Chapter Seventy-Five: Alchemist?

【Please remember this site's domain name " " or search on Baidu: Sanlian Literature Network】Fondling the spatial ring and calculating the profits that piece of bezoar could bring, Chu Tian excitedly returned to his estate.

"Woo-hoo~~" As was tradition, the first one to rush out and greet Chu Tian every time he came home was always Little White. With a swift leap, Little White jumped into Chu Tian's arms, rubbing its chubby little head against his chin, while pointing a tiny paw at the spatial ring, as if to ask: how much did we make this time?

"Heh heh." Chu Tian was tickled by Little White's coquettish antics. After dismissing Dio, he walked into the estate, saying excitedly to Little White: "This time, your big boss here has struck it rich!"

"Wooo~~" Little White let out a long, happy cry. The look it cast at Chu Tian immediately sparkled with stars. It licked Chu Tian's finger affectionately, then blinked its big eyes, indicating: hurry up and get the gold coins out!

After Chu Tian had dismissed NMD and Dio, he carried Little White back to his room, took out the bezoar, and shouted loudly at the magic communication stone: "Barbossa, get in here!"

Barbossa was busy scolding the servants in the backyard. The moment he heard Chu Tian's summons, he hurried over, all the while calculating on his way—what major event had occurred? The boss had never called him in such a tone before! It seemed someone had made the boss angry. Hmph! He had just recently developed several new strains of viruses...

Gently pushing the door open, Barbossa did not find the anticipated scene of Chu Tian in a blazing rage. Instead, the situation in the room was somewhat strange. "Uh... boss, should I perhaps make myself scarce?"

Beside a large stone half a person's height, poor Chu Tian was flailing his arms and legs, letting out miserable cries. And the number one real power figure of Duke Vladino's manor—Little White—was lying on Chu Tian's shoulder, diligently ravaging Chu Tian's ear with its little mouth. If any other magical beast had treated Chu Tian like that, Barbossa would definitely have turned it into a drug-testing base. But Little White? Even Chu Tian himself, the master, while screaming in pain, had to carefully maintain his balance so as not to drop Little White. Under such circumstances, what could Barbossa, the butler, possibly do?

"Heh heh," Chu Tian gave an embarrassed smile, and Little White, mindful of face in front of outsiders, mercifully released Chu Tian. "It's nothing. Come over and take a look at this." So saying, Chu Tian pointed at the bezoar and smiled: "This is a fine treasure!"

Little White, lacking the eye for such things, had actually mistaken the bezoar that Chu Tian had painstakingly swindled for a worthless stone, and had even thrown a tantrum over it. This left Chu Tian quite dejected, and he hoped that Barbossa, this Undead Archmage, could offer him some consolation...

Unfortunately, Barbossa also let Chu Tian down. "Boss, why did you bring back this worthless rock?" Barbossa sized up Kuyata's gallstone with furrowed brows. "Boss, are you planning to build a house for Hummer? But this amount of stone isn't nearly enough, is it?" The issue of Hummer's living quarters had always been a major headache for the Chu household. Apache and Boeing had taken those several hundred mad wolves to capture magical beasts for the Pampas family, so the only large magical beasts left by Chu Tian's side were Hummer and NMD. NMD was a good child—it curled up on the roof all day, staring blankly at the sky. But Hummer was not nearly so well-behaved.

Three-year-old Hummer was clearly bursting with surplus energy. During the day, running around with a large leather ball wrapped in its long trunk was its favorite game. The impact of this game wasn't too great—at most, it made people on an entire street think an earthquake had struck. But at night, things got rather excessive. Under Aunt AK's careful tutelage, little Hummer had developed a passionate love for the game of catching thieves. As a result, every night after the crimson moon rose over the Phantom Beast Continent, the front gate of Duke Vladino's manor became a nightmare for all passersby. Sneaking around? Catch them! Walking alone? Catch them! In groups? Catch them! Carrying tools? Catch them! So giving Hummer a house that could keep it somewhat calm had become a major affair for the Chu household.

Praise the Goddess of Life—Chu Tian had the urge to kill Barbossa with Dracula's Fury. There was just a problem communicating with people from another world. On Earth, almost everyone knew the value of bezoar, but here...

Barbossa was still rambling on: "The finest stone in the empire right now comes from Quarry Fort, but the best stone is all under military control. Oh, right—Miss Fina, a close friend of Princess Serena, is stationed there. Boss, you could ask her for help..."

