A few hours had passed again, she had made her way back home and was currently sitting inside the small house she had build-out of hide bones and wood. Surrounded by dried herbs she closed her eyes the first thing she did was get the scroll Shi Shi had left with her - touching it unraveled another part of the message just as Kou had guessed already.

Sadly the scroll did say nothing about the cryptic warning Shi Shi had given her before, instead, it was basic explanation on how to clean and maintain an alchemy furnace, as well as basic things that Kou had already found out by reading the book, there was only one interesting passage.

"Once you reached the middle of your current realm you can touch the scroll again, it will have the basis of a Technique that I have used." It was just a tease! Kou curled her nose and shook her head, well... she had enough work in front of her so another technique to learn was probably too much together with the Alchemy and all.. but still! That silly old gran... "Mh..." Kou let out a sigh, she .. missed Shi Shi, but now was not the time to lament her fate and so she shook her head a few times.

"Nothing to be sad about, I need to get this done!" There was something exciting coming up anyway! Storage treasure! She could finally use it, finally see what was inside finally she could carry her things with her! She was so thrilled that her tail was wagging back and forth like an excited dog, as she forgot to control it properly.

"So..It is already bound to me, so... close my eyes and direct my inner eyes at.. it.." She mumbled what she had to do - and gasped, she could feel the inside and see in front of her inner eye what was inside. First was the pile of spirit stones! Spirit stones! She had almost forgotten about those, as she never had any access to them! It was even mid-grade spirit-stones and a few high-grade one too! That was an amount of money unheard off! Kou was pretty sure not even the elders would have high-grade spirit stones! Sadly, there was nothing to buy on this island, and using them for cultivation seemed like a waste... "Well, those are keepers.. what else." Of course, there was a small number of different kinds of pill furnaces in it, those tended to explode at some point so having more was always better...

The next thing piqued her interest again, it was a spear! From what her very limited knowledge about weapons could tell her this thing was about the same grade than her daggers, there were a bunch more weapons all in similar quality in there, nothing that would've been a proper upgrade to her current arms. Still, that spear would be the first thing she would take out. She concentrated on it for a moment and it simply appeared in her left hand.

She had used a bone-spear before, you could put way more power into a single attack with a spear than you could with a dagger after-all, and if you had the chance to backstab someone it did not really matter with what you backstabbed, as long as it had a pointy end. This spear, however, was a proper low-grade artifact. Kou jumped backward landing a few meters back before pointing the spear at a random tree - letting her Qi flow inside of it. Wind howled and a blade made out of wind shot from the spear tip and .. cleaved through the tree. The Qi that was used up was hurtfully much but the output was very powerful, maybe even more powerful than her light dagger.

The Qi consumption was a problem, she had no affinity for wind at all so it used even more "Well..I can only do that a few times.. but just using it to stab things is good enough anyway." With that, the spear was put back into the cloak. She wondered what that old foggy that had given her the cloak had wanted with all these weapons. Of course, she had no way to know that for him this amount was child's play and counted as little more than thrash.

And that was mostly it, there were a few sets of clothes inside the cloak, but one of them would fit Kou at all, while most of them would've improved her defensive, as her clothes were not really all that expensive, she opted against wearing some strange old man's clothes...

"Well.." It was "Mostly" it, the last thing inside was a pile of earth crystals, those were used as fuel for alchemy and was probably left behind by Shi Shi... "Good... I suppose now it's training time..." But first, she grinned and stretched out her arms out theatrically while holding the sides of her cloak. "Come to me my goodies!" And then she started, first inside of her house, every herb every grass and every special bone she had, everything was stored inside her special storage, following that came her collection of first and second realm cores as well as all the dried and prepared food she had!

It was silly but felt very good, finally, she had her own "Portable" home, she could just take everything she needed with her everywhere she went! There was no need for a base anymore, she was now a walking base and nobody could simply steal her things!

"Hehehehe.." She snickered - just imagine how easy it would be to steal things now! My! She had to find a way to get into outer peoples storage treasures, the amount of wealth that was hidden in these tiny things! Kou sat down as she was caught up in her delusions before slapping both of her cheeks and shaking her head. "Focus, there is nobody to steal from here anyway!"

Her ears perked up and her tail gently coiled around her waist as she took out one of the Alchemie furnaces, this one seemed to be made out of copper and had small tigers etched into it, Kou turned it up and down and looked at it from all angles, letting out a huff. "This just looks like a couldron.. the Alchemie Furnaces in the book looked all really fancy.." The next thing she took out were some of the earth crystals "Mhh.." Sniffing them brought no further clues than what she already knew..

