Flame Li was the next one to sell me blood. While I took the sample he started asking me questions. They weren’t about the blood, or even the parasites, however. “You seem to have ‘adopted’ lot of spirit beasts, and be more comfortable around us than a lot of humans.” I nodded. “Did you grow up around some of us?”
“I never even met a spirit beast until a few weeks ago. I had just heard stories about them.” I responded.
“Then why do you treat us better than people that have known us their whole lives?”
“I don’t know.” I said with a shrug. “Maybe they learned their racism from someone. To me, you’re just a different type of person who happens to be an animal when they are young. To them, you are an animal that happens to get smart sometimes. They get used to treating you as an inferior animal, and it becomes normal for them. I’m used to treating you as a person, and the animal side of you just makes me realize that there are special circumstances.”
“Like what kind of circumstances?” he asked, curiously.
“Well, it’s complicated.” I wrote a number four on the bottle of blood and put it away. “You don’t see humans living in the wild. You don’t see humans being kept as pets. You especially don’t see humans being sold as food. But I’ve seen wolves as the first two, and plenty of other animals as the last one. Furthermore, spirit beasts don’t seem to mind eating those of other races, only really caring when you eat their own. I suppose humans are the same in that way, but when you see a hyena hunting a bird for food, you don’t think about the fact that they might both become smart one day. Xiao might have a problem with it, but I’ve even eaten lightning sparrow meat.”
He nodded. “Well, they weren’t lightning sparrows, but I’ve eaten a Steel Eagle before. By I still respect Golden Sky Lord, and the help he’s given us. I suppose it is a little different that we don’t care if the weak among us get eaten. The herbivores might not like it, but sometimes the weak must die so the strong can live.”
“I’m not sure if I agree with that sentiment, but I understand what you are saying.” I said. “My only other interaction with a burnt wolf was asking to adopt one of her children, though, so I’m not sure how common that sentiment is.”
He looked a bit surprised. “How old was this pup? You said that you didn’t see a spirit beast until a few weeks ago, so this had to have happened in that time.”
I nodded. “Yes, about a week and a half ago. I’m not sure how old it was, though. Maybe two months old.”
“And did you see her at the edge of the beast plains?”
I shook my head. “At the White Tiger sect, near High River. But they found her around there. They said she was injured and they nursed her back to health before she agreed to go with them back to their base. She gave birth a few days after getting back. Why?”
“Was she a half blood? Peak level two?”
“She was a half blood, but initial or early level three. Her pups were strong bloods though. They said that the father was probably a strong blood or pure blood.” I then realized why he was asking about that, and seemed so interested. “Since you are a pure blood burnt wolf, I assume this line of questions means that you are wondering if you are the father.”
He nodded. “Yeah.” He sighed. “Around six months ago I reached level three, and was released. With no money or belongings, I followed a group of hunters up north to the beast plains. I figured I could just live up there, like my ancestors. I failed horribly, though. I barely managed to hunt enough food to not starve, and couldn’t even find a good place to sleep. That’s when I met a beautiful woman. She was only peak level two, but she let me stay with her and taught me how to survive. We lived together for around a month, but I knew I couldn’t stay. The wild life just wasn’t for me. So I returned here, and Gitan taught me to take human form so I could live in the city. I’ve been living here since then.” He shook his head. “There’s a possibility she was pregnant when I left, though. And if that’s the case, I need to talk to her, now that she’s intelligent enough to talk. I need to explain why I left. Why I abandoned the children I didn’t know I had.”
I nodded. “Well, our group should be heading back to High River in a few days. If you want to come with us, I’m sure I can convince our caravan boss to accept another mercenary guard for the return trip.”
He shook his head. “Your trip will take you through the mortal valley, won’t it?” I nodded, not seeing the problem. “You’re still thinking like a human. You can do fine in such an area, but if I spend too much time there, I’ll start to run out of qi. For humans, that just makes you weak, but for us, it hurts. It feels like part of you is being drained away, that you’re losing your intelligence.”
“I didn’t realize that.” I said. “I asked Xiao to leave the beast bag twice while we were in the valley. He said he didn’t like doing that, and that he felt weak, but I didn’t realize it was doing that to him.” I called Xiao over through our link and he flew over. The fox woman was still telling stories, but Xiao didn’t seem that interested in them. “Hey Xiao,” I said when he landed. “Mr. Li just told me what it’s like in the Mortal Valley for spirit beasts.”
“It hurts.” he responded. “It’s like I’m slowly losing my smartness.”
“I’m sorry I asked you to come out then. I didn’t realize it hurt you to come out.”
“It’s okay, papa,” he said. “I know you really needed me then. But if you want to give me more spicy insects…”
I smiled. “Maybe later. I only have the ones I want to raise right now.” He looked a little disappointed. “Mr. Li was thinking about going to visit the White Tiger sect, but since he can’t go through Mortal Valley, he can’t go with us.”
Xiao looked confused. “Why don’t you just put him in a beast bag and let him sleep the whole time, like me?”