"Praise the Goddess of Life!" Chu Tian grew furious. He put Little White on the ground, pointed at the bezoar, and glared at Barbossa. "How did you ever get promoted to Undead Archmage? Do you have any idea what this is?"

"Isn't it stone?" Barbossa was bewildered. What was wrong with an Undead Archmage not recognizing a random rock? He wasn't a stonemason.

"Cough, cough!" Chu Tian steadied his breath and began to give Barbossa a lesson in pharmacology. "This thing is called bezoar. Medicinal agents refined from it can substitute for the effects of sacrificial spells!"

"Substitute for sacrificial spells?" Barbossa drew in a cold breath. Over the past thousand years, with the decline of the alchemist profession, almost no one on the Phantom Beast Continent remembered what medicine was anymore. Even the things necromancers had developed came in only two forms: viruses and antidotes!

"That's right, substitute for sacrificial spells!" Chu Tian's eyes narrowed as he continued to provoke Barbossa. "And its effects are the same as the ancient sacrificial arts. Though its potency is slow to act, it can ignore the gap in profession levels!"

A fervent gleam appeared in Barbossa's cold, sinister eyes. For a research maniac who dealt with viruses day in and day out, what could be more tempting than a large chunk of bezoar?

"Woo woo~~" Little White also grinned from ear to ear, drooling as it pointed out the window toward the city of Pompeii, or perhaps at the entire Phantom Beast Continent. Then, clearly visible in its eyes, there were countless gold coins! Under Chu Tian's tutelage, Little White's business acumen was growing day by day. With a medicine capable of substituting for sacrificial spells, even a pig-rat beast could calculate how many gold coins could be made from this!

"Boss, could it be that you know the art of alchemy, lost for over a thousand years?" Barbossa asked with admiration.

"Alchemy? Mm, that's right, alchemy!" Chu Tian was very pleased with this profession title. He declared with pride: "Aside from the ancient sacrificial arts, I do indeed know alchemy!"

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Money makes things easy; power makes things even easier. And if you were like Chu Tian, having both money and power, then there was almost nothing you couldn't accomplish.

Within just a few days, the entire street where Duke Vladino's manor stood was purchased by Chu Tian for a laughably small number of gold coins. Then, a large-scale pharmaceutical production base designed personally by Chu Tian broke ground.

Laying the foundation? Easy. Just have Hummer run a few laps around the site. Materials? The Pampas family still had plenty. Construction workers? Beast Minister Best personally brought a large contingent of high-ranking magical beasts to assist. Production equipment? Chu Tian could even manufacture surgical scalpels, let alone make use of the experimental tools Barbossa had for virus research.

The pharmaceutical factory was being built at a miraculous speed. At the same time, the research of Chu Tian, Barbossa, and Dio was also making great strides.

Kuyata was truly worthy of being a ninth-tier magical beast. Its bezoar nearly drove Chu Tian mad with excitement. The items made by combining it with other materials had effects far exceeding Chu Tian's expectations.

With bezoar as the primary ingredient, Chu Tian could foresee that he would be able to extract medicines common on Earth. But what Chu Tian hadn't expected was that Kuyata's bezoar actually carried the imprint of a ninth-tier magical beast! The thing Chu Tian had worried most about all along was that his medicines would take too long to take effect, not nearly as miraculous as sacrificial spells. But Kuyata's strength had scattered his worries to the wind.

Detoxification Pill—this was Chu Tian's first successful product. Many magical beasts on the continent possessed poison-type attack skills, so Chu Tian believed the sales prospects for this product would be quite promising. Bezoar had always had detoxifying properties, so extracting an antidote from it was only natural. But Chu Tian's Detoxification Pill worked damn fast. One pill down, and before you had to wait hardly any time at all, the toxins on the test subject had completely vanished.

It was Dio who pointed it out, and only then did Chu Tian understand: medicines made from Kuyata's bezoar were born with the imprint of a ninth-tier magical beast, and it was precisely these imprints that allowed the medicines to take effect in a time frame comparable to sacrificial spells!

Golden Wound Ointment—this was Chu Tian's second product. Likewise, under Kuyata's imprint, external injuries that would normally take days to heal were instantly restored to perfect condition.

Wanling Pill—the third product, mainly for treating colds, fevers, coughs, headaches, diarrhea... basically any common bodily ailment, and it took care of all of them. This effect left Chu Tian torn between laughter and tears. On Earth, different illnesses required different medicines, but on the Phantom Beast Continent, because the magical beast's imprint was too powerful, a single pill could cure all common diseases.

