Chapter 5
The moment I got off work, I went straight to the Thunder Pavilion.
I handed the clerk my claim token. He checked the ledger and counted the spirit stones out into my hand.
Six hundred.
Holy shit... The materials on this cost thirty...
I tucked the pouch into my storage bag and grinned.
Honestly, at this rate I could just get a place of my own.
I couldn't keep living in the sect dorms forever, sneaking the pill furnace at dawn like some thief's bastard. If I could earn like this, why not simply rent a room? Pick up a secondhand furnace while I was at it, and refine pills every day with the general vibe of a guy in America brewing health tonics out of his garage.
Yeah. Thought of it, so let's just do it.
I headed for the market at once. First stop was the herb shop, where I bought the materials for the three Viagra pills I'd been commissioned to make. Then I went to the artifact shop and started browsing secondhand furnaces.
A Low-Grade Pill Furnace.
I rubbed at the soot caked on the outside, lifted the lid, and checked the interior. I ran my fingertips along the rim looking for flaws, but there wasn't a real one to be found.
“How much for this?”
“A hundred spirit stones.”
“C-could you... maybe come down a little...”
“Hey! If you don't want it, don't buy it!”
A remarkably firm man. Firm enough that I had to wonder whether he, like a certain someone, had a few issues in the social-skills department.
Still, a hundred spirit stones wasn't a price I couldn't pay. Buy it once and I'd be using it for a long time. I'd get my money's worth and then some.
I peered inside again. The mouth was wide, the depth more than enough. The—
“I'll take it.”
The man held out his hand with a prim little look on his face. I put on a sulk to match, fished the spirit stones out of my storage pouch, and handed them over.
With the furnace tucked carefully away, I went on my way whistling, and that was when I spotted an herb stall.
That... is that...?
It was a yam if I'd ever seen one.
“Boss, this is yam, isn't it?”
“It is. Dug it up in the mountains.”
The merchant picked up a root and sliced off the end. I bent down and looked at the white cross-section. When I touched it with a fingertip, sticky sap clung to my skin, and up close it smelled of earth.
Yeah. That was it. The slick yam that tastes like sweet potato if you roast it.
If I could make steroids out of this... what would happen?
I didn't know the exact mechanism behind a cultivator's body. But steroids could turn an ordinary person into a monster, couldn't they? So what if you shot them into a cultivator who was already built beyond human spec? I didn't know the details, but all hell would break loose.
“I... I'll take all of them, Boss...”
“Ten spirit stones a bundle.”
I gathered up the yams and went to buy the rest of the research materials I needed. Along the way I stopped at a talisman shop and picked up several talismans, alarm talismans among them. It was a dangerous world. No harm in being thorough.
Tucking the talismans away, I asked the shopkeeper, “Boss, any houses for rent around here?”
“A house? Sure, there are.”
“Where would I find one?”
“Ask at the herb shop across the way. I hear they've put a place up at the foot of the mountain.”
I went back to the shop where I'd bought the herbs.
“Boss. You wouldn't happen to be looking for a tenant?”
“Oh? Not sure where you heard it, but the spirit energy out there is pretty thin. You sure about that?”
“Hmm...? Could I take a look first?”
“Of course.”
I followed the merchant out of the market. We walked a good while before we reached a mountain hollow—about half an hour from the market, and the same from the sect. A place as cut off as an island. The sort of spot where you could die alone and nobody would ever know.
Fortunately, the house itself was quite pretty. A tiled-roof place wrapped in a low wall, great trees crowding in around it, flowers even blooming in the yard.
The old gate shrieked as the merchant pushed it open, and I followed him into a small yard of packed earth. He went straight up under the eaves and opened a door.
“Sleep in here. The room next door, use however you like.”
I looked into the bedroom first. A wooden platform sat under the window; lay out some bedding and I could drop straight onto it. Then I turned toward the next room and stepped inside.
Oh?
It was wider than the bedroom. I went to the long wooden table under the window and set my palm on it. One side for preparing herbs, the other for catching the extract—it was exactly the right shape for that. Put a big shelf in and the workflow wouldn't be half bad either.
This is actually pretty nice. Nobody lives nearby, so whatever I get up to, there's no one around to care.
Of course, if someone came after me, that would be a different story. Lay the traps and alarm talismans properly, and it ought to be fine.
I circulated the Earth Absorption Art and tried to draw in spirit energy. Thin, just as the merchant had said—thin enough that any cultivator looking for a decent place to train would have turned around on the spot.
“So how much a month? Is there a deposit?”
“A deposit? Nothing like that. It's lunar-month rent. A hundred spirit stones a month, three months up front—pay three hundred first.”
“Good. I'll pay now.”
I took out the spirit stones.
“Thank you!”
“No, thank you, ha ha ha!”
I saw the merchant off and shut the gate. Then I went straight back to the workroom and set the furnace out.
Ah. That's not the first thing.
I took two alarm talismans and went outside. One went at the mouth of the ravine, the only way into the place. The other I set where the house wall was only just coming into view. Back inside, I set the herbs for the commissioned order off to one side of the table and put the yam in the center.
