Much of the mystery of Alchemy to Immortality had been unraveled, yet layers of fog still shrouded it.
Zhang Huairen had obtained the latter two steps—alchemy and attaining immortality—but the crucial first step was nowhere to be found.
The dozen or so loose pages in his possession were only annotations on the method to begin with, and several opening pages had been lost from what was already an incomplete text.
Presumably, the missing first section concerned the step that came before alchemy and attaining immortality—finding the ingredients.
Those "ingredients" concerned the selection of the five internal organs from people corresponding to the five elements.
At present, the deceased Cheng Xiaoming and Tian Xiaolian had been confirmed as the spleen and lungs. These two victims were certain.
But whether the deaths of the other five children before the mission began were real, or carried some other special significance, remained entirely unknown.
Thus, although the main thread of this mission had largely been established, numerous blind spots and unanswered questions remained.
For the staff at this moment, however, what they had to do was more straightforward.
The killer had used both its human and ghostly sides to devise a targeted, two-pronged plan.
Ji Li, Zhang Huairen, and Huang Banxian were to confront its ghostly side and stop it from taking the heart fire;
Mei Sheng, Wei Guang, Xue Tingtao, and the main group were to confront its human side and stop it from taking someone's kidney water in the Fourth Branch.
With this move, the killer intended to deliver a decisive blow, staking everything on crushing the staff and obtaining the complete set of five organs corresponding to the five elements, thereby completing the final step of Alchemy to Immortality.
Whether "attaining immortality" was merely a false description or something genuine was