After using a flying sword technique to reach my top speed, I followed the directions the mouse girl gave me to a small palace. I touched down right next to her. The girl looked like she was about to let a river of tears fall and was only just keeping it together.

Without saying a word, she grabbed my sleeve and practically dragged me inside and through several twists and turns. She pushed open a heavy wood door revealing a bath and a bamboo bed where Little Spring lay.

His face was too pale. Next to him, Xiao Bai whined sorrowfully.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” the poison master hovering over the kid murmured before turning to us. He nodded to Little Teasing Mouse but didn’t even acknowledge me.

I quickly scanned Little Spring with divine sense and found evidence that he’d already taken a Lin’s Healing Dan. Considering the fucked up state his body was in, it had definitely helped him to survive long enough for me to get to him. But it didn’t heal him fully. At this point, many of his organs were on the brink of failing. The kid was in worse condition than Dread Lotus had been in! How the hell had all this happened?

Fuck, I needed time to figure that out.

After pushing the fucking useless poison master out of the way, I temporarily stabilized him with sanitized acupuncture needles. This would give him at least 10 minutes.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t just feed him more medicine without knowing if it would react to whatever this idiot had already tried.

Considering how bad he still looked, I doubted that another pill would help.

I turned to the poison master who rubbed his shoulder where I’d pushed him. “Tell me what happened.”

“Wuuuwuuu! It’s all my fault!” Little Teasing Mouse said. Apparently, she couldn’t hold back anymore because a flood of tears poured down her face. She hiccuped.

The old poison master rested a hand on her shoulder. “No, no. It’s not your fault, dear. This situation was impossible to predict.”

It seemed like they were both answering and ignoring me. A vein bulged on my forehead. “Shut up! Tell me what happened right now. I’ll assign blame later.”

That shocked her enough to stop her tears. “He... hic… he went through the Beast Blood Contract Bath.”

No shit! I figured that out from the goddamn tub in the center of the room. I was already planning to put him through hell training for this stunt. Maybe worse — hell band camp. But he had to be healthy to go through that.

I glared at them while letting my divine sense pressure them. Everyone in the room flinched.

To calm myself, I breathed in. “Keep going. Tell me what happened during the bath.”

The poison master answered this time. “Well, everything went fine at first. He stepped into the bath. His beast willingly gave its blood. Then he sat there, just like any normal beast blood cultivator. It was only toward the end where he started to show signs of pain. Before I knew it, he grabbed his heart and sank into the water. This is usually the reaction we see when a beast’s rank outmatches their contractor, but...”

He gestured to the weak-looking Xiao Bai. The puppy tilted his head cutely.

image [https://i.imgur.com/NNhb9JJ.jpeg]

[Image Link]

Goddamn it. I had known that puppy wasn’t as mundane as it most definitely was... wait... Even now, all my knowledge of its uniqueness was fading after a short amount of time and I was slowly returning to believing he was just a mundane canine.

As much as I wanted to explore this phenomenon, it wasn’t important. Right now, I needed to save the fucking universe’s precious goddamned protagonist.

“Junior Linlin. I’m sorry. Because I brought him here... Because of me... he’s going to die. Wuuuwuu!” Tears streamed down her face again. Which wasn’t fucking helpful!

I ground my teeth. “Don’t you dare curse his ass! This brat isn’t allowed to die!”

The two stared at me in shock. The mouse girl even stopped crying.

”Both of you, if you’re not going to tell me the ingredients to the beast blood contract bath, then get out.”

When they didn’t respond, I picked them up with spiritual energy and threw them out. Then I shut and locked the door.

Clutching at the wood rim, I leaned over the tub to analyze its contents through scent first. I recognized a few different herbs and a mixture of things that I couldn’t figure out since it had been too long. There was a trace of the spiritual spring water the kid must have added. That probably only intensified the bath and didn’t do him any favors aside from keeping his organs clean from impurities. Organs that were failing anyway.

What happened to make the brat go through with this bullshit unorthodox method? He was smarter than this!

