"HRRRRR!"

  The exact moment Baiyun stepped into the clearing, the beetle charged once more! Loud bangs and horrifying sound of splintering wood shook the very forest as the very ground trembled.

  Baiyun hurriedly lunged to the side as the giant shot past, saving a use of his ring; it was only possible because of how much the beetle had slowed.

  His eyes widened as he realised the beetle was charging straight towards the hut. Had he gotten a random hermit involved in this mess?

  But two eyes revealed themselves from the dark entrance of the hut as a massive hand cloaked in thick black fur grasped the side of the doorway. A human head would look as small as an orange between its fingers.

  "GRAAAAAAAAAHH!"

  A roar shook the forest as the dweller revealed itself, a massive gorilla draped in long curtain-like strands of hair that swayed in the winds it stirred. Its nostrils flared as it huffed deeply, its amber eyes narrowed in fury!

  It raised its arms and charged towards the incoming beetle, opening its palms wide and leaning forward with bent legs to brace for impact. It tilted its head to the side as the horn shot past its ear, its hands clenching around the head of the giant insect.

  The firm ground beneath its feet began to crumble but it held on even as the impact forced it knee-deep into the ground, leaving deep grooves of crushed earth in its wake. Had the gorilla been pushed a metre further, its hut would have been destroyed by the confrontation.

  It let out another roar as it punched the beetle's chin, the impact sending the front of its body into the air.

  Baiyun decided it was time for him to make himself scarce and quickly took off. He had achieved his goal of getting a dangerous spirit beast to distract the beetle!

  When he saw the hut earlier, he thought for a moment a strange person might have been living there, but given the crude construction, he should have realised it was a beast's dwellings.

  Qi permeated the ground. Trees shook as their very roots were disturbed. The earth trembled.

  Behind him, fists of stone erupted from the ground like steam from geysers, striking the beetle and sending it flying higher into the air!

  Baiyun suddenly felt a piercing gaze on his back and couldn't help but turn with widened eyes. He found the gorilla staring at him with narrowed eyes as it raised a finger and flicked.

  !

  A blast of qi shot towards him and he bit down on his ring!

  Baiyun's vision suddenly blacked out as a resonant thunk echoed. He felt himself soaring through the air and crashing into a canopy. The sphere of light tumbled down the sea branches in an odd dizzying manner before hitting the ground and releasing him.

  He held back the urge to vomit as his insides spun. How ironic that the first attack the barrier successfully managed to shield was the one that left him in the worst condition. He could almost laugh.

  BOOM!

  Somewhere off in the distance, the beetle hit the ground painfully and left a crater.

  Baiyun wheezed as he got on his feet and forced himself to run, reaching into his bag and wrapping the centipede scarves around his neck again.

  To think a mere Core-Shaping beast would gaze with him like that...

  He gnashed his teeth. What would be such paltry insignificant ants to the past him had given him plenty of trouble in this life, but he took it in stride. But the way the gorilla stared at him with the same disdain... it was infuriating!

  Baiyun clenched his fists as he ran and ran.

  The agony from his wounded feet soon faded with numbness taking its places. Without the sensation of touch, they felt more like lumps of dead meat attached to his ankles. That was not a good sign.

  But at last, he made it out of the forest.

  His feet were in no condition to run, but he didn't know if his pursuers could still find him. So Baiyun let himself fall to the ground and examined the state of his feet.

  Bloody mud entwined in tangles of root and grass caked them. At some point, they had started to serve as pseudo shoes that staunched the flow of blood and prevented further injury. The same lubricant he used on the beetle had backfired on him indirectly by forcing him to discard his shoes.

  Baiyun wrapped his arms and legs in thick cloth and wrapped several old robes around himself. If he couldn't run, he would simply crawl.

  He made his way back toward the bull's trampled path and pushed his way through the grass. From there, the crawl back to town was much easier.

  With each time he grasped the earth and pulled himself forward, his body grew muddier and muddier. He could not help but think what a miserable and unsightly state it was and curse.

  6 hours passed as he crawled. It was agonisingly slow, but it was plenty of time for his soul to mend his wounds.

  Baiyun's arms were numb by the time the town came to sight. He stopped by the river connected to the town's canal, propping himself up and plunging his legs into it.

  A stinging pain struck him as muddied red seeped into the river and flowed downstream. He pulled and tugged at the tangled vegetation and finally freed his feet from their prison.

  He could only sigh at the sorry sight. He had done what he could to mend his wounds with soul, but there was little skin that remained.

  Baiyun took some time to wash himself, his clothing and the blackhorn roots. He dried the bloodied water off his feet and wrapped them in thin cloth carefully, before putting on a spare set of shoes and changing into a fresh set of robes.

  It was still dark, about 4 in the morning.

  He walked back to town slowly and to the inn, pushing its doors open.

