Chapter 243: Life 73, Age 38, Martial Grandmaster Peak
My working theory was that medicinal energy was not a unique form of energy. Instead, it was simply a blend of qi and wu. This blended energy was then shaped into specific structures to give medicinal herbs their unique properties.
If this was true, then learning to grow and tend herbs might be entirely unnecessary. If I could fully memorize the correct structure of an herb, then I should be able to create it from nothing but pure energy.
While this opened up some intriguing possibilities, I doubted there would be any way to exploit this knowledge in practice. Aside from the difficulty involved in fully memorizing an herb’s energy structure, the time and effort required to recreate it from scratch would be hard to justify. How long would it take me to meticulously reconstruct the energy pattern of a blue peony? Also, why do this myself when I can have a plant do it for me?
Still, while there may or may not be a way to exploit this knowledge directly, it potentially gave me the information I needed to finally make a breakthrough in learning to use parts from demon beasts in alchemy.
The key was that medicinal energy wasn’t a unique form of energy. It was structured qi and wu.
When I had attempted to use beast parts long ago, I had focused on the parts of the body that had the highest concentration of demonic energy. For demonic flame chickens, these were the claws and beak since those were what they used for attack and defense. However, just because these were the parts with the most abundant energy didn’t mean that these were the parts with the most structured energy, and structure was what I needed.
To test this, I needed access to demon beast carcasses. While a few members of my clan had begun raising animals to learn beast taming, it would still be some time yet before our herds were large enough that we could slaughter them for research purposes.
In my mind, ideally, I would use Peak Rank 1 demon beasts when concocting a Rank 1 pill, but after a bit of looking around, I found that such beasts were extremely scarce in the Wastes. While there were farmers who raised livestock for food, these were all simple mortal animals.
As I soon found out, the lack of true demon beasts wasn’t a function of the animals the farmers raised or the environment in the Wastes. Instead, it was because the farmers ruthlessly slaughtered any animal that showed signs of absorbing demonic energy.