Yun Qingyue turned the apothecary at the southeastern corner of Ironblood Horse Grounds into her own private territory.
The apothecary had three rooms and had originally been a storeroom where Zhao Tieying kept the pills he had seized.
She moved every bottle and jar from the storeroom out into the corridor, cleared the middle room, and set up a medicine furnace.
The furnace was cast iron and half a man's height tall. What burned inside was bone charcoal brought back from the Northern Frontier—the bone fragments left behind after the Undead Monarch's avatar had shattered.
The bone fragments burned without smoke, their flames a dark gold.
On the first day, she dug three things out of her medicine chest.
A stalk of Ten-Thousand-Year Soul-Returning Grass, brought back from Netherworld Valley in the Southern Frontier.
A small fragment of a sealing core, a leftover scrap from when Lu Chen had absorbed it in the deep pit of the Western Wasteland, no bigger than a fingernail.
And half a jar of Dragon Blood Ointment—the thickest layer at the bottom of the jar, which only yielded less than half a bowl when scraped out.
She ground the Soul-Returning Grass into juice, the dark green liquid collected in a white porcelain bowl.
The sealing core fragment was burned in the medicine furnace for a full day and night, until it became a tiny pinch of golden powder.
She steamed the Dragon Blood Ointment over water until the paste separated. The upper layer became a pale golden liquid, while the lower layer was dark red sediment. She only wanted the liquid.
On the second day, she mixed the three ingredients together.
She poured the dark green Soul-Returning Grass juice into the golden powder. The powder dissolved the instant it met the juice, turning a color