Pulling herself upright, Jun Li raised her head away from the pooling blood, which had risen high enough to threaten drowning her if she remained prone.
As she shifted her agonised body, the blood that surrounded her was unsettled, her movements causing waves that rebounded against the walls of the pockmarked crater she laid within.
The blood had already risen high enough to begin spilling out from the crater that held Jun Li, flowing out and over the summit. And although she had little mind to measure it, the sheer volume of blood gave credence to what the Immortal had told her.
'He said something like… 'our blood is diverse and plentiful.' Plentiful, I understand… that's pretty obvious, but diverse? What's that supposed to mean?' As she rose to her knees, Jun Li felt that whatever terrible internal damage she had suffered, it had little effect on her beyond pain.
Even so, Jun Li was human, and forcing herself to stand through the level of pain she experienced was a difficult thing indeed. 'One thing at a time…'
Minimising the pain of movement, Jun Li crawled out from the crater of blood and walked unsteadily towards the crystallised mass of blood the Immortal had left.
The crystal held the shape of the immortal, sitting in a lotus position and smiling as peacefully as a buddha. When she reached it, Jun Li braced her weight against the 'statue,' holding herself up with her hands on its head and shoulder.
"Bastard… that was intentional, wasn't it…? Leaving me like this…" She gripped the statue tightly, such that even her terribly bruised flesh turned white at the knuckles. "As if it matters… intentional or accidental, you're still a piece of garbage for that…"
"My Spatial Rings aren't quite good enough to carry such a bulky object, so…" Tightening her grip further, Jun Li pressed down, and the head of the statue broke off its neck, crashing to the ground and cracking it. "...I'll have to break you down a bit."
Leveraging the statue's arms, Jun Li wrenched them from its shoulders, one after another, throwing them to the ground.
Bracing a foot against the statue's crotch, Jun Li ignored the pain each movement sparked and tore the statue's legs off, before crushing the fused legs into small, uneven pieces.
Letting out a deep sigh, Jun Li looked down at the scattered remains of the statue with a modicum of satisfaction. 'Now then, there's only a bit more than a day until the second drop of Earth Dragon Blood is supposed to condense…'
"Let's see if I can make something for Little Yun with this…" Reaching down, Jun Li began to store the fragmented pieces of the statue in her Spatial Ring, remembering the Immortal's instructions. "A Cuckoo-Star distillation with an Enveloping-aspected root or grain? Damn it… why didn't I think of that?"
… … … … … …
Having accelerated her recovery with the assistance of some rudimentary medicinal pills, Jun Li quickly found her way back to the cauldron of the Grave's north end.
It had changed considerably since Jun Li had last seen it. The firestorm she had kicked up when leaving now left the grave with many of its smallest pillars unoccupied, at least, by anything living.
Jumping from one pillar to another, Jun Li passed by a dozen immolated corpses, and couldn't help but look further towards the center of the cauldron's pillars. There, numerous beasts that may have been too weak to occupy those greater pillars now sat uncontested, enjoying the rewards that the chaos of change had afforded them.
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Further still, the greatest pillars were unchanged, too wide for the flames to have reached their occupants, if indeed those flames could have harmed them at all.
Reaching the northwestern edge of the cauldron without being disturbed, Jun Li was finally able to lay eyes on Little Yun for the first time in almost four days.
There, just outside the boundary of the Cauldron, where the Earth Dragon's claw formed an alcove, Little Yun was curled up, unmoving, even as Jun Li landed in the alcove just a few dozen meters away.
'That's odd… Little Yun's always trying to chase after me, but there's no response at all here…' Walking closer, Jun Li only became more confused. 'It's not like they just didn't notice me, right?'
When Jun Li reached Little Yun, she found an unnerving sight. Little Yun's eyes were wide open, and it didn't move even as its master walked past, its body still woven into a lump, as tightly as a steel cable.
Looking around, Jun Li believed she found the reason for Little Yun's bizarre state. 'The Earth Dragon's lingering intent…?' She felt a pang of guilt. 'Damn… It's affecting you pretty badly, huh?'
Perhaps, with a stern command, Jun Li could have woken Little Yun out of its catatonic state, but that was not her intention in this moment. "With a bit of luck, the lingering intent might actually help…"
From her Spatial Ring, the first thing Jun Li produced was not a cauldron, furnace, or chunk of crystallized blood, but a knife, and a few vials filled with a silvery liquid metal. "Sorry about this…"
Jun Li slipped her knife between Little Yun's scales, not once, but in three different locations. The perforations were not deep enough to pass beyond the snake's thick muscles; they were merely intended to serve as access points to the space beneath the skin.
Uncorking three vials of liquid silver, Jun Li placed them upside down on Little Yun's body, facing the incisions she had made, and resting against the piled-up coils of its body. Slowly, the silver seeped down into the snake's fascia, as it had Jun Li's.
While that process continued, Jun Li pulled out her Cauldron and a smaller piece of the crystalised blood, what had been a shin of the 'statue.'
With those two items brought out, she used her knife to etch instructions into the stone in front of her, hastily drawn notes regarding the Cuckoo-Star distillation method that she could quickly reference.
It had been a long time since she needed something like a written reference to perform any alchemical feat, but the method she was faced with was complex to the point of impracticality, or it would have been under any normal circumstance.
This technique she was about to engage with for the first time, despite its obscenely roundabout and arcane methods, seemed perfect for distilling the remnants of the Earth Dragon Blood from the crystalised blood of the mutant beast.
What had appeared impractical now seemed ideal beyond reason, and Jun Li cursed herself for falling so short of her forebearer's alchemical intuition. 'Damn… how did he pick this out so quickly…'
Returning her knife to Little Yun's body, Jun Li cut into the snake's body just enough to draw the blood she needed for her distillation, quickly filling a vial the size of two fingers, before binding the wound she had made. "Sorry about this…"
Pouring a small portion of the blood into her cauldron, Jun Li followed up by breaking down the crystalised shin in her hands and adding it to the cauldron in large chunks. Although she could have melted the substance in her own hands with ease, it would have been counterintuitive to the Cuckoo-Star distillation process.
Throwing in a handful of a medicinal root she had found in the Grave's western marsh, Jun Li lidded the cauldron and, for the first time in her alchemical career, physically picked the cauldron up, swirling it around in her hands, creating a profoundly mundane vortex of blood and solids inside.
Placing it down as quickly as she picked it up, Jun Li's Qi seeped into the cauldron, feeling around its interior with discreet tentrils of profound sensorial discipline.
Feeling that the grainy skin of the root had begun to disperse its grit into the blood, Jun Li flooded the left side of the cauldron with Qi, while simultaneously tapping the other side of the cauldron in brief intervals, each tap injecting brief bursts of Qi that bounced off the walls of the cauldron, creating echoes and waves.
Glancing up towards her notes, a bead of sweat ran down Jun Li's brow.
'This… will take a while.'