First the order. Then we take this slow.
I lit the brazier at once. While the heat settled in, I washed out the furnace. There was some soot on the outside, but the inside was sound. I wiped it dry and set it over the fire, and it looked far more convincing than it had back in the shop.
I pulled a chair in close and sat. Out came the materials I'd bought, and the tools I needed went where my hands could reach them. Outside the window, the yard had already gone dark.
“Alright. Shall we start the game?”
The Viagra refinement finished quickly. Pharmacy is like that. Building the formula is the hard part; once you've made a thing once, production itself gets drastically easier. Which is why aspirin knockoffs wander every country on earth with nothing but the name changed.
“Well then... shall we move on to the long-awaited anabolic steroids?”
I picked up a chunk of yam and rolled it across my palm.
There was a gentleman named Russell Marker. The father of anabolic steroids—the man they call Sburji. He tore through the Mexican jungle scraping together wild yam, pulled hormones out of it, and mass-produced the countless juicers of the modern world. A truly admirable gentleman.
The fire roared as I drove the furnace hotter. What had been red gradually turned blue, and a vicious heat slammed into my skin.
And now, following in that admirable gentleman's footsteps, this world was scheduled to receive a Sburji of its own.
Me.
I sliced the yam and put it in the furnace. Once I'd drawn out the components I needed, I drove the reaction with spirit energy.
...Hm?
Something was wrong. I couldn't peel the spirit energy off the extract. It was stuck fast.
The spirit energy is clinging to the hormone. Sticky as glue...
I ladled a little of the liquid into a small bottle, brought it close to the lamp, and examined the inside with my spiritual sense. Even after it left the furnace, I could feel the spirit energy bound to it.
So what happens if I shoot this into a body?
I held the bottle and grinned.
On Earth, muscle is cosmetic. Nothing more, nothing less. But here? Muscle lets you swing a weapon harder. Muscle lets you beat a man to death. Muscle, in other words, is power. And if the steroid came with spirit energy thrown in, two for the price of one? That was a completely absurd level of performance.
I pictured cultivators gone hulking on the stuff. An immortal descends riding his sword, rolls up a sleeve, and the forearm is as thick as somebody else's thigh.
The future of the cultivation world is looking bright as hell.
I rolled up my own sleeve. I put strength into the arm and looked back and forth between it and the hand holding the bottle.
We've got an emergency patient right here.
I filled a syringe with the extract, sat down, and rolled my pant leg up to the thigh. I'd been working at the furnace long enough that sweat had glued the cloth to my skin. I pulled it free, bared the flesh, and brought the needle in.
...Wait.
Actually holding it over my own thigh, a very important problem occurred to me.
But I can't... I can't actually end up a eunuch...
Every dark path in the world exacts a price. Steroids, for instance: the moment you start using them, your dick shrivels up and goes on strike. There were variables here, though. For one, the higher a cultivator's realm climbs, the more naturally he turns into a eunuch anyway. For another, this steroid had spirit energy stuck all over it, thick as glue.
“Even so... anybody with his head screwed on would stick it in a rat first, right...?”
Jin Myeong hid himself at the edge of the woods and studied Jihun's house.
The house is exactly on the owner's level.
He glanced back at the lights of the market, far off. Getting here had been a fair amount of trouble, but it was an excellent place to start something.
He lives out in the middle of nowhere like this and didn't even set up defenses?
Jin Myeong looked from the gate to the wall and back again. A thoroughly sloppy bastard. The wall was low, and the gate was nothing but rotten timber.
This is... this is him standing there shouting, please, rob me.
He let out a snort. Live in a place this remote and common sense said you spent far more than the rent on traps. This halfwit didn't even have that much sense. He was sprawled in his room with the lights on.
If you're stupid, you deserve to die.
Jin Myeong dropped low and slipped out of the trees. Avoiding the side where the light leaked through, he circled around the house. He paused in front of the wall and listened toward the workroom.
Not a sound.
The second one...
Triggered — twice, in succession.
That couldn't be a coincidence. I spread my spiritual sense at once, and I caught a presence I knew.
Jin Myeong? What the hell is that piece of shit doing here?
If he'd come for a housewarming, he should have come through the gate. Instead he was pressed to the wall, peeking in. Whatever that bastard had come for, it sure as hell wasn't anything pretty.
Ah... I should've laid the traps first.
I'd bought traps at the market, and talismans too. But I'd been in such a hurry to make the steroids that I'd stuck up two alarm talismans and sat right down in front of the furnace. I pulled out a talisman I could use immediately and tucked it into my sleeve. The one mercy was that he and I were at the same realm.
The problem is that I'm a coward.
A coward, as a rule, does not pick a fight he might lose. And he and I were at the same realm. Which meant the odds were dead even.
I can't stake my life on a coin flip.
I looked down at the bottle on the table. A pale, watery extract pooled at the bottom. It didn't have the FDA's approval, or a lab rat's, but it couldn't be helped.