Alex held the last piece of Blood Spirit Ginseng in his hands and then looked at the heated-up cauldron in front of him.
"What am I doing?" he thought, almost disappointed at himself. "I can't refine a saint rank ingredient by myself."
"I need help," Alex thought.
He was getting so desperate that he nearly risked not only ruining the ingredient but also hurting himself.
He remembered what happened when he was in the Mind Tempering realm and tried to refine a True rank ingredient. He had nearly caused the energy to go violent and volatile.
Saint rank ingredient would be way worse than that.
So, Alex decided to ask Qin Shan for help in this matter.
"You want me to refine an ingredient?" Qin Shan was surprised. "I'm sorry young man, but I've never performed Alchemy. I will… I don't how I could ever do it without messing it up."
"Don't worry, senior. I will train you myself. Besides, I just need your help because you have Saint Qi. I would have done it myself if I had the Qi," Alex said.
"Fine, fine," Qin Shan accepted in the end, seemingly reluctantly. On the inside, however, he couldn't help but be super excited.
After all, the whole world was trying to take a glimpse of Alex's face right now, and he was getting a one on one training for him.
Besides, it was hard to deny the words of someone who made a 92% pill.
Alex gave a personal lesson on alchemy for the whole day to Qin Shan who happily absorbed it all. Later that night, he sent him back to revise the lesson in his mind as the next day he would have to help Alex.
Come next day, he sat in front of Alex in a confident manner.
"Now listen to what I say and do exactly that," Alex said. He then started teaching Qin Shan exactly how to move the ingredients.
"Just focus on moving it, leave the fire and temperature to me," Alex said started focusing on it.
Once he was ready, he told Qin Shan to start.
Gently, Qin Shan dropped the final piece of the Blood Spirit Ginseng and Alex immediately poured all of his attention into gaining the impression of the ginseng once again.
It had been 3 months since he last got the impression, so he was hoping to be somewhat wrong so that he could go on to find other ingredients that would work.
However, unfortunately for him, it was entirely the same. The same wood energy, the same feeling. In fact, he could tell that the Fragrant Ginger Vine was the perfect ingredient to replace it if it was also a Saint rank ingredient.
A minute later, Qin Shan stopped and took some heavy breaths. "Whoo! Saint rank ingredients sure are hard to control," he said.
"Yes, the higher the rank, the harder it becomes to handle them," Alex said without any emotion on his face.
While he was capable of making small conversation, his mind was entirely focused on finding what he would do now. The last piece of Blood Spirit Ginseng was gone and he had found nothing new.
He could just wait until Saint realm to get his arms back as everyone else told him. However, no one knew why he was really doing this.
If it were only for him, he could've waited to make the pill once he reached Saint Realm and not have destroyed the Blood Spirit Ginseng.
But given how rare the ingredients were, he doubted he would get more than a single set of ingredients. What then? He would be healed, but what about his master?
Wen Cheng was back in the crimson empire without a hand and a few fingers on the other one. His Martial Uncle was without a leg, and so were the many other elders that fought on the night when his master died many years ago.
He wanted to help them too. He was sure that they would never enter the saint realm, at least without any external help. As such, if he didn't make a pill for them, he would never have them healed.
'What should I do?' he started feeling panicked and stressed. He had a few people around him but none of them could help him right now.
His mother wasn't helpful in alchemy. Shen Jing had gone home and wouldn't return for another decade or more.
Aside from these two, there were a few others he could rely on in most cases, but not this.
"You must have been in a lot of life and death battles," Qin Shan suddenly spoke, taking him back to what he was doing.
"Sorry?" Alex asked as he didn't quite hear Qin Shan.
"I said that you must have fought a lot of life and death battles, or been around a lot of deaths," Qin Shan said.
"Not really around humans, but for beasts yeah," Alex said. He had killed a lot of humans already, but compared to beasts, the number was insignificant.
"No wonder," Qin Shan said with a sigh.
"No wonder what?" Alex asked.
"No wonder you can stand this thick of a bloody stench," Qin Shan said.
"Yeah, you get used to it. You just need to ignore it and focus…" Alex trailed off as he realized something and abruptly stood up.
"Stupid!" he called out himself. "Why the hell am I ignoring the Blood Aura of an ingredient named Blood Spirit Ginseng?"
"Are… you alright?" Qin Shan asked.
"Yes, thank you, senior. You helped me realize my mistake," Alex said. "If you'll excuse me, I have to be somewhere."
Alex ate a face-changing pill and went to the guild to buy a bunch of true rank ingredients with Blood Aura in it. From what he hoped, he would pair the Ginger Vine with one of these ingredients, and hopefully, the blood aura would do its job.
So, Alex returned back to his place and started making the pill once more.
He put in the ingredients as per the recipe with a lot of mistakes along the way as his body had heated up to a point where making pills was getting hard again.
Still, he forced his way through it and prepared the pill. As he went along and was on the final step of the process, he put in the Fragrant Ginger Vine.
Once that was refined, most of the time, he would make a pill out of it. However, now he was going to put in another ingredient because of its blood aura.
Alex took out a red leaf and was ready to place it in when he stopped as a bunch of information appeared in his mind.
Fire. That was the elemental energy of the ingredient in his hand. If he were to place this ingredient in, the fire would very easily cause problems for the Water energy that was the current result.
'This will destroy the pill,' Alex thought. He switched through the other ingredients, but very easily, any one of them could ruin the pill.
Alex turned what was in the cauldron into a pill and started thinking of what other choices he had.
'I need blood aura without it having any other energy,' he thought.
