Flames of origin

If he wanted to walk far on the body cultivation path, a huge amount of resources were necessary. And the most important of these resources were pills.

And especially in the dao star realm. Almost all of the dao stars required a specific pill to resonate with them. Without that pill, finding the star you wanted in the ever changing sea of stars was impossible. Bai Yun knew which stars he should condense in order to maximize his gains. He was simply going to condense the stars that he did in his previous life, except this time he wasn't going to try and condense the Nameless star. He knew a few other options for his final star that he should condense.

And finding the stars he required without the corresponding pills was stupid. In that case he would have to waste years looking for them. Of course, he could also try to condense stars that were nearby him, but that would reduce his strength, and Bai Yun was even less willing to do so.

Since Bai Yun had condensed them all before he knew the formulas for the pills. Bai Yun could give the formulas to other alchemists and ask them to make them for him, but unfortunately, all the stars he wanted to condense were the strongest of their type and thus only a god could help refine those pills.

The pills themselves were not that difficult to refine, with only two being of the immortal class and others at the dao class, but the need for resonance with such a high grade dao star meant that only a god could do so.

But Bai Yun could also do this. The resonance was created by adding the auras of these stars to the pills and then ingesting the pill. But Bai Yun had already condensed theses stars once before, and thus knew their auras, and could simply recreate them and add them to the pill, to cause a false resonance.

But creating pills was difficult. Thankfully he had access to the dao repository. In Bai Yun's plan, he would try to get the God of Alchemy's legacy during his fourth visit. That would allow him to reach an acceptable level of alchemy before attempting the trials he would have set. Of course, there was no way he could pass those. Bai Yun's only hope was that the God of Alchemy had left a true soul incarnation, which had his memories and would remember Bai Yun and the favor he owned to Bai Yun's mother. If so he could somehow find a way to get a part of the legacy related to the dao star pills and it would help him greatly.

And the alchemy path was extremely important to him. And other than medicinal formulas and medicinal ingredients, there were two other items that were important in the alchemy path.

They were alchemy cauldrons and transcendent flames.

Alchemy cauldrons were created by weaponsmiths. It helps to keep the medicinal power from dispersing. It was not a necessary ingredient to creating pills, but the lack of one will make it much harder to create one. Higher graded cauldrons could even help in increasing the circles of a medicinal pill.

As for transcendent flames, they were a special kind of flames, that were found in nature. There were different kinds of transcendent elements. There were transcendent flames, lightning, wind, water, and earth, and even strange things like transcendent wood, light and shadows and many more.

The transcendent elements were formed either in nature or artificially. Depending on their formation and the ingredients involved they could be of three different types and natures.

The first kind were the beast elements. When some beasts with strange or extraordinary bloodlines or some rare lifeforms were killed, it was possible to extract some transcendent elements from them. For example, it was possible to extract the formless shadows from the nether race, unmelting ice from an ice dragon, and the extreme storm wind from the sand bird.

The second kind were the earthly elements. These were generally formed by the agglomeration of a large amounts of a particular element. These could be formed in nature, or could even be artificially created. The molten flame, was created from large lave pools, and the demon gods blood was created artificially by killing millions of people and merging their blood.

The third kind were heavenly elements. These were extremely rare, and often born out of chance events. For example, there was the star streaking flame, formed when two meteors collide, and the undying lighting, formed when seven or more lighting bolts collide in midair.

The transcendent elements could be strengthened after they were born. All elements had a natural limit to which they could grow, which was depended only on the transcendent element itself and not by how it was born. A star streaking flame that was born of the collision of two meteors would be much much weaker than one born of collision of two stars. But the limit of the two was the same. In fact a star streaking flame born of the collision of two meteors would even be weaker than a molten flame, but was considered much more valuable due to its growth potential.

And the difference between the three kinds of elements was due to the difference in the way they were grown. Heavenly elements would grow alongside a person as he increased in cultivation. There was no need to especially grow them. But since they grew alongside a person, it also meant that if a god got their hands on a high potential element, but it was extremely weak, then he would never use it as it simply wouldn't strengthen itself.

