Preliminary testing of the Blue Spider Lily went on for an entire week.
Tamayo, Yushiro, and even Kanae and Shinobu, who arrived later,
had barely slept a wink.
Even Xia Xi, who had joined in to help with his [Medicine] and [Pharmaceutical Crafting] skills,
gave it everything he had.
They tried every method they could think of,
turning the samples into over a hundred micro-scale test specimens and using every means at their disposal to observe and analyze them.
Tamayo even used small quantities of her own blood, as well as Upper Rank blood, to test their reactions with the samples.
But the results... were disappointingly consistent.
No matter whose blood they used, there was little difference in the reaction.
None of them managed to detect any of the special substances they had expected to find.
And even when Tamayo brewed medicine according to the Heian Period formula the Demon King had once provided,
all she obtained was ordinary medicine for treating illness.
It could neither turn the laboratory mice and the death-row volunteers found by the Demon Slayer Corps into demons,
nor take Tamayo, who had already become a demon, and the captive demons fitted beforehand with [Blood Demon Art Signal Jammers],
and turn them back into humans or allow them to withstand sunlight.
The flowers seemed to be nothing more than dried blue wildflowers Tamayo had casually picked by the roadside.
They contained neither factors governing longevity nor any special active substances.
They had no special effect on either telomeres or mitochondria.
By the second week,
Tamayo, who looked considerably more haggard,
had begun to doubt herself.
Had something gone wrong with the experiments?
She had wondered whether what Xia Xi had picked really was the Blue Spider Lily recorded in the ancient formula.
She had also wondered