Flame Li smiled. “I never really liked staying in a beast bag. Don’t worry, I know a road that goes around the valley. I’ll just take it. It should only slow me down by a few days.”
I nodded and paid him his stone, and Xiao left with him. He was curious about the world and wanted to ask all of the questions that he could. Two hours later I had drawn blood from thirty one more people, including old Gitan, and none of the others seemed to want to sell to me. This would be enough to get started, though.
Gitan looked like he had a lot more energy, and explained that the talisman had trapped seventy three parasites before running out of qi. I showed him how to recharge it, and he said that he would use it on all of his parasites before sharing it with everyone else. I knew that one talisman wouldn’t be enough, so I made another three before leaving. Hopefully that could help them isolate the parasites so that the people don’t suffer from a constant qi drain any more.
The sun was starting to set as I left, so Xiao and I said goodbye and I went to a home furnishings store. There I bought two hundred glass saucers with lids. These would act as petri dishes for my experiment. I hadn’t actually grown bacteria cultures before, but this didn’t seem as complicated as that. I also went by a talisman store and bought some more level two papers and ink. This time they were made from spirit cotton, like the clothes most people in town wore, so they wouldn’t last as long as the leather ones, but they didn’t require a hard to get material so I could make more of them.
Once I was back at the shop I started painting identical gathering formations on the bottom of all of the saucers, then left them on the table to dry. Xiao was getting hungry, so I gave him half of a rainbow fruit and ate the other half myself. He started acting a bit drunk and I put him back in the bag so that he could sleep it off. With him and the fruit both being level two, it might be a little strong for him. I should probably buy a few of the level one rainbow fruits tomorrow, and maybe look to see if I could find any level threes for after I had adapted to them and the Chaos Rainbow Enlightenment fruit. The stalls hadn’t had any, but maybe a specialty shop or proper grocer would.
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Once the paint dried I turned the saucers over and put a little tea in each. I made three for each sample of blood, shuffled them just in case the strength of the formation changed, and lined them up on the counter in a three by thirty five grid. Under each I placed a piece of paper with dish number, the number of parasites I could count in each one, and the number of the blood sample. I then added one drop of blood to each dish and put on the lid. After I was done I started making talismans to help treat the parasites.
An hour or so later, Jiang came to get me. “It’s getting really late, so we’re going to leave. Are you finished?”
I finished the last few lines on the talisman and put my brush into the cup with a bit of water. “Yeah, I’ll have to check on my experiments in the morning, but I’m finished for now.” I laid the last talisman out to dry and stood up. I had finished just over one hundred of them. I had enough practice with it that the recharge part of the talisman only took ten seconds or so and I no longer made a mistake that would prevent it from working, only ones that made it work worse. The trapping formation had improved as well, with the effect rarely having a flaw that I needed to fix. One of the parasites inside of me was constantly having its barrier destroyed and reformed as I tested the different talismans, so it would likely last longer than the others. Still, by sunrise all of the ones that were trapped would be dead and I would have to trap the ones that had grown up. Hopefully I had trapped all of them before they were old enough to reproduce. While they could reproduce asexually, without qi they wouldn’t have the energy to do so, and the barrier should stay up long enough that the few eggs they laid that hatched should starve to death within an hour.
Once we were outside I said goodbye to the other two alchemists and Jiang and I walked towards the manor. “Do you want to go out to eat?” she asked, and I shook my head.
“I’m kind of worried about eating right now. Do we know which places have been cleared so far?”
Jiang nodded. “Actually, the guard released a statement a few hours ago which listed all of the vendors that hadn’t shown evidence of food tampering. Those that did were temporarily closed for public health reasons, but until an investigation has been done, no one is being arrested. They could easily have employees that infected the food, and the bosses are innocent.”
I nodded. “In that case, let’s pick one from the list.” An hour and a half later we left some fried food place. While the food wasn’t bad, it was a bit greasy for my taste. Jiang seemed to like it, though. I didn’t want to go home without doing something to relax, so we walked the street looking for something to do. Jiang couldn’t drink at the moment, so we couldn’t visit the bar. While a small amount of wine wouldn’t hurt her or Eight, neither of us wanted to risk her drinking too much. Most of the other places that were opened at night specialized in the type of adult oriented entertainment neither of us wanted to participate in at the moment.
We eventually found a gambling establishment. “Huh, they have stone gambling here.” I said, a bit surprised. While it was popular in some places on Earth, especially China, and a staple of recent xianxia novels, I didn’t realize that this world had it, nor had I ever done it. There were two attached buildings. One was labeled ‘Mineral seller.’ The other was labeled ‘Stone Gambling Hall’. Neither Jiang nor I was sure how it worked here, so we went inside the gambling hall.
