After devouring the freshly cooked wild boar meat, Wan Lihan sat back, the grease staining his ragged sleeves as his stomach finally settled. His core cultivation hummed lightly, drawing energy from the cooked flesh to stabilize his 2nd Layer Qi.As he stood up to sweep the dust from the floorboards, his gaze caught a dark corner of the abandoned house. Thrown off by the dim lighting when he first arrived, he hadn't noticed the thick patch of overgrown weeds creeping through the rotten wall panels.
Nestled deep inside the vines was a pale, desiccated skeleton.Lihan didn't flinch. His blank eyes closely examined the remains. Clutched tightly against the rib cage was a dusty, weathered leather spatial pouch. Bending down, Lihan pried the bag from the bone fingers and poured its contents onto the floor
.A handful of basic healing pills, a sharp iron sword, a thick leather-bound alchemy manual, a compact bronze refining furnace, and a cracked wooden identity token clattered onto the wood.Lihan picked up the token, tracing the foreign engravings with his thumb. Is this token for an official sect member? he calculated silently. Looking at the hairline cracks in the bone, his injuries were likely too fatal. He must have crawled into this abandoned house to hide, fell into a deep sleep, and died alone.Lihan stared at the empty skull for a brief moment.
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"Rest in peace,"
he muttered flatly.Hauling the skeleton over his shoulder, Lihan walked out to the quiet dirt clearing behind the house. Using the rusted blade he had found earlier, he spent an hour digging a deep, respectful grave into the soil, placing the bones inside and burying them beneath the earth.Returning inside, Lihan sat by the small hearth fire and opened the newly acquired alchemy book.
His calculating mind devoured the ink, memorizing the crude illustrations of spiritual vegetation and medicinal plants.If I want to maximize my survival as a rogue, I need to know how to process my own medicine, he thought.Closing the script, he left the cottage on foot and began tracking up the jagged, rocky paths of the nearby mountain peaks. Since his Qi Cleansing realm didn't allow him to fly on blades, he relied on his enhanced physical stamina to traverse the dense ridges.Searching through the shaded crags and oak tree roots, his eyes locked onto three specific plants detailed in the text for refining basic healing pills: three stalks of crimson Earth-Blood Weed, a cluster of yellow Sun-Burst Leaves, and a handful of glowing Silver-Mist Vines.Carefully harvesting the spiritual ingredients and tucking them securely into his pocket, the fugitive rogue cultivator turned on his heel and descended the mountain trails, heading straight back to the safety of the abandoned house to begin his first true trial of pill-making