Void Cultivation

Inside the fairly small pill cauldron, Grey saw a small but completely black pill. Wisps of black fog was being emanated from it from time to time. As Grey looked at it for several seconds, his nose scrunched up and he took a few steps back in slight panic.

Very soon, he felt corrosive substance surge from his body into his shadow. His shadow which greedily gulped it all up, started to look even darker and inkier.

With that, Grey let out a small sigh. "This pill is just too dangerous. Just me taking a small wiff is enough for the corrosive substance in my body to rise exponentially. If it was left to disperse, what then would happen!?"

Just the thought of everyone in that raduis including him suddenly mutate, or die from the decay point was enough to make him freeze in thought.

Even the pill cauldron was starting to get corroded because of the completely black pill inside.

'Since this is like a new generation poison, let me make another poison from this one! That way, it will still keep it's usefulness and I can create more pills at the same time.' Grey suddenly had an idea an began to put it into motion.

First, he surrounded the black pill in several walls of spirit energy. Until he made he sure that no corrosive aura was seeping out, he then brought out more ingredients from his storage bag and began to create a new pill.

One by one, several poisonous grasses and herbs appeared on the table. Grey's eyes were calm as he took out the last one.

He then began to mix the various materials together as if he was creating another poison.

'But without the Blood Ice Root, it's lethality and corrosiveness will not be as high as that of the Black pill.'

Grey drew a slow, steady breath and created several walls made of spirit energy around the black pill until the air itself seemed to hold its breath with him. The pill inside the cauldron sat like a kernel of night, small and utterly absorbing the light; wisps of black fog curled from it and into the web of spirit energy he'd woven. Every time the fog licked the barrier it left a faint, pitted stain on the aura as if the poison were trying to bite through the world itself.

He did not remove his hands from the edge of the cauldron. Instead he let his palms hover there, feeling the tiny vibrations of the pill's aura — irregular, hungry, like a pulse in a dark cave. From time to time a thin tendril of corrosive substance leapt along the surface of his palm; each occurrence Grey shunted immediately into his shadow. The shadow accepted with greedy softness, thickening around his feet into a darker, more viscous outline that drank the poison without complaint.

'This will be difficult.' He thought, watching the shadow darken as if ink were being poured into it. The knowledge of the Black pill's potency pulsed in his chest, knowing he was dancing on a thin line, he let the threat of urgency loom over his head. He did not scoff at its danger; he respected it. Respect, however, did not prevent calculation. If this pill could be the seed, then perhaps he could coax more fruit from it — copies, derivatives, poisons less godlike but more plentiful and usable.

He gathered his implements with the practised motions of a craftsman. The small mortar, the thin silver spoon for filtering, the strip of cold iron to steady the spiritual currents. One by one he set out the herbs he intended to blend into the new batch: retarded blood shoot in smaller measure for fire and irritation, a measured cut of tainted bluesilver for slow corrosion, a pinched dusting of the poisonous gold-leaf night grass for venomous persistence. Each ingredient had been altered, tainted, or cultivated to work with corrosive auras; none were innocuous, but none matched the rawness of the black pill he had just created.

He placed them in the cauldron with almost ceremonial restraint. Unlike before, when he had pushed his energy wide and violent to dominate the mixture, now Grey threaded his spirit into fine, deliberate filaments, trying to weave the black pill's aura into the new blend rather than simply pour it in. He wanted resonance with the black pill. He wanted the smaller poison to carry an echo of the original's lethality without imitating its corrosive appetite.

As he worked, he siphoned a sliver of the Black pill's aura — not enough to unbalance it and cause the wall of spirit energy around it to break, but enough to collapse it inward, but sufficient to act as a pattern. The aura was dense with corrosive insistence; when he touched it with his spirit-sewn filaments he felt a dull nausea press at his sternum. He breathed through it, like inhaling ash, and coaxed the pattern out as if plucking a tune from a broken instrument.

"Ratio 2:5 of gateway undergrowth to Yin bloom flower." he told himself, the rules as much ritual as thought. He lowered the aura into the base liquid in measured threads. The brew sighing as the first filament sank, then bubble and hiss where the black thread met the tainted liquids. A thin fog wrestled up from the surface, colored a darker gray than before — not the night-black that signaled life-consuming potency, but a bruise-darkness that clung close to the liquid and did not leap.