  The desk was empty at this hour with no personnel in sight. Such lax security, the innkeeper not even sparing the effort to lock the doors at him. But he wasn't complaining about the hassle it saved.

  Baiyun trudged up to the second floor when he suddenly paused before his door.

  There were fingerprints on the doors that weren't his! He was certain it wasn't left by the staff either, for there was only a single person in charge of room service; whose thumbprints he had already noted when food was brought to him.

  He sent divine thread into his closed room and found a foreign object. A cage was now in its midst, with a mole pawing at a pile of pillows inside.

  This...

  Baiyun walked to Mohei's door and checked, finding matching fingerprints. Ah. So it was his.

  While he wasn't usually one to care about such minute details, with divine thread and his subconscious memory, it was easy for him to sense even subtle changes.

  It was as if a drawing he previously saw suddenly had scribbles all over it. Even without perfect memory of what the original image looked like, it was easy to tell something was wrong.

  Fingerprints were far from the only minor detail divine sense recorded. The position of every hair, the arrangement of veins beneath his skin. Every crack within a rock, the exact texture of its gritty surface and the mixture of minerals within. Every single blade of grass in a field, their tiny pores taking in the air. And much more.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  Divine sense was powerful.

  But remembering such detail would drive most to insanity, so this was mostly a subconscious feeling. Fine details would usually only be noticed when the user put their mind to it, such as when Baiyun wanted to sense the essences in herbs.

  Baiyun opened the door quietly and limped in, looking around at the walls and furniture with a slight frown. Something felt a little different about his room that he couldn't quite place his finger on, but he figured it was because Mohei had entered.

  "Krrr?"

  The mole raised its head and sniffed. Its eyes lit up as it suddenly spotted the blackhorn roots around Baiyun's neck and it began to squeak and claw at the cage excitedly.

  "Settle down." Baiyun mumbled.

  He walked to the table where Mohei had placed a note under a key.

  "Sorry for breaking in. Your mole is very noisy so I can't sleep, I had no choice! The key to the cage is here ->"

  A small arrow drawn on the note pointed to the key that weighed it down. Baiyun chuckled to himself silently as he picked it up.

  With a quick twist and a small click, the doors of the cage swung open and the mole scrambled out! It wasted no time running to Baiyun and trying to paw at the roots dangling around his neck.

  "Okay. I can give you a piece. But don't eat it. Understand?"

  Baiyun tried his best to communicate his intentions with soulsense as he passed it a small segment. The mole bit the root between its mouth and rushed back to its cage. It pulled out the herb pouch hidden below a pillow and stuffed the root in.

  Hah...

  What an presumptuous creature to so casually declare the pouch as its own so confidently. For a moment, he wondered if he should try to make it clear who owned that pouch. but he decided not to antagonise it.

  One he showed the mole the wonders of alchemy, he was certain it would happily pass the herbs to him on its own accord!

  With the adrenaline wearing off, the fatigue was starting to set in. Baiyun stashed his shoes and cloth bindings away before plopping onto bed and lying flat. His soul was fine without sleep but the same could not be said for his mortal body.

  But the mole suddenly let out a shrill squeak. It clawed at the side of the bed and clamoured on, tapping at Baiyun's leg wounds as if asking what happened.

  This mole... Baiyun was taken aback.

  It hesitated for a moment.

  "Krr..."

  Then it reached into the herb pouch and pulled out a small red ginseng, an immature twin of the large red ginseng it previously hugged.

  After what he did to it, even if the mole knew not of how he was the cause of its miseries, it was still willing to forsake a precious herb for his sake?

  Baiyun felt a strange emotion he could not describe and he clenched his fists for a moment before sighing. Hah... some creatures were too pure and innocent for this world.

  He reached out a hand to ruffle the fur on the mole's head as it squirmed, clawing at his hand in protest. He would have to repay this favour a hundred-fold one day.

  Baiyun reached for the small ginseng. As much as it would be responsible to reject it, without the aid of precious herbs, it would take weeks for wounds of this severity to recover. He was far too pragmatic to allow that.

  "Kr."

  ...

  He pulled on the ginseng, but the mole's grip was like iron. It held on tightly for a full minute before finally reluctantly letting go.

  Baiyun conveyed his gratitude with soulsense to it but he didn't know if it understood such an abstract concept. The mole slumped sadly.

  He turned his attention to the herb in hand. From the other guidebook which he had learnt the names of local herbs with, he knew it was Crimson Blood Ginseng.

  The herb brimmed with such potent vital essences that he could feel them brimming out even without divine touch. A strange illusion that it was beating in his hand like a living heart could be felt despite how motionless it was.

  It was a true natural treasure!