For earthly elements the way to strengthen it is to recreate the conditions of its birth, or adsorb the ingredients involved and use it to strengthen itself. For example to grow the molten flame one had to absorb huge amounts of lava, and of a high grade.

Finally to strengthen the beast elements, one had to kill the members of the race the beast elements were from and use them to strengthen the flames. But the beast flames did not have much potential. Even though it could be strengthened a bit, all beast flames would quickly hit a limit.

Above the three kind of elements were origin elements. These were extremely powerful, such that only gods could use their full strength. And only a single one of those exist at any time. Which also made them incredibly rare. A second one would be formed only after the first was destroyed for some reason. Even though he knew a few people who had an origin element, in his entire life Bai Yun had only seen one in action: the Everburning Nether Flame of the God of Alchemy.

It was said there were seven special elements even more powerful: primordial true yin, yang, fire, water, wind, lightning and earth. It was said that these were born alongside the universe. But no one had seen them since. Many only regard these as a legend, while many say that they degenerated into the different origin elements and that one had to merge all the origin elements of a particular kind to create the Primordial True elements.

The special elements were in high demand as they all had different abilities, could help in comprehending the dao of that element, could provide special help in controlling the elements, and could even help in combat. As a result, they went for astronomical prices. Even among them the transcendent earth and fire went for an insane amount. This was because of the extra uses these two had. But this price was not fixed, the transcendent water would be as costly as the other two in the ocean empire, and in the pilgan forest, any transcendent wood would cause even family members to murder each other.

The transcendent earth could be used to build fortifications and other defensive treasures. It was also of great help to formation masters in laying down formations. This meant that all the major forces would try to collect a lot of them. As for transcendent fire, it was essential for both alchemists and weaponsmiths.

In both professions, it was necessary to use fire to melt the raw materials and then merge them together. Even though one could use a flame generated from qi, but they were much weaker than transcendent flames. This meant that all the alchemists would go crazy over even the mere mention of a transcendent fire.

Luckily for beasts, the beast flames have some of their residual will in them, making them much harder to control. This meant that the alchemists had to spend some of their efforts to control the beast flame, lowering their chance of success. Even though it would help improve the circles if the pill was formed, no alchemist wanted to reduce their success rate and would rarely use a beast flame. Otherwise, all the beasts and races that give a transcendent fire might all have been made extinct by the crazy alchemists.

The biggest difficultly in alchemy was the difficulty of splitting the soul into different parts to control and refine different alchemy ingredients at the same time. It was possible to refine and merge ingredients one after the other instead of simultaneously, but this would cause the pill to lose a majority of its strength. But this was not a problem for Bai Yun as he had the Infinitude Heavenly Thought. In fact, he was sure that once he reached a high enough realm he wouldn't even need an alchemy cauldron.

The Infinitude Heavenly Thought was such a cheat that even the God of Alchemy coveted it. The God of Alchemy not only agreed to make the pills that Bai Yun needed in the dao star realm, he even gave many other pills and even owed a favor to his mother before his mother allowed the God of Alchemy to study the Infinitude Heavenly Thought.

The only thing Bai Yun needed was a transcendent flame. And he was sure that the Bai clan would have some in its treasury.

He did not hope for a high grade one. There was no way they would put up a heavenly flame for the younger generation to pick. Even though it was said that the winners could pick anything they want, the most precious items would definitely be hidden. It was most likely that they would be hidden somewhere else in order not to raise suspicion and to make the younger generation think that the clan is extremely generous so as to increase their allegiance.

It was possible that there would be an earthly fire in the treasury. Even a good enough beast flame would satisfy Bai Yun, since he could control them.

But to get the chance to get them, he would need to be the winner of the clan tournament. Buying one was out of the question. And looking for one was not only time consuming, but also depended on luck. This was his best chance.

He would have to change his plans for the next seven months. He no longer had enough time to slowly grow in strength.

He had to win the clan tournament.