He adjusted the walls, tightening the bands of spirit energy until the cauldron hummed a single note. The walls of spirit energy he erected held for now, but he felt the brew contest them in small, cunning pushes — a ripple of intent here, a corrosive whisper there. Every time the mixture strained outward, Grey redirected it inward, letting the shadow beneath his feet swallow the spillage before it could sink into his flesh or the cabin's wood. The shadow worked mechanically but it also exacted payment: each gobble of poison left the shadow a little more slicker, darker, and Grey noticed with a curl of unease that the outline around his legs had grown ragged at the edges, like a well-used tool beginning to fray.

Hours, or a fraction of hours, passed in needle-precision. He ground and folded, heated and cooled, coaxed the brew toward a balance between corrosiveness and controllability. He used salt-smoke to stabilize volatile strands and a whisper of frozen breath drawn from the residual aura of the Black pill to stiffen the filaments of poison into something that could be shaped into a pill. The Black Ice Root — the single root he had burned in the previous refinement —

'Ah, if only I had another one...'

Grey felt a small hollowness in his options. He could feel, in the subtle harmonics of the mixture, where a freezing tendon would have lent tighter control. But he did not linger there. He compensated: different timings, subtler seals, an offset in spiritual cadence to mimic the root's effect.

When the mixture finally thickened to the right viscosity, he worked quickly, spooning the black-echoed liquid into molds. Each drop hissed as it touched the cold iron, pulling a whisper of vapor that scraped at his throat. He formed dozen tiny pills, each bead of night-brew shrinking and sealing beneath a thin crust of hardened spirit film. The surface did not gleam like the original Black pill; it was duller, more matte — competent, useful, and not the same abyssal hunger he'd first witnessed.

He let the pills cool clutching his breath, feeling the aftertremor of having coaxed black pattern into lesser flesh. Then, because habit and paranoia were kin, Grey hovered his hand over one and tested the aura with a fraction of his spirit. It bared its teeth — sharp, stinging, and immediate — but the bite was shallower, the corrosive intent truncated by the absence of the root's biting frost and the decision to limit the Black pill's direct essence.

He expected this. He had known before he began that without the singular influence he had sacrificed earlier, these derivatives could not reach the apex lethality of the Black pill.

In fact, he even guessed that it was the Black Ice Root that made it reach such a lethality. With the other materials he had added, he had made their effects over effective.

What he had obtained, however, was not failure. The new pills were wicked in their own right: they would rot flesh over seconds instead of moments, unravel a cultivator's spirit at close range rather than voiding it outright. They could debilitate, cripple, or quietly eliminate a target who did not endure long enough to notice the first symptoms. They were, in short, practical but equally deadly- in a way he could tolerate.

A weary smile ghosted Grey's features. "Not perfect," he admitted beneath his breath, "but worthwhile." He stored them with the care of a man who knew value — not because they matched the terror of the original, but because they multiplied his options. A hundred smaller knives were sometimes more useful than a single blade that could only be wielded once.

He arranged the freshly formed pills into silk-lined vials and sealed them with low-level spirit wards. The air in the cabin cleared incrementally as the residual fumes sank, met and were consumed by his shadow, or caged within the spirit rings. Grey slid the pills and powder into his storage bag, weighing them with one hand while his other massaged the raw edge of his cheek where the earlier batch had taken its cost. The purple crystal's healing warmth pulsed faintly from within his chest, a tiny relief against the ache.

The shadow at his feet shifted, stretching out like a satisfied animal returning to a nap. It had fed well tonight on the volatile offerings of the cauldron, and its darkness had grown a little thicker for it. Grey felt the change not with marvel but as another tool smoothed into place.

He glanced once more at the original Black pill — still intact, still perched on its little altar of iron and silence — and felt the same cold thrill he'd felt at the start. It remained a thing apart: absolute and dangerous, not to be replicated lightly. The copies he had made would not eclipse it; they would complement it.

"That will do," Grey murmured, and the statement hung in the heavy air, modest and absolute. He had birthed another poison from the night-pill's shadow, lesser in bite but crafted with the same relentless patience. It was enough for the next step, for the next fight, for the quiet work that required subtlety more than catastrophe.

Outside, the cabin kept its small breath. Inside, Grey counted his poison pills and the other powder he had made.

'129 ordinary poison pills, and ten sacks of 500 grams of poison powder!' Grey finished counting inwardly.

He now had poison that could affect Foundation Establishment realm cultivators, and outright kill Qi Accumulation cultivators in a short while. All in all, he had upgraded another one of his trump card again