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“Sure, let’s talk about the pills then,” Alex said. He could see the excitement on everyone’s faces and didn’t want to waste any time. “However, there is a small problem that won’t let me help one of you.”
“Huh? What do you mean?” Qiu Jianhong asked.
“It’s regarding senior Huang,” Alex said. “You’re probably unaware since you’ve remained in here, but I’ve had a bit of a scuffle with the Huang family.”
Huang Chen looked slightly perplexed. “What sort of a scuffle do you mean, little brother?” he asked.
“I come from a different continent, the Western continent, and when I first arrived on the mainland, I needed to sell pills for some money. The Huang family’s head realized this and requested me to make a pill for him to improve his cultivation speed. I agreed, not knowing that he actually wanted me to sell him my recipes.”
“He tried to imprison me after I told him I wasn’t willing.”
Huang Chen’s eyes narrowed. “Who is the current head? How could he do something like that while being the head of the family?” he asked angrily.
“Actually, I never bothered learning his name. After all, I left the place after he tried to imprison me, and along with that, I took away the ingredients he was going to force me to make pills with,” Alex said.
“Good thing you left,” the man said. “Those bastards trying to tarnish the name my brother created.”
“Actually, it doesn’t end there,” Alex said. “A year later, when I joined the Alchemy Association and made a name for myself with my pills, he came to the association and tried to defame me. It didn’t go his way obviously, but in the process, I felt forced to speak an oath.”
“Wh-what oath?” Huang Chen asked.
“I made an Oath that I would never make a pill for any Huang family member in the future,” Alex said. “My apologies senior, but I was angry at the time and never expected you to request my pills as well. However, as Oaths go, I am going to have to follow it and thus cannot make any pills you request.”
Huang Chen’s happiness was snuffed out in seconds after hearing the words that left Alex’s mouth.
“No way… but we’ve waited for so long just for your… this can’t be happening,” Huang Chen said.
“Young brother, you must have left yourself a way out, right? Surely you didn’t make an oath without conditions,” Yao Ning said.
“No, I was very angry at that time and I made the oath not realizing that I would have to be in such a situation,” Alex said.
“No way,” Liang Shufen said with her hand to her mouth. “Is there no way for brother Huang to get a pill?”
“Actually, there are two ways, although I’m not sure how effective they may be,” Alex said. “I’ve never had this oath tested against me before, so I apologize if what I suggest may not work.”
“What is it? What must I do?” Huang Chen asked.
“The first method is the worse one and the one that is most likely supposed to work,” Alex said.
“Tell me, as long as it is physically possible, I will do it,” Huang Chen said.
“You will have to renounce your connection to the Huang family, senior,” Alex said. “As long as you are not part of the Huang family, I’m sure I won’t face any restrictions from my oath.”
“That…” Huang Chen paused. “I can’t do that. That’s my family, my identity. I can’t give up on my name. That’s the same as giving up on my ancestors.”
“I know, senior,” Alex said. “That’s why I said it is the worse one.”
“What’s the other one then?” Huang Chen asked.
“I… I do not know much about oaths to know if they will work, but when I made the Oath against the Huang family, I promised never to make a pill for them knowingly. So, as long as I don’t know… that will work right?” Alex asked.
Huang Chen’s eyes went wide. “Wait, tell me the oath exactly, word for word,” he asked.
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“Hahaha! The heavens have favored me,” Huang Chen shouted. “Thank you young brother for your generous oath.”
“Will that help?” Alex asked.
“Yes, yes,” Huang Chen said. “But I should probably not talk about that. I will keep myself out of the conversation for now.”
The others realized what he had to do as well and continued the conversations on their own.
They started listing off a bunch of different types of pills they wanted to be made. They left the specific pill for Alex and only asked if he had any of those pills at all.
For ease, Alex handed them a talisman with all the pills he could make and what they did. The 10 could then ask for the pills they wanted from that list.
The group read the list with excited expressions as they knew they were getting pills with over 90% harmony. That was something they would’ve never expected to get in their entire life, so it was a momentous occasion certainly.
After a few minutes of reading through the list and trying to figure out what they wanted exactly, one of them turned towards Alex and asked, “Are these all the pills you can make?”
“I can make any pills that I have the recipe to, but these are the ones I can guarantee will be over 90% harmony,” Alex said.
“No other hidden pills that you might be keeping to yourself? It’s okay if you don’t want to answer,” another one said.
“No, I do have a few others, but they do the same thing as the others pill in the list and they do it worse, so I choose not to include them,” Alex said. “Why? Did you want pills with effects that are not in there?”
“Actually, yes,” Qiu Jianhong said. “There are indeed pills that we wish you can help us with.”
“I will see what I can do,” Alex said. “What sort of effects do you want? It will be easier if you have recipes to begin with.”
“Oh, we do have for one of them,” Ren Guanting said. “Brother Tan, you have the recipe, right?”
“Ah, yes. Here,” Tan Yang quickly pulled out a recipe and handed it over to Alex. “Do you think you can make a good pill with this recipe? It doesn’t have to reach 90% harmony, but it will certainly help if it can reach at least 60% or better. We’re getting old and having pill poisoning at this age is not really good for us.”
Alex looked at the recipe for a pill with no name at all. It only listed the ingredients and the directions to make the pill.
He closed his eyes and started going through the names on the list and seeing what sort of ingredients they were.
The others kept quiet seeing that Alex was deep in this thought and didn’t want to disturb him at all.
The first ingredient on the list was a flower that would numb one’s body. The second was a bark from a tree that would improve one’s muscles.
The third was a beast’s liver which would inflame one’s meridians and force them to grow slightly.
As such, Alex went through the entire list of ingredients and learned what they all did. After that, he tried to make sense of what the ingredient would do together when their energy was mixed in a certain way.
“It’s… a pill that will give you a burst of power?” Alex questioned. “No, that’s not right. It gives you temporary strength, but it’s of a defensive kind. Wind? No, wood.”
“Resistance then? Resistance to wood?” Alex questioned before finally landing on an answer. “It’s a pill to give one a small burst of resistance to lightning, isn’t it?”
The entire group of 10 looked awestruck at seeing Alex figure out the purpose of the pill in less than 10 minutes despite the recipe having no indication of what it was about.
“How did you know?” one of them asked. “Have you seen the recipe before perchance?”
“Of course not,” Alex said. “I just brute-forced my way to find the answer since I know what the ingredients themselves do.”
He saw the faces of the 10 who still couldn’t believe it. “It’s not as impressive as you might be thinking,” he said.
“No, it definitely is,” Tan Yang said. “It took my family generations to figure out what it did exactly as there were no apparent changes when one ate that pill. It was only after someone ate it during a lightning storm that we figured it out.”
“I see,” Alex said. “Your family held this recipe from generations ago to forget what it meant? I didn’t expect the Tan family to go so far back.”
“No, our family doesn’t go as far back, just a dozen thousand or so years back,” Tan Yang said. “The recipe has indeed been with our family for a long time, but it wasn’t made by our family. We most likely acquired it from someone who acquired it from that place.”
“That place?” Alex asked.
“You know,” Tan Yang said. “The Sundering Sanctum.”
“Oh, the secret realm. I have only heard of it. Does it house a lot of hidden treasure?” Alex asked. He wondered if it was similar to the Demon realm back in the Western Continent.
“We believe it used to, but not anymore,” Yao Ning said. “Now it’s just a crumbling piece of space we send our best and brightest to test themselves.”