But I couldn’t rule out that, despite his protagonist status, he was still just a kid.

Fuck. I didn’t have a lot of options and only a limited amount of time to save him. There was no way I could concoct a specific pill to help. If a Lin’s Healing Dan couldn’t fix him, then I could only rely on his special constitution. But it wasn’t activating. At this point, it should be sending energy to heal his ass and make him stronger. Which meant that the goddamn bath must have done something to change it.

No. The constitution of a protagonist could not be fucked up that easily.

So, I had to start at the beginning. What did this bath even do? It connected a beast tamer to their partner on a physical level. It even allowed the tamer to share useful traits of their beast. And it did that through blood.

This had to have something to do with bloodlines. But Little Spring already had one. Likely a dragon, since he was a little protagonist.

Then the energy from Xiao Bai’s bloodline had to be fighting against Little Spring’s. They were so busy trying to dominate the other that they had no time left to heal his body. In fact, they were making him worse. Their struggle had to be causing his originally healthy organs to fail. And the reason I couldn’t sense them was because their energies had to be opposite enough to cancel each other out.

So, how did I get these two opposing bloodlines to stop fighting?

The only thing I could think of was shocking his system into focusing on healing.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

Fuck. This was goddamn counterintuitive.

With a grasping gesture, I removed the needles. I took out a small knife and pressed it near several of his vital organs, using a sword technique to pass through his skin and slice just the tissue I wanted. In quick succession, I hit the liver, bladder, heart, lungs, stomach, and spleen.

His face turned paper white. He coughed up a mouthful of blood.

I shoved a Lin’s Healing Dan between his lips and guided the pill’s energy to go through his system repairing the injuries I’d just made, all while following his cultivation technique.

I healed his spleen.

Come on, work, damn you. Follow the goddamn leader!

I reached his heart. Nothing. This wasn’t fucking working!

Wait. There. A trickle. Two different conflicting energies began to repair the kid’s heart. At first, they had trouble healing together. Each energy got in the other’s way and made the organ worse.

This wasn’t good. It was like one step forward and two steps back.

There had to be a way to fix this!

I split the healing energy in two and guided the other energies to spiral in harmony. They copied me and finally moved through his body without damaging him. By that point, I didn’t have to do anything anymore. On their own, they strengthened his organs even more than they would have individually.

I was positive that, after this, even I would have a hard time stabbing him. What kind of bullshit luck did he have?!

Once I finished healing his body, I waited to see if the energies would continue to fight. Fortunately, they seemed to have stabilized. At least, for now.

After I gave him an energy-replenishing pill, his eyes opened. He froze for a moment. Then he swallowed. He looked like he knew he’d done something bad.

”I knew you’d save me.”

I frowned down at him. “Undo your disguise technique so I can take a look at you. I need to see if your original appearance changed.”

He nodded and focused.

The kid slowly went from looking like a young teen to a tall middle schooler. Everything looked normal, aside from his hair, which had somehow turned completely white. Oh... and that was new. White fluffy ears had somehow grown on top of his head. While they looked like Xiao Bai’s current husky-like ears, I was positive that was only because of the not-quite-a-puppy’s mind-altering effect.

“…”

”What? Do I look bad?” He sat up. With a few incantation gestures, he brought up a water mirror. When he saw himself, he frowned, then wiggled the ears on top of his head. They flattened.

Fucking adorable.

Or they would be.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find them cute since the reason he now had those ears was an unorthodox method that would harm his future path and make it difficult to cultivate.

Aesthetics meant shit if achieving them harmed the body.

I turned away.

“I was trying to figure out what Xiao Bai is by looking at your ears... but it’s not working.”

“Sister Lin... are... are you angry?” he whispered.

I couldn’t look at him. “Take a guess.”

“Ah... I... This wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”

I clasped my hands behind my back. “Oh? Then what did you think was going to happen when you got into an unorthodox bath?”

“Well, I had made plans to fool the poison master. I even thought they had worked.”

