Closing the door behind her, Jun Li heard some commotion from behind as the senior alchemist called out in shock. 'Is he that concerned?' Jun Li raised an eyebrow as she walked further into the room. 'Well… I suppose this would be… quite dangerous to a normal person of my Cultivation…'

  Walking through the blackened mist of the demonstration chamber, Jun Li turned over the senior alchemist's apparent concern in her mind. 'Is he actually worried about me? The way Uncle Zhu talked about the Jianghu, it's hard to imagine someone of his station would bat an eye at some random person getting themselves killed…'

  As she walked towards the corpse in the middle of the room, Jun Li began to feel the effects of the poison, as her skin started to bruise, and it became hard to breathe. 'Already, huh? Time to get to work…'

  Before entering the room, Jun Li had identified the poison's primary effect as attacking the blood with a clotting and hardening effect. Even moving and breathing was causing her rapidly hardened veins to snap and bleed into her body.

  She hadn't walked in without a plan, however. 'In those memories, this method for 'self-exsanguination' sticks out so strongly… as if it's the first and most important medical technique he knew…'

  Pulling a thin blade from her Spatial Ring, Jun Li hesitated for a moment, restrained by human instinct. 'Come on… It's just pain, and if I don't do it now, my hardening blood will destroy my lungs and drown me…' Even if Jun Li could normally control her blood, when it hardened piece by piece from this foreign poison, it 'died' and became utterly inert to her influence.

  Turning the small blade towards herself, Jun Li grasped it with both hands, handle and blade, such that less than an inch protruded from the fingers that gripped near the end.

  With careful precision, she sank the blade into the side of her neck and slowly dragged it down, millimeter by millimeter. 'A vertical slit in the external carotic artery…' The pain shot through her neck like a sharp icicle and was immediately smothered by the horrible warmth of pouring blood.

  Well before she had finished the cut, blood flowed down her neck in such a thick stream that it rendered her lightheaded. Not from any true physiological symptom, but from a psychological one.

  Repeating the process to the other side of her neck, Jun Li let out a breath, feeling nausea overtake her for a moment as her clothing became sodden and slick. The knife fell from her hands, and she slid down to her knees. To cut into herself in such a way was more than she could handle.

  In the tension and frenzy of battle, perhaps it wouldn't have been as severe. But the slow, intimate precision of quiet mutilation caused her mind to reel in a way she hadn't experienced before.

  'Horrible… And I'm not even halfway through the full process…' Kneeling to the floor, with her head hanging down, Jun Li shook her head as she felt blood flow down from her neck and onto the edges of her face.

  'That's… enough. I'm already losing so much blood that the poison can't affect me anymore…' The concept of being unable to die from blood loss was far, far from a cure-all for the human anxieties inherent to such visceral physical trauma. Even Jun Li, with her experience and affinity for bloodshed, could not endure it, not in quiet solitude.

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  Drawing in a nauseated breath, full of poison vapor and the scent of blood, Jun Li focused her attention on the corpse in the center of the room. 'If I fix this poison, I should be able to become part of the Alchemist's Association… being an alchemist of a Mortal Kingdom's branch office isn't good enough, I need to make a name for myself here, so Uncle Zhu can find me…"

  'And…' Jun Li looked over the corpse, which laid leaning back and covered in red and blue splotches. '...Maybe I can snag something of value from this guy, it's not like they would have known what's in his Spatial Ring anyway…'

  Crouching down next to the corpse, Jun Li saw that the cauldron in its lap had its lid displaced, and its surface bore many opened apertures. From those points, dark vapor spilled out, filling the room even now. 'That's a pretty intense amount of energy… And this guy wasn't even a formal alchemist?'

  Jun Li quickly lidded the cauldron and, after a moment of fiddling about with the cauldron's internal array, managed to close the apertures along its surface with the correct application of Qi. 'That should prevent things from worsening…'

  Setting the cauldron aside, Jun Li looked over the body. 'Spatial Ring… Spatial Ring…' Reaching over, she turned the corpse's hands over once to look for a Spatial Ring, then she turned them over again, and saw nothing on his fingers or wrist. She even checked his throat to see if he carried a Spatial Ring on a necklace, to no avail.

  Turning the body itself entirely over, Jun Li saw that it had been leaned against a bloated rucksack, stuffed with all sorts of Medicinal Plants, by the smell of it. Logically, she should have begun rifling through the bag. After all, nothing had changed, Spatial Ring or no, he still held something of value on his person.

  And yet… when Jun Li saw that rucksack, she looked to the man's face. He wasn't particularly young, but he wasn't exactly of advanced age either. Through the harsh, mottled bruising, Jun Li could tell this man tried to take care of himself. Judging by how he had fared in the presence of the poison, she could tell that his Cultivation had been weak, perhaps only in the Late or Peak Qi Condensation stage.

  This man, lacking in wealth and opportunity, had attempted to pass the test to become a member of the Alchemist's Association and had died here, poisoning himself to death.

  To another, this might have seemed like a pointless, foolish end. But Jun Li could tell that this man had taken a risk, a gamble. The smell of the poison and that of the Medicinal Plants he carried on his person was enough to tell her that.

  "An Autumn's Compassion Bolus…" She looked towards the cauldron, muttering the name of the troublesome, complex medicine she believed the man was trying to make, and the potential dangers of its creation. "You probably hesitated…just a few seconds too long…"

  Sitting quietly next to the man's body, Jun Li felt awful. She herself had experienced no end of anxiety and uncertainty when it came to alchemy in the past, so for someone to hesitate and be uncertain whether a pill or elixir was complete was entirely understandable to her.

  Yet, Jun Li knew too much about alchemy from her inherited memories to make a fatal mistake in such a way. The way in which certain Medicinal Plants react to one another, or to time, or method, or even age… it was laid out with supreme clarity in her inherited memories and intuition.

  'If I didn't have this inheritance… I might have made this sort of mistake myself.' She raised a hand to her neck and felt the blood pour through her fingers. 'And, I may not have survived such a mistake…'

  She sat there for minutes, looking towards the corpse of the aspiring alchemist, contemplating his position and the nature of the poison he had left behind.

  "At the very least, I'll clean up this mess so you can rest… somewhere less awful."