Su Xuan returned to his room and sat on his bed.
He caught a faint, delicate fragrance lingering on the sheets. Besides the medicinal scent from earlier, there was a smell reminiscent of orchids.
‘Lu Zhiyi was sleeping on this bed just a moment ago. Is this her body fragrance?’
He hadn’t noticed it before, so he took a deep breath. Remembering the sight of her earlier, his heart heated up slightly.
After struggling for a moment, he suppressed the temptation to spend a wonderful holiday night and pulled a small storage bag from his robe. At the moment, his entire net worth was contained within this palm-sized bag.
With a thought, the interior of the storage bag appeared in his mind. With another mental shift, the items he had obtained from the Inner Market earlier that day abruptly appeared on the table.
There was a 3rd-tier pill recipe, more than ten types of medicinal materials of various sizes and textures, a pill furnace that looked ancient and grand, a deep blue high-grade spiritual stone, and several dozen ordinary spiritual stones.
It could be said that he had never been this wealthy, except for a few of his most successful runs in the game.
‘The system prompts are certainly useful. I should hope for more of them.’
He scanned the items on the table, inexplicably reminded of a certain person from his previous life who loved learning foreign languages.
Once his sentimentality passed, he thought for a moment and retrieved the Mysterious Workshop Owner’s Token and Shangguan Yu’s token from behind his pillow. He placed them both into the storage bag, thinking they might come in handy. After also stowing away the broken sword wrapped in cloth from the head of the bed, he finally turned his attention to the pill recipe.
“Evil-Warding Pill.”
“Pureness arises, all evils depart, Earth-Vein Purple-Patterned Ginseng suppresses the Yin, Thunder-Heart Peach Wood breaks the stubborn…”
He squinted, reading carefully. Just as he subconsciously recited a few lines, a wave of dizziness hit his brain, feeling like a needle prick.
Su Xuan hurriedly set the recipe aside and took several deep breaths to recover. In less than ten minutes, the spiritual power in his body had been completely drained. It was as if every sentence he read required an enormous expenditure of energy.
He frowned and took a moment to recover. He tried to read it again, but he found that he couldn’t process a single word beyond what he had already seen. A wave of intense weakness washed over him, as if his body were being crushed under an unbearable burden.
‘It seems this pill recipe is not simple. With my current cultivation, I likely don’t even have enough strength to read it all the way through.’
No wonder his character in the game had to spend cultivation and spiritual power just to examine a 3rd-tier pill recipe. He had originally thought it was a brain-dead setting designed by the developers to force a time sink, and he had criticized it harshly.
Thinking about it now, as a medium-to-high-tier recipe, it was only natural that there would be protections to prevent just anyone from reading it.
‘Sigh, this Qi Refining Level 3 cultivation is truly too weak. I need to hurry up and increase my strength.’
Su Xuan sighed.
Currently, refining the pills was a race against time. He didn’t have any time to dedicate to normal cultivation unless…
He paid to win!
An idea flashed through his mind. He grabbed a spiritual stone from the table and crushed it!
An abundance of spiritual power dispersed into the air. He immediately activated the Evergreen Art, absorbing the thick, mist-like spiritual qi into his body.
A moment later, Su Xuan felt his body filled to the brim with spiritual qi. Unable to take in another drop, he immediately picked up the pill recipe.
“Tranquil Lotus transforms into light to protect the true nature, Morning Light Jade Dew and Spiritual Stones solidify the foundation…”
The pill recipe acted like a whirlpool, constantly devouring the spiritual power in his body. In exchange, several more mnemonic formulas surfaced in his mind.
This was only possible because he had the system’s help. Otherwise, how could a common loose cultivator at the Qi Refining Stage afford to squander spiritual stones like this? They would usually have to calculate every bit of spiritual crystal they spent.
Seeing that it was working, he exhaled a breath of turbid air, his heart filled with excitement.
He had to strike while the iron was hot!
He quickly grabbed several more spiritual stones, crushed them, and activated his cultivation method again.
After repeating this process several times, more than half of the several dozen spiritual stones were gone, leaving him with only a dozen or so. While he had plenty of spiritual power remaining in his body, his meridians were starting to ache from the constant, rapid absorption.