  Most essences in herbs didn't do much on their own, but the most precious of herbs innately had complimentary essences. It would have incredibly restorative effects even if used raw; one could even say it was a natural elixir, a pseudo elixir borne from the hands of nature!

  Baiyun already knew what precious herbs the mole had in the pouch, but holding one in his hands set something ablaze in his heart. That light could be seen in his eyes as he walked to the table in excitement.

  The mole let out a squeak of horror as it saw the giant walk on raw exposed flesh, but Baiyun was too distracted to even feel it.

  Now that he thought of it, was this not an opportunity?

  He had been stubbornly thinking he had to make a medicine that could help the mole in its breakthrough to convince it of alchemy's wonders. But that technically wasn't part of the agreement.

  As long as the mole was convinced alchemy worked, it would be enough to establish the contract. And if he showed it an elixir could recover wounds far better than the raw ginseng, perhaps that would be enough persuasion!

  Baiyun smiled, beckoning for the confused mole to look.

  He reached into his bag and pulled out various alchemic tools and a knife. Then he slashed the ginseng into small chunks with quick slashes of his knife and the pieces fell into the stone mortar waiting beneath.

  "Kr! Krrrr!"

  The mole squeaked in fury. It had given him a precious herb it raised with blood and sweat but the giant was destroying it?

  Baiyun huffed. Bah. It would understand when he showed it the final product!

  Two sprigs of Purple Grass, a Blueflower and a small snip of Golden Thread Fern; from Guan Qiang's mountain and stolen from Yingtao's bull respectively. He tossed those into the mortar as well.

  With one hand he kept the enraged mole at bay, and with the other hand, he obliterated the herbs into paste with quick thumps from his pestle.

  Baiyun deftly flicked his fingers to parry each of the mole's strikes. He poured the paste from the mortar into a filter, pressing down on it with his pestle to force out as much liquid as he could into the glass container beneath.

  A striking red liquid more crimson than blood dripped filled the beaker. Under the dark skies of the early morning, it was like a splotch of red ink in a black and white photo, Baiyun's reflection in it was slightly unsettling.

  He stared at it for a moment and paused. The mole was too tired to interrupt.

  ...

  Back to work. Baiyun unwrapped the filter and revealed a clump of crushed and blackened fibres. 36% of the essence was still left unextracted.

  He opened his mouth wide and swallowed it whole like a python.

  "Krr?!" the mole was baffled.

  Soulsense!

  Much like how he crushed the Undying Basalt into powder in the prison, he attacked the tough herb fibres. They began to tremble and compress as liquid oozed out. Each individual fibre began to fray and break into smaller and smaller strands until only powder remained.

  Baiyun grimaced as unpleasant vibrations permeated his abdominal organs.

  He had sustained significant injury from a similar act back in the prison, but this time he was unharmed. Plant fibres that could be crushed by a pestle was nothing compared to the absurd durability of the basalt and his cultivation had improved slightly since then.

  Wisps of qi flowed into his dantain and brought him a small step closer to the next level. While Crimson Blood Ginseng was largely medicinal, it was still ultimately a spirit herb. It was as potent as eating the herb discards the sect had fed him for about 900 days! But truthfully, that said more about how pathetic the qi contents of servant food was than it did about the qi contents of the ginseng.

  Baiyun glanced at the crude red liquid within the glass container and saw that small black dots had begun to form on its surface.

  Good. That meant it was reacting the way he wanted. He didn't technically need visual cues because of divine touch but he still liked to see signs.

  "Look."

  Baiyun poked the mole and pointed at the pathetic liquid that could barely be considered an elixir.

  "Once it sits for a few hours, it will be far more potent than the herb could ever be. Maybe you'll be a little more convinced of alchemy's prowess then?"

  He knew the mole couldn't understand a word he said, but if he spoke to it enough, he hoped it would at least pick up a few words over time.

  At the same time, he conveyed a vision of how the elixir would restore the skin on his feet to the mole.

  "Km!"

  The mole crossed its claws, unconvinced.

  Whatever.

  After the small rush of making a somewhat functional elixir, Baiyun felt a little too antsy to let his body just lie still on bed till morning came.

  He went to the bookshelf and looked through the books, when an unassuming fairytale book caught his eye. This book... had it always been there?

  ...what nonsense was he thinking? Baiyun shook his head as he recalled an old memory of when he first entered the room. It had always been there.

  He sat on bed and flipped through it slowly. Divine touch let him read books with far more ease, but he still found it the most satisfying to read them directly. It didn't occur to him how odd it was that it was this unassuming book that drew his attention instead of the newly acquired alchemy books from Qinghe.

  The mole climbed up his leg to take a look. It tilted its head in confusion, not why the giant was staring at lines and scrawlings on sheets of light brown.

  Baiyun could already feel faint tingles from his wounds as they began to subtly recover; even merely from consuming the crushed pulp.