As members of Kuyata's clan arrived one after another, Chu Tian delightedly discovered that the giant cattle of the Phantom Beast Continent seemed to have a special affinity for gallstones. Roughly one out of every few dozen cattle would produce a bezoar. But this still wasn't enough to satisfy Chu Tian, since bezoars were ultimately a limited resource. So Chu Tian went to Kuyata once again and announced that this illness would frequently recur, and therefore his clansmen would need to stay under observation at his place for a period of time.

As Kuyata wept tears of gratitude, Chu Tian built a large cattle ranch outside the imperial capital. The living conditions for the giant cattle inside it had become so luxurious that many minor nobles were envious. As for why Chu Tian treated the giant cattle clan so well, no one knew the reason. Even Barbossa only knew that the boss wanted easier access to bezoar, and Dio, the one most likely to know the truth, had been deliberately skipped for one lesson by Chu Tian. The content of that lesson was: high-calorie food, plus a life of ease and comfort, damn it, that's practically a recipe for gallstones!

A cow gets cured, then enjoys Chu Tian's warm hospitality every day, then gets gallstones again, and the bezoar is extracted once more... This was the bezoar production line Chu Tian had painstakingly engineered.

But there were still things that failed to satisfy Chu Tian. Most of Kuyata's clansmen were low- to mid-tier magical beasts. Medicines extracted from their bezoars, while still miraculously effective against common diseases, were not so effective against high-level magic or battle qi. For example, a Golden Wound Ointment made from a third-tier bezoar could heal injuries inflicted by professions below the third tier instantly, but for those above the third tier, though it could still heal them, it required a long time for the wound to close!

Injuries of the same tier required treatment methods of the same tier or higher—this law of the Phantom Beast Continent still constrained Chu Tian's medicines. In response, Chu Tian divided his products into various grades. Common ailments were treated with ordinary bezoar, and only for difficult or complex conditions would Chu Tian use the medicines extracted from Kuyata himself!

Researching medicines required a great deal of manpower, and the three of them alone could no longer keep up. But this couldn't stump Chu Tian. Dark mages—a profession looked down upon, the byword for shamelessness and treachery in the eyes of others—were, in Chu Tian's view, all talents! Xuanhuan-style chemists—that was the role Chu Tian assigned them.

Under the rallying call of Barbossa, the Undead Archmage, plus treatment that was enough to drive people crazy with desire, many of Barbossa's old friends and younger colleagues naturally became Chu Tian's private magical consultants.

Producing medicine also required workers, and specifically workers who could keep secrets. On this issue, Chu Tian did something that made everyone gasp in astonishment yet also filled them with admiration. Which race at the slave market was the dumbest? Beastmen! Which race was the most obedient? Beastmen! Which race was the easiest to manage? Also beastmen!

Over a thousand beastmen slaves who looked dull and simple-minded were bought by Chu Tian and brought home. After simple training, they became the brawn of Chu Tian's factory. Although they were stupid, having each person do just one thing was no problem at all. And a daily wage of one pig-rat beast was enough to make them work desperately, even to the death, for Chu Tian.

Divided labor and separated production—this was Chu Tian's method of keeping secrets. Later, some people wanted to copy Chu Tian's medicines, but of course they didn't dare go ask the great Lord Vladino in person, so they captured a few beastman slaves and tried to intimidate or bribe them. In the end, every beastman gave a bizarrely different answer. One said, "I only carry rocks." Another said, "All I do is push the millstone." The next one said, "I just throw sand into a big pot every day..."

The furious kidnappers flew into a rage, and even went so far as to grab one beastman from each job while Chu Tian was away, then play a game of combination. Unfortunately, the final product-assembly process was handled by Barbossa...

The extraction of bezoar was the most difficult step and also the one Chu Tian least wanted anyone to know about, so Dio temporarily took charge of the entire process of examining the giant cattle's bodies. Fortunately, a single bezoar could produce a large quantity of medicine, so poor Dio could still bear the "test" his teacher had given him.

The pharmaceutical factory's operations were on track, but Chu Tian's big trouble had also arrived, because no sovereign could tolerate his minister possessing both a ninth-tier magical beast and dozens of dark mages in his employ!

Praise the Goddess of Life—Young Master Chu naturally wasn't about to let Rudy III throw the first fit. The expression of a holy charlatan once again appeared on his face. Chu Tian narrowed his eyes and appeared cheerfully at the gates of Caesar Palace. However, whether he had come to confess his sins before His Imperial Majesty or to extort Rudy III, no one could say for certain.

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