Three days had passed since the auction.
Back in his quiet Zone C dwelling, Airan shifted his daily focus toward his new acquisitions, beginning with the brutal body-cultivation manual.
However, when it came to his internal Qi refinement, Airan entirely avoided conventional pills.
Instead, he relied exclusively on his own distilled wine.
While medium-grade spirit wine held roughly the same spiritual energy density as a standard low-grade pill, it carried zero medicinal toxins to clog or corrupt his meridians.
Drinking four small cups of his own high-purity brew provided clean, smooth spiritual energy that kept his foundation pristine.
He was going to use his wine-derived Qi as fuel to feed and strengthen the weak fire essence he had purchased.
Alongside it, he had acquired a specialized technique to safely integrate a low-grade fire directly into his Dantian.
If he succeeded in housing and controlling this flame, it would serve a triple purpose: providing the intense external-internal heat required for his body-cultivation manual, supercharging his fire-control techniques without needing expensive advanced spells, and drastically boosting the power of his fire-based agility and defensive arts.
With his own cultivation path mapped out, Airan turned his attention to his oldest companion.
He had already consulted Max about mortal pet awakening resources, learning that such items did indeed exist.
The key item was an Awakening Beast Pill, which normally carried a fifty-fifty success rate for turning a mortal beast into a spirit beast.
Max explained the process: to push the success rate to seventy percent and grant the pet elemental affinity, the owner had to continuously feed their own primary elemental energy directly to the beast until it began to integrate.
Once the pill was finally administered, the pet would fall into a deep, unpredictable slumber.
The exact duration of the awakening phase varied entirely on the beast’s constitution, though the absolute deadline before failure was one week.
Because the ruling Violet Sect—which governed the city and a sprawling thousand-kilometer radius—did not manufacture this specific pill, Max had to place a special order with a distant beast-taming sect.
It would take a full month for the pill to arrive.
A month of preparation, feeding his own elemental fire energy to his hound, and forging his own body into steel before the real trial began.
Author’s Note: Thanks for reading Chapter 12!
Airan’s journey from a penniless herb collector to a spirit distiller starts here.