Pill Refining required talent, but it required countless rounds of repeated practice even more.
What was the Alchemy Dao?
Practice bred skill, skill bred mastery, mastery bred wonder, and wonder opened the way to the Dao.
The Alchemy Dao was the direct expression of talent and practiced skill.
Talent without effort was an empty name with no substance behind it, useless when it mattered.
And effort without talent?
That only took a person farther and farther down the wrong road.
This principle was not limited to the Alchemy Dao.
It applied to most of the hundred arts of cultivation.
But that was beside the point.
Among Pill Refiners, anyone who wanted to reach a high rank needed countless experiences at the cauldron.
Yet one person's strength was severely limited.
That was why, during the foundation-building stage, anyone with the means would train a group of support cultivators familiar with their Pill Refining habits to assist them.
Otherwise, the preparations before Pill Refining and the cleanup afterward alone could torment a newly initiated Pill Refiner until life felt worse than death.
Luo Chen had been a wandering cultivator when he first started out.
Buying materials, preparing medicinal ingredients, cleaning Pill Refining equipment, selling pills... All those miscellaneous tasks had consumed far too much of his time.
Calling those days a matter of rising early and sleeping late barely began to describe them.
Thus, Pill Refiners who reached Tier 2 or above were rarely alone.
Some were cultivated at great expense by sects or clans.
Others, like Luo Chen and Pill Origin Master, established wandering-cultivator forces devoted to serving them.
Through it all, support cultivators who assisted with Pill Refining were indispensable.
So when they heard that Luo Chen needed no support cultivators, Tao Wan and Chu Huai were genuinely astonished.
Luo