I knew the brat was too smart to really go through with a bath like this. But, despite his best efforts, his plan had messed up somehow... Or, the goddamn author of this universe wanted this to happen. If that was the case, then fuck them and their left eye, in particular!

I turned back to him. “What were your plans?”

::When I went to help Xiao Bai cut his paw, I stopped his skin from touching the blade. Instead, I used crimson dyed syrup to replace his blood. But he had to have accidentally cut himself on the knife without me noticing.::

::How could you not notice?::

::Oh… I had immediately wrapped his paw up to hide my deception.::

He glanced at the adorable not-puppy with worry in his eyes. “Are you hurt, Xiao Bai?”

He jumped up and down. His paws made clacking sounds on the tiled floor. The kid picked him up and set him on his lap. He ran his hands through his soft fur.

image [https://i.imgur.com/6ZpdcXY.jpeg]

[Image Link]

I sighed. ::Xiao Bai must have believed that this bath would benefit you both.:: I scowled down at the dog. It tilted its head innocently when it looked at me. Yeah. He wasn’t fooling me any more. From this point on, I would never forget that he wasn’t actually mundane, no matter how much he definitely felt like he was.

Frankly, I wanted to be mad at the not-dog, but I couldn’t. Even if he was some kind of secret Ascendant Beast, he was still just a child.

I picked the puppy up so I could stare into his blue eyes. ::You must feel like you can’t trust us to protect you. At least not yet. And that’s why you’re hiding your true form. That’s fine. But don’t you dare pull this stunt again. Do you hear me?::

“Bork!” He then licked my face. His slobber felt incredibly gross.

I closed my eyes tightly and held in the urge to yeet the dog.

Throwing a small puppy across the room was something only villains did. Him licking my face was a show of affection and not a biological attack. And, actually, dogs had fewer bacteria in their mouths than humans… but they still had them.

Very slowly, I placed Xiao Bai back on Little Spring’s lap and immediately used a cleaning technique on myself, him, and the dog.

The kid winced.

“Did that feel like being stabbed with a billion needles?”

“N-no.” He frowned. “Though it did hurt...” he said, then mumbled, “worse than it usually does.”

::That must be part of the side effects. It likely gets worse the higher your realm is.:: Considering what Noxious Fangstrike said, anyway.

::So, are you ready to tell me why you went through with this stupid idea in the first place?::

He blinked and his eyes appeared glossy. ::Uh... I thought you’d be angrier.::

::Oh, I am. I am so furious that I’m planning out months of training... but you’re my patient right now. And, while I might be an old monster, I don’t yell at patients who’ve almost left this plane to drink Meng Po’s Soup.::

He shoved his hand into the not-puppy’s neck fur and held on. ::Was I that bad?::

::You must have saved the universe in your past life to have me as your martial sister.::

::Definitely.:: He nodded, then hesitated. ::Well, after doing some reconnaissance, I discovered that the fastest way to get to the second floor of the treasure pavilion, like I promised you, was to go through with the bath.::

A vein bulged in my forehead. ::Are you telling me that you went through with this for the mission?::

He nodded. ::Well, I was planning to pretend to. I’m not stupid enough to sacrifice my cultivation base for something like this.::

::I figured that you weren’t that idiotic.:: I loomed above the kid. ::But, unfortunately, your plan failed which just added the biggest mission of all to our to-do list.::

He winced. ::Are you… going to cure these side effects?::

::Of course!:: I crossed my arms over my chest. ::Who do you think I am?::

::Sister Lin!::

::That’s right!::

And the first thing I needed for that was the ingredient list of this goddamn Beast Blood Contract Bath. I needed to fix it first. Once I saw how the corrected bath worked, I could cure those already affected.

Actually… The bath prescription was something Violet Pill Fairy had never had in my past life, yet she had been able to partially resolve Little Teasing Mouse’s side effects. To finally prove that I was the better alchemist — I had to fully cure Little Spring! No, not just him. I would fully cure this whole goddamn sect and ultimately one up that bitch! Muahahaha!

“Ah, sister Linlin... you seem a lot more excited about helping me than I thought you’d be.”

I coughed.