Chapter 665: Almost Evil

Chapter 665: Almost Evil

More and more singleton herbs joined his original set. At last, the list stabilized. Even as the other clones progressed, herbs rarely joined Mortals set. He looked over the herbs, looking them up and down.

Currently, Im looking at eight herbs. Judging the pills difficulty by the number of herbs required to cultivate it, its well out of my skill range!

Oh well. If I have to rely on Xi Sanji, so be it. Ill try my hardest to figure it out first, but Im not afraid to call on her if I cant. After all, these are all elements Im used to. Even if I dont understand the finer points of pill cultivation, I should still be able to guess the way they align and suppress and enhance one another. The pill library the other clones are downloading into our brain means I basically cant help but know that right now, even putting aside my own hard-earned knowledge!

The bulb with the small flowers, the dried bud that bloomed into a flower, the black leaf with ridged edges, and the fire-colored flower all remained in his set of eight. Five new herbs joined them. A scraggly red root with small tubers exuded fire element. A spray of heavy flowers dangled from a thick black stem. The flowers glowed like stars, and the stem absorbed that light. Floating beside the flowers, a dry bean pod in brown held ember-hot beans. A long branch rounded out the five, the left half of it alive, full of leaves and flowers, the right half of it dead and dry.

Mortal put a hand on his chin, thoughtful. Life and death. Yang. Fire. Wind. Its not impossible to combine them, but its certainly not going to be easy.

Lets start from the easy combinations, and work up. It makes sense, right? What kind of madman would start from the hardest eight-herb combination? Lets do twosies and threesies and work up from there.

The nice part is that Im currently in a dataspace. In other words, none of these herbs are real. While it does mean that Im not a hundred percent accurate in terms of what the combinations will be, since I wont be able to accurately predict things like imperfections and extraneous additions, Ill be able to figure out the basics of the combinations with infinite copies of the herbs.

Basically, Im applying the principles of computer modelling to pill cultivation. Its probably the only way I could possibly learn pill cultivation without a massive waste of resources. After all, Im not learning pill cultivation the proper way. Even attempting two- or three-based combinations with these herbs is probably far beyond the beginning capacity of an ordinary pill cultivator. Pill cultivators almost certainly begin with simple, easy herbs. Common herbs. These herbs Im going to guess theyre the kind of herbs most pill cultivators dont see in their lifetimes.

He took a deep breath. With a gesture, he sent the components into his dantian. Using the fire, he began to heat them. Alright. Here we go. I hope it doesnt hurt!

Once more, the pill components spun together. Using his dantian, Mortal pressurized them, while the phoenix fire burned from below. His stomach heated up, but not so painfully that he couldnt press on. Between the pressure and the heat, the fire flower melted. The ember burst into flame, boiling the liquid. The tuber burned away, purifying to a white, fibrous powder that fell into the liquid. The boiling liquid thickened and wrapped around the ember as it burned out, creating a smooth red coating on an ashy black pill.

There we go. Thats more like it!

Calling the data pill from his dantian, Mortal scratched its surface with his fingernail and extracted a bit of the coating and the pill beneath. He lifted his finger to his mouth, then paused.

Im about to use my bodiless mental clone forms tongue to test the effects of a data pill created from mental copies of the herbs this is insane.

Or a complete, perfect computer model of a human body trying a new pharmaceutical that still only exists in the dataspace. Its a very normal, reasonable thing to do, right?

Right!

Anyways, here goes! He tasted the pill.