Fortunately, the formulas and materials on the recipe had been completely “cracked,” allowing him to view them freely!
Su Xuan was delighted. He read through the refining formulas on the recipe, mentally calculating the refining process.
Compared to his weak spiritual power, his mental state appeared incredibly powerful. Without much effort, he summarized a refining method based on his own understanding.
With his previous refining experience, he deliberated for a moment and separated one portion of the medicinal materials. He planned to give it a try tonight.
If he succeeded on the first try, would he still have to worry about spiritual stones? Would he still have to worry about low cultivation?
He could simply pay his way all the way to Foundation Establishment and worry about the rest later!
Feeling as if he had found a shortcut, his heart swelled with excitement. He picked up the pill furnace Shangguan Yu had given him.
The furnace was only one foot square, but it was extremely heavy. It was definitely made from high-quality materials, and the ancient inscriptions carved on it likely provided a bonus to alchemy. It looked incredibly valuable.
He clicked his tongue and nodded. He hadn’t expected Shangguan Yu to be so generous. As expected of a Feng Aotian character in the game—she was nothing if not overbearing.
Su Xuan arranged the furnace and materials. With a thought, a pale blue flame appeared beneath the furnace, steadily heating it.
Sure enough, the pill furnace was more than just a little more advanced than his previous blackened iron pot. The inscriptions flowed slightly, and the temperature of the furnace was transmitted to his mind through a thread of Divine Sense, allowing him to understand everything inside the furnace perfectly.
After a few more words of praise, he began adding the materials step-by-step according to his understanding of the recipe.
“One Tranquil Lotus, half an Earth-Vein Purple-Patterned Ginseng, three drops of Morning Light Jade Dew…”
Step by step, he felt the contents of the furnace slowly taking shape. The corners of his mouth gradually curled upward.
‘Looking at this, will it be a success on the first try? This isn’t that hard. I don’t know why those other people can’t refine it.’
As the last few materials remained, the furnace glowed red, and a faint medicinal fragrance began to drift out. Although Su Xuan’s technique remained steady, a hint of disdain inevitably crept into his heart.
*Bang!*
Before he could continue his train of thought, a dull thud echoed from inside the furnace. The clear fragrance instantly turned into turbid smoke, accompanied by a pungent, irritating odor.
Clearly, he had failed!
Su Xuan froze. He had been in the middle of the nourishing stage of the refining process. He hadn’t even had the chance to add the subsequent materials yet, so it definitely wasn’t an issue with the ingredients. Since the failure was sudden, it wasn’t a temperature issue either.
He thought about it for a long time and decided it might be a matter of timing. After cleaning the furnace, he started again.
This time, the failure was even faster. He didn’t even reach the nourishing stage before the contents turned into a pile of ash.
Su Xuan stared at the pill furnace and begrudgingly realized one thing.
It wasn’t an issue with spiritual power manipulation or timing; rather, his understanding of the 3rd-tier recipe was incorrect.
Alchemy was not something that could be successfully navigated based solely on talent and intuition. It required systematic study and summarization.
The original owner of his body had been able to refine 2nd-tier pills because he had built a solid foundation while working as a servant. Now that he had reached pills of the 3rd-tier and above, he was out of his depth.
The problem was that alchemy wasn’t like cultivation, which had dozens of major and minor realms and plenty of resources ranging from good to bad. There were only nine tiers of alchemy, and the difference between each tier was like heaven and earth. Accordingly, the refining methods were often closely guarded secrets of various sects. He wouldn’t even know where to go to learn them.
What should he do?
Looking at the pill furnace, recipe, and materials he had gathered, Su Xuan felt a wave of indignation at being unable to refine the Evil-Warding Pill just because he lacked formal training.
He searched his memories for every detail he could recall from the game. Suddenly, he thought of a person in the Inner Market.
That person had seemingly inadvertently shown him alchemy techniques before, and her attainment was extremely profound. More importantly, in the game, she was the easiest person to gain favor with!
Unlike the constant misery he felt being tortured by his disciples, which kept his mood low, he was always happy whenever he visited that person.
After all, a game wouldn’t always torment the protagonist. Occasionally, it would provide some sweetness, arranging special supporting characters and stress-relieving events.
For example, by thoroughly drilling her.
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