Liang Wei diced the limbs into sections.
Then he began tackling the torso. Using his saw blade, he cut along the sternum, tearing through bone and muscle.
He wiped his tools on the real fur body beside the astral phantom before ripping the crimson shell of its chest cavity open, gaining the Confinement skill along with an alchemist ingredient.
He looked at his weapons as they registered the skill.
Liang Wei didn't celebrate. Instead, he finished dissecting the astral corpse, dividing it into chunks with his cleaver and bone saw.
"It's really hard working through a carcass, isn't it…" he muttered, wiping his brow.
He was lucky the last remaining wolf hadn't succumbed to its injuries, or else the next round would have started before he finished preparing.
When he was done, he didn't repeat the process with the real body. He got up and looked at his black storage bag.
He opened it, waiting for his inventory screen to pop up—but it didn't.
"Is it disabled?" he asked. Since his Vitae Skill Tree was half-rendered, that might mean his inventory didn't work the same way here.
"This will be a pain when I'm in the middle of a fight and need something specific."
He sighed and looked into his gray-cloud storage pouch. Inside was a completely different realm of spiritual length and width, several times larger than the outside.
In the middle of the pouch were three Elemental Grade cores, all filled with dark gray liquid, with silver crane images welded around their crystal spheres. Each pulsed, holding faint storm Qi sloshing inside.
His arm reached in around them toward the pile below. His palm clenched the side of a cauldron, but it was too heavy—yet strangely smaller than he expected.
It almost felt palm-sized, as if everything in the bag was scaled to be easily grabbed.
!!
Why's it suddenly this heavy?
He pulled his arm out and dropped the cauldron to the ground with a thud! It sank, growing ten tons heavier, almost breaking his wrist as it returned to full size.
"Welcome back, old friend," Liang Wei smiled, rolling his arm as it nearly detached.
He moved the lid and took it off, revealing the items inside:
Spirit roots, herbs, smaller pots, glass bottles, bowls, and a ladle.
He took them all out and placed them around. "Now I need a bonfire," he murmured, looking at the weapons on the walls.
Axes. Spears. Shields. Leather armor.
"Those will do," he said, eyeing the wooden handles and leather he could use to start a fire.
What about using them?
These were all low-level gear. Removing his current arsenal to replace them would be a loss, and even if he wanted armor, his clothes had more durability than the flimsy wall gear.
He took an axe and broke several weapons into pieces.
Then he piled them up and started a fire.
With this, he could begin heating his cauldron—but his preparations weren't finished. He went to the wolf's physical body.
He brought his bowls and began bleeding it.
He gathered some blood, then skinned it and cut it into chunks. He removed the bones and threw some into the fire. The organs were wrapped in the wolf's skin for later—
all except the stomach.
That blue organ was the most important thing here.
He opened it, revealing a cold chill and a glowing orb floating in a realm of black. Ice Qi sloshed inside the sphere, indicating what it truly was—a Spirit Core. If that wasn't enough, the ice forming around it showed it was a newly advanced Elemental Core yet to develop its distinct Beast Patterns.
That's right—this was an Elemental Core, the same classification as what was in his storage pouch.
In truth, it wasn't a bag at all but the stitched-together stomachs of three spirit beasts, forming a pouch from their unique ability to make their stomachs larger on the inside.
This was part of the incentive pack. When second-grade monsters started appearing, players would get storage pouch material drops—stomachs filled with spirit herbs, smaller spirit beast parts, and even player items.
Liang Wei remembered these update rewards and hoped they carried over here.
"Jackpot," he murmured, seeing the herbs inside.
He reached in and pulled out a plant with multiple bell-like flowers growing from its stem:
+8 Low-Grade Spirit Herb (Ice Bell Sprout)
There were even more herbs inside. He couldn't take them all out one by one, so he stuffed the organ into his pouch.
He then continued his preparations, bleeding what little remained of the other wolves—except the one he needed alive.
He heated the cauldron, pouring all the blood he had collected into its steaming basin.
He added Nine Peach Lotus stems, Blood Moss, conjoined two-colored mushrooms, vitality root shavings, dried ginseng, and six thousand grams of Blood Qi.
This made the brew glow as he stirred, actively changing the temperature of the flames below.
The fire beneath the cauldron flickered to life—a deep, pulsing crimson like liquid blood.
08:00 ↓ 07:59 ↓ 07:56 ↓
He waited as the brew processed, occasionally adjusting the heat with a flick of his wrist. When the cauldron chimed with a notification, the results appeared:
Twisted Flame Alchemist Liquid: Seven Ingredient Brew (Healing Variant)
Liang Wei took a potion bottle and used his ladle to scoop in the blood-red tonic. He poured it into twenty-five bottles, then appraised his work.
Potion Quality: Lv.5, Lv.3, Lv.4, Lv.7, Lv.2, Lv.16
The rest were below level 4, going as low as level 1.
Liang Wei nodded. "Not bad. Shame nothing stronger dropped, but the Lv.16 potion will do. Half potency or not, it's usable."
He stored them without haste.
But he still had more tonic in the pot—far more than what his in-game character would have after filling only five potions.
Here, it seemed logic was affecting the potion bottles, expanding their capacity fivefold.
He bent down, grabbed the burnt bones, and started snapping them into the mix. This darkened the liquid.
Then he added crushed Oak Gall, wilted white cherry blossoms,
100 grams of honey duo,
and charcoaled wood from the fire,
mixing it well,
letting everything soak in the Blood Qi.
"Since you weren't done refining, I'll make use of you here," he muttered, reaching into his pouch and taking out a now-calm blue vial of ink.
[Unrefined Dao Ink: Moon Beetle, Green Mantis, Human Mix]
Type: Consumable
Quality: Mixed Batch
(More than three offsetting Spirit Materials)
Effects:
• Ink Corruption
• Blood Qi Integration
Bonus Effect:
Depending on the resources used, the consumer may gain traits of those sacrificed in the ink's creation.
Side Effect Chance:
Madness / Body Failure (Low)
He uncorked the lid.
A thin cloud of mist escaped. The smell made him recoil slightly, holding it away as he poured the contents into the cauldron while increasing the heat of his flames.
The cauldron boiled as flames erupted higher.
The liquid began to render, boiling black as the gall mixed with soot and the fermented ink he had just added, staining the brew an inky shade.
He took out the ladle, setting it aside, and pulled out his brush.
It grew in size, becoming as tall as he was as he dipped it into the ink.
He closed his eyes and inhaled. The bristles drank deeply, soaking up the brew—draining the cauldron slightly, but not enough to empty it.
Liang Wei pulled the brush free and began to draw—
He painted on empty air.
"Art of Calligraphy."
Ink bled from the cauldron's surface, gathering into a shifting mass as he sketched.
A blank, human-shaped ink blob slowly took form before him.
"NPC Creation…"