After telling an employee that we had never been there before they explained the rules. There were three types of stones you could gamble on. The first were geodes, which could be bought for one hundredth of their weight in pure quartz spirit stones. This was the main source of gems for the mortal currency in the city. The second was Jade. They sold for their weight in stones. Last was Essence stones. They sold for one hundred times their weight in stones. You could either remove the excess stone or cut it open yourself, or let them do it. On average you would make about eighty percent of the value back on all of the stones, but sometimes you would get lucky and earn a profit, and sometimes you would open a dud or a stone with an unusually low value. All of the stones were mined nearby in the city’s various mines and sold directly to the shop from the mines.
They would even buy the stone from you if you don’t want it. That was the main source of jade and essence stones for the connected mineral merchant, and cutting the gems from the geodes was a major source of more currency for the city, the rest of the currency coming from their smaller competitors. The shop also dealt in various ores, though the spirit stones were chipped out of the rock directly at the city’s spirit stone mine.
As I wanted to buy some essence stones anyway, I decided to buy a few small ones. As long as I got at least one of every element I would be happy. Jiang didn’t have much money to gamble with, but wanted to buy a geode to try her luck. After she picked out a geode and I picked out ten small essence stones we went to the front desk to pay. I saw a sphere of a strange type of jade on the desk, a mixture of white and black opalescent jade, about the size of a fist, and asked the man behind the desk about it. “That is actually a defective jade. While it’s pretty, and some people buy them for decoration, it can’t really store memories. That’s why we polished it into a perfect sphere.”
“Do you mind if I try it?” I asked and he shook his head. I picked it up and touched my mind to it. It seemed like a vast empty space, and I couldn’t see any other memories inside.
“Many people have tried to store information in it, but no mater how much they place in there, they can never find it afterwards.” the man said. “Since it can’t be retrieved, it’s useless as a memory storage item.”
Most jade was like a box, and the memories were sheets of paper or books. Different jades had different sized boxes, and the pages could have more detail, but you could always look inside and find the memory you wanted. This, on the other hand, seemed endless, like you were throwing the paper into the ocean. Could it just have so much space that they couldn’t fill it enough to notice the memories? I wasn’t sure, but if that was the case, I might be able to turn it into a server storage device once I was back on earth. “Interesting. Would you be willing to sell it to me?”
He shrugged. “One that size would normally go for ten taels, but since you are planning on buying these other stones, you can just have it.” I thanked him and stored it in my bag.
He weighed the stones I wanted to buy. They weighed twelve point three stones, a stone being about twenty five grams or a twentieth of a gin, so I pulled out twelve hundred and thirty stones. He gave Jiang her stone for free, and even gave us a bonus small jade stone so that we could see what the jade was like, then we let them open them. I wanted to keep the essence stones intact, so I asked that they chip the excess off of the outside rather than cut it. For the jade and geode, however, we let them cut them in half.
When Jiang’s stone fell apart we saw that it was full of beautiful purple crystals. “Congratulations,” the cutter said, “It’s an amethyst. That’s worth slightly above average, so we can pay you one hundred and five taels for it if you wish to sell.” The sale price would have been ninety three taels, so she would have made a slight profit if she had actually paid for it. She decided to sell it so that she could have more spending money. Next they cut open the jade. It was a low quality green jade that was only really used for taking notes and storing petty and mortal quality books. While the jade would have cost just over three stones, if we sold it it would only be worth two. This was what most of the jade that was harvested here turned out to be.
After that we waited for the team of apprentice gem cutters to chip the outside off of my essence stones. Many people were watching them work, as buying so much at once made me a bit of a high roller. Over half of the essence stones sold here were Earth Essence stones. Next were the Water stones at about twenty percent. Then came fire, at around ten, as there are several dormant volcanoes in the area where the stones can be harvested. After that was wood at a three or four percent chance, followed by metal which had less than a one percent chance. After that was mostly duds, though you would occasionally get an unknown, with a root of an unidentified type, or a mutant stone, like advanced forms of the elements. If you were lucky enough to get one of them, they could be sold at hundreds of times what you paid for them.
They served us tea as we waited, and Jiang put a mint leaf in both of our glasses before they poured the tea in. While it changed the taste, there was no guarantee that their tea wasn’t infected, as places that only served food or beverages to entertain guests or provided them to employees hadn’t yet been tested. The mint leaf would kill any eggs that were in the tea leaves if they were there.
Soon the first stone was cleared, an Earth type. The next was a Water, followed by two more Earth. After that I got a Fire, then three Earth, then a Wood, then another Water. I checked all of them, and found that they all they all seemed to have a bit of a personality, like the shard the Ambassador had loaned me, but stronger. As I hadn’t gotten a metal one, I talked to the shop keeper. Someone had sold a smaller one to the shop yesterday, and I spent another eighty one stones to buy it from him, even though he had paid seventy five for it. The total value of the raw stones I had bought came to just over eleven hundred. While I had lost some money on the Earth Essence stones, the Wood one had brought up the average considerably, so I didn’t lose as much as I had expected to.
I thanked the shop for everything and we left for the manor. Now that I had a complete set of stones, and I suspected that they had more complete personalities than the shard, I could see if they could train against each other the way the shard had trained against me.
