Soul Banner (Part One).

Of the three storage bags Xavier owned, one was filled with supplies while the other two were filled with dead bodies. Since he needed to store the body of the boar and it wasn't time to use the dead bodies of the attendants, he began to empty his supplies. The first thing he removed was a tent, and after setting it up he started emptying almost everything from the storage bag inside the tent. 

When the bag was empty enough, he placed the boar's body inside the storage bag and walked to the stream. There was still ice in some places of the stream, this was a good thing for Xavier, it would help cool the boar's body quicker and lead to less loss due to rotting. With a wave of his hand, the boar splashed into the stream. He needed the boar's hide, its blood, its bones, and was planning on eating its meat. He was going to leave it in the stream for the next hour or so while he collected firewood before the sun went down and the temperatures plummeted. 

As he walked among the trees collecting firewood, he saw plenty of wild boars walking around eating low-level spirit herbs. There was an array under the valley, it drew in spirit energy in the air to help spirit herbs to grow. The spirit herbs are then eaten by the wild boars, which digest them and then shit them out as a spirit energy rich fertilizer. This makes more spirit herbs grow, which provides more food for the wild boars, allowing them to grow bigger and breed more often. This cycle was meant to provide materials for those who received the Soul Controlling Sect's inheritance. There is a much larger version of this valley within the sect's territory, except there is a larger variety of spirit herbs which allows the wild boars to become spirit beasts. These spirit beasts have a cultivation between 1st layer of Qi Condensation to peak of Foundation Establishment depending on age. 

It was a good thing that this array was limited to just normal wild boars and not spirit beasts, because the spirit beasts would overeat the spirit herbs and leave the valley to find food. If one at the 5th layer were to head to one of the smaller cities or the capital, it would be an unstoppable monster eating every scrap of food and person it could find. 

When the firewood was gathered, he returned to his tent and lit a fire. After placing a pot of water next to the fire to heat up, he walked to the stream. The boar had cooled down, tomorrow he would begin processing the boar for its hide and blood. Tomorrow would be the beginning of many things he wanted to do. Placing the boar in his storage bag, he returned to camp and threw some pork jerky into the now pot of hot water and allowed it to soak. This would be his dinner tonight, a cheap and easy jerky soup, it was nowhere near as good as the food he had in the past couple of days, but it was still better than nothing. Xavier released the two little ghosts to stand guard throughout the night, he gave them orders to paralyze anything that came near the camp and not to devour the souls. After cultivating, he climbed into his bed roll and covered himself with a blanket and his cloak. He was expecting the night to be a cold one, he didn't think he would freeze to death because of it, but waking up repeatedly due to the cold would be annoying.

Xavier was woken up by the sound of birds chirping just as the sun was rising. It was dark, it was cold, and if he didn't have so much to do, he would prefer to sleep some more. Getting out of bed, he wrapped himself in his cloak and ate some jerky as he headed into the woods. He needed to collect a large amount of spirit herbs to mix with the boar's blood to create an ink. He needed this ink for drawing arrays and for refining treasures. The spirit herbs weren't hard to find they were growing everywhere, and in large patches.

He easily collected several times the amount he needed at the moment and headed to the stream. Once there he picked a flat section of the gravely shore and removed one of the human bodies in his storage bags. He searched the body for weapons and anything of value, before repeating the process with the other six bodies. He found knives, daggers, needles, short swords, 51 silver coins, and a luminous stone. Other than the luminous stone and coins, the rest was worthless to him. 

The seven bodies were stacked upon each other in the gravel. Xavier pointed to the bodies and a small black flame appeared on them. It was a corpse fire; it was a fire that burned flesh and blood but left bones undamaged. It would take a couple hours for all the flesh and blood to burn away. Now it was time to make some ink. This required him to walk back to camp to collect some of the items he removed from his storage bag to make room for the boar. When he returned to the gravel beach, he removed the boar from the storage bag and stabbed it in the neck. As the blood seeped out of the wound, Xavier made a pulling motion with his arm and a large amount of blood in the boar flew out and hovered in the air. With a move of his hand the blood flew into a large pot, he pulled more blood out till the pot was full of blood and he placed the boar back into the storage bag.

Shoving a handful of spirit herbs into a mortar and pestle, he ground them into a soupy paste. Squeezing this soupy paste into a bowl, the liquid dripped down, while the pulp remained in his hand and was tossed away. When the bowl of filled with juice from the spirit herbs, Xavier poured it into the blood and began stirring it with a stick. After a few minutes the mixture began to boil as it separated into a thick reddish black layer that sank to the bottom, and a large amount of yellow tinted watery layer on top. Tipping the pot, the yellow tinted liquid flowed out of the pot, leaving only the smaller reddish black portion. This was the ink he needed, but at the moment it was too thick and needed to be stirred till it had the consistency of ink before he could pour it into glass jars. 

After repeating the process several times, the boar no longer had any blood within it. Pulling out a long thin knife, Xavier began to carefully slice into the skin, doing his best not to damage the hide as he removed it from the boar. He was going to skin half the boar at a time while harvesting the meat. The legs were removed whole, same with the belly, one of the backstraps was taken, then the beast was rolled on the other side and the harvest continued. The last part to be removed from the boar was the heart, he would eat it for dinner tonight. He placed the meat he harvested along with what was left of the carcass back inside his storage bag till needed. 

By the time he was done butchering the boar, the flesh and blood of the bodies had been burned away. The white bones stood out among the grey ash and needed to be collected. But after cutting up the boar, he was covered in blood and needed to wash himself in the very cold water of the stream.