Chapter 18 – Art of Alchemy
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After witnessing the performance of the lady in purple, many participants felt their breathing quickened. Even Mabilis Sagunien also felt that her ability could rival his. For someone who didn't come from the sorcerer family, it would be very challenging to have enough resource to spend it on improving their alchemy skills.

As for Forus, his case was very uncommon. In his first life, he was a successful businessman whose marketing skill was very extraordinary. He also had enough luck and resource to reuse the concept of gambling creatively and modified it into the lottery shop, exploiting the greed that presented within almost every sorcerer.

When he witnessed the talent of Abicel, his mind suddenly thought about how confident the mistress of the Coruscare Family sounded. Mabilis turned his attention towards Forus, who was immersing himself in checking the ingredients.

Since the start of the latter part of the competition, Forus hadn't even touched the cauldron at all. All of his attention had fixed on identifying the characteristic of the ingredients, using them to recreate a more suitable procedure.

His action caused Mabilis to frown at first, but due to his experience, he caught up to the thought of Forus, only to make him frowned even harder. Even for himself, he knew that it would be unquestionably challenging to modify the recipe for the pills according to the provided herbs and not the other way around.

After witnessing the subtle display of talent from Forus' work, Mabilis felt a large amount of excitement building up in his mind, the eagerness to see the battle between the two raising suns caused his face to break into a smile. The more talent Forus was, the better support he would have once he reached out to Forus and successfully recruit him.

Silently watching, Mabilis too didn't neglect his concoction. He also intended to compete for the first place of the test. Although others would have to rethink their choice before trying to get in the way of the sorcerer families, Mabilis himself was also from another sorcerer family, so he naturally wasn't afraid of them.

While his mind was wandering into the land of thought, Forus slowly lifted his head and reaching out towards the cauldron. His action caused Mabilis and others who paid attention to him to focus on him. They were wondering about how Forus would fare against his counterpart.

Forus waved his hand, creating a magical force that gently lifted the corpse of the dead infant towards him. His hand moved as the small line of blue flame gradually manifested itself before him. The bluish flame moved according to his wills as it swiftly invaded the inner organs of the lifeless infant.

The art of alchemy had diverged into many different topics, as the alchemy itself wasn't absolute. In countless ages and eras, many masters went against the common sense of their time and created multiple unique alchemy techniques. Many of which had lost their successors, and fell into oblivion due to the passing of time.

However, even though none of the masters had achieved the true immortality, and in the end, they fell victim to the river of time, their ideas and knowledge would still live on, engraving itself into the history of alchemy.

The art of fire was one of the most fundamental topics about the art of alchemy. It taught the alchemists about the importance of the heat source and how they could integrate them into their alchemy concoction techniques.

The art of fire also explained the different kinds of heat. The weakest class of flame was the yellowish fire. The alchemists would use it to warm up the cauldron to get rid of their rust or used it for a minor experiment or minor refinement process. This fire was the second elementary fire that was just a little harder to produce than the average flame.

The most common flame used by the alchemists was the orangish flame. It was the most crucial flame that all of the alchemists must learn to manipulate. It was stronger than the yellowish flame and was the most simplistic flame to produce. It was the core part of various concoctions throughout the history of the alchemy.

The art of fire didn't end at the orange flame. Many flames existed above the ordinary flame that alchemists commonly used. That bluish flame that Forus used was one of the said flames. The bluish flame was very tough to create, as the alchemists had to focus the energy of the fire to reach the peak of regular fire before compressed them into a spark of energy to break the limit of the orangish flame.

Only then would the colour of the fire become blue and achieved the qualitative change. The alchemists would seldom use this kind of flame as their radiation was very hot that they could potentially break out of the cauldron and injure the alchemists themselves.

However, the advanced alchemists would still use these fire to concoct pills and potions that needed the highest degree of pureness in their ingredients, as well as the refinement that involved the better tier of treasures.

Recalling the detail of the bluish flame, Mabilis widened his eyes as his vision carefully examined the condition of the fire as well as the expression of Forus. After seeing that Forus was still relatively relaxed after the creation of the flame, he suddenly felt that this man was not as simple as he looked.

Ignoring the admiration of the onlookers, Forus was still concentrating almost all of his attention into controlling the bluish flame to quickly cleanse the inner organ and blood veins of the dead infant. He had to control the fire to keep it from burning the skin of the infant.

Due to the immense power of the bluish flame, while it might destroy the skin of the infant, it would also promptly burn off the contamination in the infant at an astonishing rate, reducing the unnecessary time that it would take as well as reducing the risk of poping and hardened veins.

