapsed on top of him! Whilst it wouldn't necessarily increase his combat strength, his ability to endure for longer during battle had definitely improved by no small margin.
Although this was certainly something to be happy about, Yaan quickly calmed himself down. There was still one more pill to use, the Rank 3 flesh nourishing pill.
His experience not too long ago with the lower ranked version of this pill was enough to make his heart sink as he thought about going through all that again. Luckily, this time, he was at least prepared.
Gulp!
Yaan swallowed a concoction of pills and three different potions, instantly feeling his recovery rate accelerating beyond safe levels. If he didn't damage himself somehow, his body would swell up and transform into a mountain-sized tumour.
He threw back the skin coloured flesh nourishing pill, and instantly, that recovery rate had its work cut out.
Since Yaan had already experienced all of this in the past and optimised his method in advance since last time, he attempted to keep his mind clear and lucid, whilst ignoring the excruciating pain shooting through his body.
Like before, once he felt the pill's energy slipping out from his muscles, he forced it back in with his vital energy and then swallowed a bunch more pills. This was where Yaan's usage of the medicine differed from others; others would stop here, but Yaan was moving on to begin the 2nd cycle!
Blood exploded from his pores all around throughout this 2nd cycle, but naturally, the 3rd cycle was an order of magnitude worse. By the time he finished 90 minutes later, his entire garden, stream and small lake had been died red with blood.
Despite having prepared throughout beforehand, Yaan couldn't help but feel relieved. The pain from the flesh nourishing pill was so bad that it could send weaker cultivators insane, some even going so far as killing themselves to escape the short period of agony!
Unlike before, Yaan forced himself to remain conscious, assisted by the mental clarity potions he chugged like juice. These medicines forced him to stay awake, allowing him to witness the bizarre scene of the blood throughout his garden forming a vortex, then flying back into his body! He didn't even feel it enter, but somehow, Yaan felt different. Not just different due to his improvements from using the medicine with near perfect efficiency, but something to do with witnessing the vortex definitely changed him somehow.
No matter how hard he searched, Yaan couldn't find the answer, so he gave up and went to sleep.
Over the next few days, Yaan realised something slightly unexpected. Because he absorbed so much of the bone strengthening pill's medicinal efficacy into his bones properly, he actually didn't improve his vital energy as much compared to if he had just let it be! He didn't regret this at all though…any resource containing energy could increase vital energy, but very few things could alter and optimise the very structure of the bones. Not to mention that this improvement to his bones was highly desirable given that the inheritance seemed to favour those with strong physical bodies!
Not only that, but after another two weeks, Yaan was startled once again. It seemed that by developing bronze bones and absorbing so much of the pill's power into his very bone marrow, his vital energy was slowly, very, very slowly, increasing without him even doing anything! Perhaps he hadn't actually lost out on as much of the vital energy improvement as he previously believed!
The flesh nourishing pill provided a much greater improvement to Yaan's vital energy, increasing the realm completion from 12% to 16%.
Seeing as he used this pill near perfectly, yet increased his vital energy by only 4%, it was clear that progressing through the 3-Star realm was an order of magnitude more difficult compared to the previous realm. That said, it was also possible that like with the bone strengthening pill, Yaan ended up using more of the medicinal energy to strengthen his physical flesh rather than his vital energy this time.
Any thoughts he might have held onto about dedicating himself to body tempering had been wiped away. If the 3-Star body was so difficult to improve, then what about the 4-Star, or the 5-Star body? He now understood why Rui said that achieving a 5-Star body was beyond difficult, and that Qi refining was the superior path for all humanoid life forms.
Now that he had spent the majority of his disposable funds, there really was nothing else for Yaan to do aside from practice his sword arts.
Life became peaceful. Extremely peaceful. Yaan quickly settled into a routine, free from stress, free from scheming or danger, free from needing to do anything other that practising his sword arts.
Despite there being only a few months remaining until the inheritance opening day, he didn't act as if he was hurried, or in any sort of rush. He practised slowly and deliberately, sometimes stopping and pondering a single muscle movement for hours at a time.
Months flew by, but Yaan met not a single person in this time. There were plenty of spirit fruits growing in his garden and jerkied meats in his storage room. He even had wine and tea. There was really no reason to leave.
Not to mention that he didn't actually 'need' any of these things, since his hunger and thirst could be remedied with a simple Rank 1 pill. But still, Yaan enjoyed eating, drinking and sleeping each day, spending maybe 4-6 hours every day on these activities combined. Sometimes, he also meditated with no real goal in mind, it just felt serene and relaxed his ever-weary heart.
Eventually, without ever actively pursuing it, Yaan began to understand those 'illusions' that appeared whenever he practised his sword arts. He also started to realise that although they were indeed illusions, they weren't entirely illusory.
Rather, without even realising it, he had started to incorporate dao into his sword arts. The dao of illusions, the dao of air, the dao of water, the dao of sword. These four often seemed to overlap, fuse and intertwine during his practice.
To this day, Yaan didn't understand dao. He didn't understand why so many Qi masters obsessed over pursuing their specific daos, why every single cultivator believed that their interpretation was correct, despite every interpretation differing from the next.
