When he finished cleaning the cauldron, he pulled out the herbs needed for the spirit gathering pill and separated them into three piles. When eaten the spirit gathering pill releases a large amount of spirit energy that is useful for cultivating and was mostly used when breaking through. But overuse leaves impurities in the body and weakens the strength of spiritual energy. Removing these impurities was costly and required a significant amount of time and effort to repair the damage. But what he had planned for these pills, none of that was going to be a concern.
Refining the spirit gathering pill was a multi-step process. One batch of spirit herbs needed to be heated at the right temperature to render the medicinal properties out, then the medicinal liquid needed to be store in a clean jar while the process was repeated with the second on third batches. Then the first and second liquids needed to be mixed together and heated till reduced to half before the third liquid was added and heated to reduce by a third. When this was complete, the final liquid was a thick liquid with a dark green color. Using his spiritual energy, he lifted a small amount out of the cauldron. He tried to force it into the standard round pill shape as it began to cool down and solidify.
When he was done, he had five round dark green pills. This way of doing alchemy was far easier than what he had used before his regression. But he still had aways to go before he could proclaim his dreadful alchemy skills had truly progressed. With the amount of spirit herbs he had used, he should have been able to make ten pills. After cultivating for a while to replenish the spiritual energy he had used, he made another batch of spirit gathering pills but only got six pills.
It was mid-afternoon when he got done cultivating after the second batch of pills and would be dark in an hour or so. While the benefits of alchemy were great, it was a great drain on his current amount of spiritual energy and required plenty of time to recover. With almost all of today's day light gone, the plans he had for today would have to wait for tomorrow. After eating his dinner, he spent his time practicing his martials arts and practicing with his bident, before going to bed.
Waking up before the sun had risen, Xavier walked into the cave dwelling and began to carve out the main room. It was dark inside the cave, pulling out a small round blue stone from his storage bag the inside of the cave dwelling glowed with a pale blue light. The small round blue stone was a luminous stone, a stone that when left in sun light would glow in the dark. They weren't rare, but they cost enough that most families in the cult couldn't afford one.
Xavier was able to carve out a ten-foot-long shaft into the rock, and was now knee deep in sand. So he used the earth mover spell to push the sand to the stairs, and when he got to the stairs, he pushed it outside, and when he stepped outside he pushed the sand in the direction of the stream. His fingers were slightly numb and tingling, but they weren't as bad as they were yesterday. His body was adapting to the spell, by time he finished this cave dwelling he should be able to use the spell as long as he had the spiritual energy to support it without any pain or numbness. The sun was just beginning to rise as he sat down in his tent to begin cultivating.
An hour or so later, he had replenished his spiritual energy, and his hands had returned to normal. Grabbing a bone ingot, he began to shape three round disks slightly larger than his palm. When they were hardened, he used ink to draw a complex looking array on each of them before he used his soul flame to cause the ink to sink into the three disks.
Now that everything was ready, he headed off into the woods while eating some jerky. He had First and Second guarding him and two boars scouting up head looking for groups of wild boars. It didn't take long for one of the boars to find a large group of over a hundred wild boars, but with his bone processing area temporarily off limits, this group was too big for his current needs. The next several groups the boars found were also too big, after a while a group of fifteen was found. Most of this group of wild boars looked old, even if they avoided dying to predators, they looked to only have a year or two before they succumbed to illness or old age.
The wild boars noticed Xavier when he approached but soon ignored him and went back to eating spirit herbs. With a thought, one of Xavier's ghost boars charged towards one of the few younger boars of the group and disappeared inside it. Instead of devouring its soul, it possessed it and walked towards Xavier in unsteady steps. When it arrived before Xavier, he used his knife to cut the boars ear and allowed the blood to drip onto one of the round disks he had made. When it was covered with enough blood, Xavier began to infuse the array within the disk with his spiritual energy. The blood covering the disk started to be absorbed by the array and when the last of the blood disappeared, the dark reddish black ink of the array started to glow gold. The disk was a beast controlling plate, it allowed someone to form an external beast taming contract. This external contract was far from perfect, Xavier couldn't exert perfect control over the boar. The control plate allowed him to always know where the boar was and its general wellbeing, it also allowed him to issue orders to the boar and cause pain as punishment for any disobedience. The boar could resist orders that was afraid of and would cause it pain or kill it. But it was better than the alternative of giving up being able to control a ghost or two to accommodate a traditional beast taming contract.
Xavier took a small pale white box made from refined bone and removed a spirit gathering pill. Tossing it on the ground in front of the boar he ordered the ghost boar possessing it to eat the pill. When the pill entered the boar's stomach a large amount of spirit energy was released. Xavier used his control of the ghost boar to control the flow of that spiritual energy to try and find the spirit energy pathways of the boar. This was similar to the process he had put himself through to transform his body, but he knew the way to do it for human beings. Xavier had never done this to a boar before, he was just trying to go with the flow but understood he was most likely causing a great deal of damage to the boar. This damage would make it hard for the boar to break through at higher levels, luckily this was not a concern of Xavier's.
Xavier could sense the boar wanted to scream in agony but was prevented from doing so by the ghost possessing it, the only outward sign of it excruciating pain was some light shaking of its body. By the time the spirit energy in the boar had been used up, the process was still incomplete. Tossing another pill to the boar, he started the process again. A bit later he felt a popping sensation in the boar's body through his ghost. The remaining spirit energy within the boar flowed throughout the boar and nourished its body. This wild boar had just transformed from a normal beast to a first level spirit beast.
Releasing the possession, the boar moved behind him in an unsteady manner and began eating spirit herbs. With the first spirit beast made it was time for the second one, the ghost boar was sent to possess another of the younger boars. Instead of feeding it one pill at a time, Xavier feed it two. Unfortunately, the combined spirit energy of two pills was too potent and caused the boar to begin shaking and blood to flow from its mouth and nose before it dropped dead. Moments later the spirit beast boar that was behind Xavier stopped eating spirit herbs and walked to the boar's corpse. After taking a few sniffs, the spirit beast opened its mouth and began eating the corpse. Xavier wasn't expecting this to happen, nor was he planning to make it happen, but he was going to stop it from happening either.