"Well guess it's time to rename this place from storage house to Alchemie shack." She got to work with a random sword she picked out of the cloak's storage she quickly dug a small hole in which she stuffed the earth crystal. "So now I need some wood, hardwood, and a fire..." And that she did, gathering some wood, and making a fire, Kou was a cultivator, making fire was a simple thing after all! She just had to rub to pieces of wood together so quickly that they caught fire from the friction! Hurrah for the inhumane powers of cultivation.

She continued doing that until she had a small fire before starting to shove the wood next to the earth crystal, heating up nicely the crystal started to produce smoldering heat, and Kou backed off feeling like she might just melt any moment, she closed her cloak and deployed her ice flame inside of it to cool down before approaching again. "Ha.." She blinked the heat was strong but was already going back. "Uh...when fire goes down... blow on it right?" She took a deep breath and started to blow down, which made the smoldering wood pieces dimming fire reignite again.

However, how was she supposed to blow on the wood to keep the crystal hot when the furnace was on top of it, it was not just the lack of oxygen that made the fire go out, the crystal was literally sucking the ignited fire qi out of the wood, making the flames weaker and weaker.

There had to be a constant influx of wind to keep the flames strong, and she had to feed wood every other minute to keep it going at the proper head to make pills. "How the heck..." The book just barely touched on these struggles, saying that heating earth crystals manually was rather hard, but than went quickly over to things called "Pill flames" Treasures that would use Qi to heat create the flame and heat the crystal. Kou had no such flame, and her Ice-flame sure as heck would not work for that, It was not even a real flame, it literally did the exact opposite!

"Mrrrhmmm..."

She stretched out her left hand calling the wind spear out of her storage and stared at it for a moment before directing a small amount of Qi into it. "Oh!" It did exactly what she wanted, it converted her Qi into wind Qi and shot wind no matter how much Qi she used, to actually have any impact on a foe she would have to use a quite grand amount of Qi, but to simply feed a fire, it was not to bad...! "Well, I guess you are hereby promoted to the great position of fire keeper... Looking forward towards future cooperation.." She hummed at the spear before sitting down and placing the Alchemie furnace on the hole, she let some space so she could shove more wood in and point the spear tip inside. Then her tail curled around the spear to hold it in place and she had her hands free.

"Well, test run one.." She mumbled while directing just a little Qi towards the spear. Most of her attention was on the furnace, that quickly changed color from rusty brown too - red. "Once the furnace is hot, you give in the herbs.. than.." She had studied the book for many days, there was often nothing else to do but train and read after all, and that book was the only one she had. Of course, Alchemie was not so simple! You could not just throw the herbs in and let it boil for a bit! Alchemie had its own technique, and while Kou had practiced a lot, this was her first time actually using it.

She directed her weak spiritual sense towards the furnace and coated the herbs she had just thrown in with Qi. The technique she used was the basic pill creation, it would coat the ingredients with Qi and oversee them slowly splitting down in the magical furnace, later she would have to direct the parts she wanted together and condense them into a Pill! It sounded very simple, but needed quite the large amount of concentration! A whole lot even since this was her first time!

Many ...Many hours later.

Kou sat there for hours, her hair was disheveled and her eyes looked like she had been crying! But she had just stared at the closed furnace for all this time, thick pearls of sweat on her forehead, there it was! She would finally be able to condense a pill! She felt how the ingredients had split and quickly closed her left fist to condense the pill inside! Cracks had already started to appear in the furnace, but Kou was in a different world right now! She rarely struggled! And unlike Spiritual Weapon which was the only thing she did not pick up quickly, Alchemie was actually very important for her future growth so Kou would and could not accept not being able to do it!

The heat had already singed away some of her hair but she did not care at all "Now!" She felt how the pill formed inside the furnace...

"BOOM" The Furnance exploded, together with her small hut and a large piece of ground, Kou was thrown into the air, her face full of ash and soot. Of course, she was not really damaged, part of her clothes was burned, but Kou was already in the 3rd realm! An explosion would not make her take any damage!... Sadly that could not be said for her surroundings, splinters of the burning hot furnace were drilled into various trees, that quickly caught on fire!

Kou sat on the ground a bewildered expression on her face, a burning branch of some tree suddenly fell down on the ground next to her - finally pulling her out of her daze. "Wh...whaa!" And so she quickly went to work.. saving the forest from burning down...