722 Medicinal Pastes

"So, I just put it all here and start mixing it?" Alex thought for a moment as he read the talisman again and started crushing the ingredients in the mortar and pestle.

Most of the ingredients were plants, but there were some that were from beasts too. However, unlike Alchemy, very few of them were from beasts.

As Alex crushed the ingredients, he started noticing the flaw of the medicinal pastes. Even as he crushed it, energy left the ingredients and flew away.

Unlike a cauldron with a lid, mortal and pestle couldn't contain the energy. Still, it wasn't like he was burning the ingredients, so not much energy left the ingredients.

Having never done this before, it took a while before the paste came to be as smooth as he wanted it to be.

'That looks like it will work,' he thought and brought out the sword from his storage ring and cut a line along the back of his arm.

"Argh!" he winced a little from the surprise at how easily the sword cut his skin. It was almost like his True King realm physical body was nothing against this sword.

'Just what the hell are you?' Alex thought for a moment before bringing his attention back to the medicinal paste.

He made another cut next to that one and immediately went for the medicinal paste.

He scooped a bit with his 2 fingers and applied it to his new cut. Within seconds of applying, the wound completely vanished, while the older one was still squirming a little, trying to heal.

Alex let it be and it took him nearly 5 minutes to fully heal a simple cut. And that was only because he was a body cultivator. A normal cultivator would require nearly half an hour to heal that wound on his own.

"Well, this works perfectly," Alex thought and looked at the medicinal paste. There were still 20 or so more scoops of what he had applied still remaining in the mortar.

Alex scooped it all up and put it in a vial. Then, he looked at the list of ingredients and compared them. If he had used these ingredients to make a pill, it would have only helped a single person.

However, with medicinal paste, it would help many of them.

Alex shook his head when he realized how easy it was. 'I should have started years ago,' he thought. But he knew how busy he was with the 3 different guilds.

Fortunately, he didn't have artifact guild on his list as well. Otherwise, he wouldn't know what to spend his time on.

For the rest of the day, Alex spent his time on the same medicinal paste and made about 3 more batches of it that came out to be around 20 vials altogether.

'I should probably get bigger vials. These pill vials won't hold much,' he thought. He remembered the jar of acrid-smelling paste in his bag that nearly burned his nose from the smell.

He needed that type of jar.

"Yeah, I should ask them that too," Alex thought.

He walked out of the Alchemy guild with Shurin who had waited for him despite his insistence.

He gave her a vial for the troubles and told her it was a medicine that would heal her minor wounds.

"How do you use it?" she asked.

"You take a little bit and apply it to your wound," Alex said.

"Oh," Shurin said. "What if I have a lot of wounds, would this one vial be enough?"

"Well, no," Alex said. "But those are cases where you eat a pill."

"What if my wound is on the inside?" Shurin asked.

"That… I think you can eat it, but I don't know how to start testing that," Alex said. "I would need a volunteer."

"I can be one," Shurin said.

"You want to get cut on the inside?" Alex asked.

"Wait, does it have to be a cut? Won't a sprain be enough?" she asked.

"Ah, right," Alex said. "I should try with broken bones too, and if I can, maybe someone with some sort of sickness or disease. Although those might need other pastes."

"I will let the princess know what you need. For now, let's just try with the sprain," Shurin said.

"Give me your hand," Alex asked.

Shurin brought out her hand and Alex immediately grabbed it and pulled on it hard.

"Argh!" Shurin cried out in pain as some tears flooded her eyes.

"Sorry," Alex said and looked at her wrist. "Yeah, that looks sprained. Eat this quick."

He had her scoop out some medicine with the other hand and eat it.

"Ew," she made a weird face before swallowing the medicine. Once she was done, she looked at the wound in her hand.

"No… wait, a little," She said. "Let me eat some more."

Shurin ate 2 more scoops of the medicine before there was some noticeable difference in the wound.

"What if I apply it directly?" Alex asked and scooped some too before applying it from the outside.

"Same difference," she said. "Maybe it's because it is the hand? It is quite far away from the stomach."

"Well, try diverting your energy to the hand with your cultivation technique," Alex said.

"Right here?" Shurin looked around in the middle of the street.

"Right, let's go back to the palace first," Alex said and they went back. Without stopping anywhere, they sat down on the front lawn and tried it all out, including broken bones. Multiple locations at that.

The only thing they couldn't test the paste against was sickness or diseases as Shurin didn't have that.

Soon, Alex came up with a small hypothesis of his own.

For a medicinal paste to work, it needed to be close to the injury. In fact, touching the injury itself was always better.

If the wound was on the outside, applying it directly to the wound was the way to go.

If it was internal, one needed to eat 2 or 3 scoops and cultivate to move the energy from the paste to the wounded section.

The medicinal pastes worked on skins, muscles, and organs, but bones were hard to treat.

A fractured bone would need at least 5 scoops to heal properly. If the bone was broken, the medicinal paste wouldn't help at all. That being said, Alex only knew about the pastes from True rank ingredients.

He couldn't help but wonder how Saint Ranked ingredients would affect physiology.

There were also multiple other types of paste that did different things, but he could tell that their influence wouldn't be any better.

For the trouble, Alex gave 5 healing pills to Shurin that were some of the best he had prepared today.

She of course didn't want it as she had been doing what she was appointed to do, but Alex didn't take no for an answer.

After she left, Alex returned back to his room and sat down to cultivate. At the same time, he started processing all that he learned today at the library.

He hadn't learned very much, but he hard started off small after all. Slowly, he would go for more difficult topics and subjects and learn more about the human body.

Alex chuckled as he wondered what his mother would think if her homeschooled son suddenly became a very talented doctor.