Although in the beginning, he had thought that he wouldn't need to try too hard to win this competition, but now, having recognised his naive beliefs, Forus determined to use the utmost of his ability to compete with her. Even if he had offended the Ninguis Family, after witnessing the skills of Forus, the higher-ups of the Steel Cauldron would naturally try their best to protect him.

However, most of the skill he displayed was still within the limit of his plan. He wasn't planning to reveal his secrets alchemy techniques that he learnt from the self-learning of the worst nightmare of his first life, the blue-robed true sorcerer.

Even though Forus had always regard that monster as his worst enemy, he would still respect the abilities of his as he could self-learning alchemy and created his unique techniques and wrote down his understandings for future reference.

Forus couldn't risk exposing his connection with that rogue sorcerer as he might invite the greedy wolfs who wanted his treasures and secret techniques. If the situation was in that stage, even the Steel Cauldron might even betray him and took all his wealth for themselves.

After a short amount of time, the bluish flame had already dried the lifeless infant into a dried shell. Seeing the progression of his concoction, Forus, whose face was still cold as ever, continued to channel his sorcery energy to infuse with the prepared elemental blood, causing them to boil up.

The boiling blood then extracted itself and formed a wave of blood-drops. They floated around the dried up infant and, under Forus' guidance, slowly seeped into the flesh of the dehydrated shell, invading the blood veins and inner organs.

As the new blood inserted itself into the blood circulation system of the dead infant, it would gradually mutate the body structure of the infant to become one with the blood itself. If the blood was too diluted or the body was too firm, the new bloodline would get rejected and caused harm to the physical shell.

This process of integrating new bloodline into the body of the infant had taken lots of mental stamina of Forus, making him sweated a little bit. He had to be very cautious not to lose his focus, or else the new bloodline would go berserk and caused an undesirable drop in the shell's quality.

Once Forus saw the progressive change in features of the dead infant, his eye revealed a hint of vigilance. Shortly after the first visible change, the dried up infant suddenly twitched uncontrollably, making weird and disturbing sounds every time it moved.

The new bloodline had collided with the pure body of an infant, trying to devour each other. It was Forus who constantly created an equilibrium for both the physical body and the bloodline to merge with the other. Due to his destructive action, he had attracted the vengeful spirit of both the newborn infant and the owner of the bloodline.

This step was very crucial for the concoction process. If the alchemist couldn't suppress the vengeful spirits fast enough, it would influence the quality of the pill, causing it to experience a tremendous drop in quality, not only that, the backlash would also injure the soul of the alchemist, causing a decline in their sorcery cultivation if their sorcery foundation was not powerful enough.

Suddenly, expansive black gas seeped out of the body of the lifeless infant, filling the nearby surrounding with a heavy aura of bitterness and sorrow. Inside the black gas, two figures were floating and hatefully staring at Forus.

One of the figures, a middle-aged lady whose appearance was unidentifiable due to a disgusting injury she had sustained, screamed out a hoarse cry that sent out a wave of sound that disrupted the concentrating mind of other alchemists, causing them to slip up on their concoction.

Immediately after her first attack, Forus used his hand to form a fist and directed the power of the frost to cover his fist and punched towards the faint silhouette of the maddening lady. His fist collided with the soundless and traceless wave of resentment, creating a shockwave that caused the ground to faintly quake.

The shockwave fused the remnants of the resentment and progressed outwards from the point of collision, causing various alchemists to lose their focus and got hinder by the backlash of the disordered movement of sorcery power.

This commotion caused many spectators to swiftly shift their attention towards Forus, using their eyes to measure his look as well as his sorcery power. They were waiting to see what would Forus do to get rid of the resentful spirit without causing the damage to the ingredients.

After punching out at the decaying lady, Forus clasped his hands together and blew the frost that covered both of his hands towards the black mass of gas. The icy-cold ball of elemental energy flew with the magical wind and travelled towards the black smoke, clashing with it.

Upon the moment of impact, Forus pointed his finger rapidly at the two silhouettes behind the wall of smoke. Each time he aimed at it with his finger, the tip of his nail would absorb the natural light surrounding him and condensed it into a ray of golden light before shooting itself towards the black gas, helping the ball of the icy particle to push back the aura of resentment.

During all of this, Forus had consumed much of his sorcery energy inside of his body, making his face turned slightly pale. He also needed to focus his attention on refining the interior of the dead infant as well as supplying the sorcery energy to the bluish flame to keep it burning while balancing it not to let it get out of control and ruin the concoction.

At the crucial moment when most of the ray of light had pushed the dark cloud into retreating inwards of itself, lady Abicel clapped her hand two consecutive times, creating two waves of heat. One would condense the refining ingredients inside of her cauldron into a pill while another would travel towards Forus, disrupting his concentration and destroyed all of his hard work.

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