Yaan felt like these people put too much emphasis on describing this 'dao' with words, causing them to completely miss the truth that was standing directly in front of them.
To understand the truth of a horse, it was pointless to stare at it whilst talking about how it was large, brown, bulky, had a long mane, four legs and so on…if you were standing in front of a horse and you could see it with your own eyes, then that experience was the closest truth you would ever find. Any attempt to describe it would draw further and further away from the truth with each consecutive word.
"Or, maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps I, and every one else, are simply bad at explaining things, and are thus unable to explain dao." Yaan smiled brightly without caring at all about the accuracy of his musings.
As Yaan grew older and saw more of the world, he began asking questions sometimes, the sort of philosophical questions that even great scholars struggled to answer.
"In the end, dwelling on such intangible things doesn't make sense. It can be fun to muse now and then, but obsessing over these questions just leaves you without any answers, and even more questions."
"Hey, Yaan…!" Yaan's quiet contemplation was interrupted by a familiar voice that he had not heard in quite some time. He didn't mind the interruption, as he wasn't particularly busy and never said that he was going into closed door cultivation anyway.
"Nadda! It's good that you improved your realm and even fully recovered in time too!" Yaan laughed as he approached the happy looking, yet gloomy faced boy.
After chatting with Nadda for some times and confirming that he had fully recovered from his injuries whilst also stabilising his foundation after reaching the 4th layer, Nadda spoke of his plans leading up to the opening of the inheritance.
"You're going to hold a corpse auction? Seriously, is it ok to do that? I thought your clan preferred to keep this a bit more secretive?" Yaan blinked in surprise at what he just heard.
"Keeping the corpse trade a secret in normal times is to maintain our reputation…anyway, anyone who's worth something in these lands already knows about our business…we trade with over half of them after all…"
Yaan nodded, he realised early on that this was probably the case. In truth, keeping their corpse trade a 'secret' only served to delude the masses within the city. Most low level normal Qi masters would be off-put by a city which thrived on the trade of corpses, but holding a one time auction in the build up to an inheritance exploration was different.
"The inheritance site is filled with opportunity and peril…the city is still filling up and it's only getting more and more hectic these days….as the pressure starts to haunt everyone, I'll announce the anonymous auction…we'll say it's to help minimise our losses in the inheritance exploration, nobody will complain about that…nobody worth caring about anyway, kahaha…"
Yaan's eyes shone brightly.
"Good plan!" He commented honestly. "So when will you hold it? I think it's still too soon. The atmosphere is very excitable, but it's not quite 'tense' enough, I think."
Nadda also nodded slowly, he had thought of the same thing. There were still three months to go now, the excitement was peeking, but the fear hadn't quite kicked in properly. Once those people who intended to explore the inheritance began to feel nervous and anxious, they would spend all of their money on treasures to build up their strength.
"What sorts of corpses will you be selling, to make the most money?" Yaan suddenly asked.
"The best Qi Temple realm corpses…not Qi Palace realm demons, my clan prefers to keep those….as for demonic bodies…there are no 3-Star corpses in this city, they're too rare…"
Yaan nodded as he thought about it. Spirit Core and Demon Core realm corpses were useless to take into the inheritance since the core would just be removed. This was found to happen in previous explorations, and the core extraction always damaged the corpse, despite not damaging living beings somehow. The demand for corpses right now would be strongly skewed towards those at the higher layers of the Qi Temple realm.
"High ranking Qi Temple realm corpses could probably be sold for a hundred times the normal value, if we sell them at the right time…" Yaan pondered allowed. Nadda frowned and shook his head.
"No way, not that much…ten times, fifteen at a stretch…I've tried this before but there are usually some problems…it's still profitable though…"
Yaan smiled and crossed his arms.
"Let me guess…the people who are fine with using corpse puppets already have their own, whilst the others refuse to buy them because they don't like using corpse puppets?"
"Haha, so you can even guess something like that…" Ghu Nadda laughed, but his gaze towards Yaan became serious.
"Are you saying that you have a plan…?"
"Naturally I've given some thought to ways of making money, and this auction is giving me an idea…your Ghu Clan doesn't mind some slightly…underhanded methods, right?"
Ghu Nadda laughed happily and nodded approvingly at Yaan's idea, despite not yet knowing what it was. Underhanded? The Ghu Clan was built on a foundation of underhanded methods!
"Of course, that's fine…! So, what's your plan…? I feel like it's something interesting, right…?"
"Mm, if it works, then it will certainly be a plan that nobody in this province ever forgets. But first, tell me, of the nine Northern factions, which are coming this time with decent man power?"
Nadda laughed at Yaan's massive exaggeration, but then, he paused for a moment.
'That light in his eyes…he's planning something big. Definitely something big!'
As the plan gradually took form in Yaan's head, he realised that this situation, this gathering that was a bit disjointed due to the beasts at the Northern border…could prove to be an incredible opportunity.
Actually, he had often considered formulating such a scheme like this over the past few months. Yaan recently realised that he was privy to various pieces of information, which if controlled properly, could change this entire province in a matter of weeks!
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