Chapter 31: Pill Refining

“Damn… this is serious…”

Lin Wuming gulped nervously as he glanced at his junior sister, who was clearly trying hard to hold back her tears.

It seemed that—after all that buildup—things had finally reached a tipping point.

The girl couldn’t suppress her emotions any longer.

Just look at her—she was so upset, her whole face had gone red.

Feeling a little guilty, Lin Wuming instinctively took two steps back.

Once the mission was complete, he really needed to find a way to apologize properly to her.

He only hoped… that by then, it wouldn’t be too late.

After running through several more pharmacies, he finally managed to collect the last required ingredient.

That twenty taels of gold?

Spent completely—down to the last coin.

Left with no other option, Lin Wuming returned to the Jade Stone Pavilion again, traded a low-grade spirit stone for gold, and used that to purchase a small alchemy furnace.

With everything prepared, he brought his junior sister back to the inn and began his serious preparations.

To heal her eyes, the first step was naturally to concoct a detoxifying medicine.

The poison in her eyes wasn’t something ordinary.

Purging it completely wouldn’t be easy.

But Lin Wuming had already analyzed the toxin more than once before.

He had a rough solution in mind.

All that was left was to actually refine the antidote.

After settling his junior sister near the bed, he began his work.

He sorted the ingredients by type and effect, placing them in neat batches, then set the newly purchased furnace in the center of the room.

There were many ways to refine medicine.

Boiling was the most basic.

The best method was pill condensation—forming actual pills.

However, pill refining was an extremely difficult skill.

Even the most basic pill alchemists were in high demand.

All six major sects fought over them.

Lin Wuming, of course, had never learned alchemy.

He didn’t know how to refine pills.

But he did have Old Ma’s instructions to follow, and for now, he just added the ingredients into the furnace in the given order, step by step.

“Golden tree flower, Fire Bright seed, Dragonblood wood…”

All of them were potent pure yang ingredients—because the poison in his sister’s eyes was extremely yin in nature.

But eyes were delicate, and his sister didn’t have cultivation to protect herself.

If he let these strong yang energies collide directly with the yin poison, the poison might be neutralized—but her eyes could be destroyed in the process.

That was one of the biggest difficulties in removing this poison.

So the real challenge was: how to detoxify without damage.

Staring intently at the furnace, Lin Wuming knew that in order to purify the poison while keeping her eyes intact, he had to perfectly balance yin and yang, allowing them to cancel each other out harmoniously.

But the poison itself was strongly yin. The medicine he was refining had to be strongly yang to neutralize it.

If the medicine was balanced from the start—it wouldn’t be strong enough to detoxify.

If it was too yang-heavy, it would damage her eyes before neutralizing anything.

In other words, he needed to create a medicine that was both yin and yang, and ensure its proportions matched the poison exactly.

The yin from the poison plus the medicine’s yin had to be just slightly less than the medicine’s yang, so that yang could cancel yin, eventually balancing out.

But then, new yang had to be generated to continue the cycle until everything was gone.

How much yang was needed to cancel how much yin?

How much more yang would be consumed during the process?

What was the timing between each phase?

Every single value mattered—and any small miscalculation could cause the entire process to fail.

At best, the detox would fail.

At worst, she’d go blind permanently.

Even an elder from Shennong Valley would likely frown at such a task.

But for Lin Wuming, this was merely a slightly more complicated… math problem.

“If it can be solved with math, is it even a real problem?”

Besides, after his breakthrough during the competition, he had officially stepped into the Qi Condensation Realm.

With spiritual energy in his body, he was more confident than ever in his precision.

Step by step, he carefully added the ingredients, precisely calculating every change.

The medicinal energy wrapped in layers, each layer perfectly proportioned to release at the right time, forming a delicate and harmonious cycle.

With his newfound spiritual energy, it felt as though he now had a supercomputer helping him.

Everything became smoother and easier.

Even small errors could now be corrected with spiritual power.

As the refining continued, Lin Wuming entered a strange mental state.

Everything was unfolding naturally—almost effortlessly.

His energy flowed with the medicine, circling in the furnace like waves…

Until his expression suddenly turned… weird.

“Why does this feel like… stir-frying sugar beans?”

Somehow, the strange stir-frying techniques he’d learned from Old Li in his past life began to surface again—but this time, it felt completely different.

He tried using his spiritual energy as a spatula, treating the medicinal essence like sugar beans, and began “stir-frying” it in a whole new way.

Immediately, everything became smoother.

Like a boat sailing with the current, his control over the medicinal energy became instinctual and effortless.

The liquid began to condense and swirl, following a mysterious pattern, slowly taking form…

Finally, everything settled.

Lin Wuming let out a long breath, still dazed from the strange and mystical sensation he had just experienced.

And inside the furnace—no trace of liquid remained.

Instead, resting there was a small, translucent bead, smooth and glossy like white jade.

It was about the size of a pinky fingernail, glowing with a soft, milky light.

Lin Wuming blinked, picked up the little bead, and examined it carefully.

He checked the medicinal energy inside—layer upon layer, perfectly precise, like the most advanced machine.

“This is… a pill?”

Tilting his head and blinking in confusion, Lin Wuming stared at it in a daze, still trying to process what he’d just accomplished.