A Cook Who Couldn't Make Pills Wasn't a Good Artifact Forger! Please Keep Reading! Please Vote!

Huff, huff.

Exhausted, Jiang Lin sat on the ground in the courtyard, looking at his handiwork without any extra thoughts in his heart.

At the sixth stage of Dou Qi—no, now that he was at the seventh stage—with the explosive power of the Flame Burst Armor-Slaying Sword, he could directly chop a Da Dou Shi to death if they were not serious. The lower one's cultivation, the more a Dou Artifact could blur the suppression between realms.

If you used your fists, even with a Dou Technique enhancing them, a Dou Zhe might not be able to break through a Dou Master's Dou Qi Garment.

But if you used a Dou Artifact of the same grade, then as long as the other person's body was not tougher than the weapon, one slash was enough to silence them for good.

After resting and recovering some strength, Jiang Lin sat cross-legged and began cultivating the Forging Fire Art. Soon, his entire body turned red like a shrimp.

The Forging Fire Art isn't an ordinary cultivation method. After cultivating it for a year, I can feel my physique and the resilience of my meridians growing. The Dou Qi realm is a process of cleansing the marrow and tempering the meridians, while the Forging Fire Art is the best introductory chapter for Dou Qi. I just don't know whether I can continue cultivating it later, or whether there are higher-level versions of the Forging Fire Art.

If it starts at Yellow-grade, then goes to Mysterious-grade, Earth-grade, and even Heaven-grade... a complete cultivation method like that probably only exists in the hands of the legendary Dou Di, right?

If Dou Qi cannot cultivate a method... then if one became a Dou Di, it wouldn't be impossible to create the strongest foundation-building and qi-refining method of one's own.

Jiang Lin shook his head and buried these thoughts, which were still beyond his reach, deep in his heart before beginning his daily cultivation.

The Forging Fire Art differed from ordinary cultivation methods. He could not cultivate it all day long. Jiang Lin could circulate it through one great cycle at most, which took an hour, and then he could not continue. If he kept going, his CPU might really overload and refine him into someone Greatly Intelligent.

Jiang Lin cultivated the Forging Fire Art roughly twice a day. The rest of the time, he needed to nourish his body, which also gave him plenty of free time.

Once in the morning and once at night. He could not practice at noon, because "middle" had a death in it.

Mm. Fine. It was because he had things to do during the day, while morning and night gave him enough time to recover.

After completing his daily work, Jiang Lin took out paper and pen and wrote down the incomplete inheritance knowledge of Dou Artifacts in his mind as a series of small concepts. That knowledge was too fragmented for him to access directly. His mind would easily wander and his thoughts would scatter. Only by writing down every small concept and then having his brain brainstorm around those fragments of knowledge could he efficiently gain new insights.

This way of thinking was like Jiang Lin turning his memories into a company. He was the big boss and lacked the energy to handle every low-level employee, but once he grouped those employees together and placed them before him as project teams, he gained a comprehensive grasp of the entire company.

It took Jiang Lin three days just to organize that scattered, chaotic information.

"Whew, what a headache. No wonder Alchemists and Artifact Forgers of later generations no longer use this method of knowledge inheritance. It taxes the brain too much, and the passage of time wears down the 'writing' so severely that much of it becomes garbage information. Going to all that trouble to download inheritance knowledge, only for most of it to be blurry and unclear... it feels like one of my high school roommates. He once stayed up at night, even letting his phone bill go unpaid, just to use his precious data to download an adult film. After waiting forever with great anticipation, he clicked it open and saw two men. Tsk, tsk, tsk."

"Fortunately, I wasn't as unlucky as that guy. Among these scattered fragments, I still found several Weapon Refining concepts that greatly inspired me."

Three days later, Jiang Lin placed a pale blue stone the size of a human head on the paper-covered table in his room.

"This Magic Core Crystallization Armor must be some antique several thousand years old. Too much of its soul power has dissipated, and there isn't even a complete paragraph left inside. Good thing I don't need to refine artifacts according to its methods. The ideas it gave me are the greatest gain from this inheritance iron sheet."

"Ancient Artifact Forgers were actually obsessed with Magic Cores all along... but it made sense when he thought about it. Alchemists have complete techniques for extracting energy from Magic Cores to make pills. It was only natural for ancient Artifact Forgers to have the same idea. In fact, the two must have developed together, except Artifact Forgers eventually declined?"

Jiang Lin slowly sanded away the dirty outer layer of the Magic Core Fossil. If it had been intact, he would not have dared sand it like this. It would explode.

"That person said Magic Cores are Dou Qi carriers with enormous potential... well, Mr. Yao said that Dou Zhes form a qi vortex inside their bodies, Dou Masters turn it into liquid, and from the Dou Ling realm onward, it becomes a small spiky lump. As for Dou Wangs, I don't know. By that logic, humans seem to have Magic Cores too. They just don't develop as extremely as those of magical beasts."

Magic Cores were top-tier biological materials with growth potential.

"My greatest use for Magic Cores has been making them explode. Even if I use wires to channel their energy out, I can only use it on Dou Artifacts. But that person believed the Rampant Dou Qi within Magic Cores could be refined. The reason humans cannot refine it is because their meridians are not resilient enough. That is true. At the same realm, magical beasts have always ruled through their physiques. Humans can only slowly wear them down through tactics and coordination. Few humans can suppress magical beasts head-on at the same realm."

"It says that experts above the Dou Wang realm can temporarily absorb the Dou Qi within Magic Cores in emergencies. His line of thought began from that point: allowing the human body to safely absorb Magic Core Dou Qi."

"If human meridians are lacking, then use materials harder than Flesh and Meridians as an intermediary to refine a Dou Artifact, weakening the rampant nature of Magic Core Dou Qi bit by bit. If Magic Core Dou Qi is a tangled ball of thread, then as long as tools are used to comb those threads out, straighten them, and make them controllable, Magic Core Dou Qi should naturally become usable by humans. Discovering phenomena, summarizing patterns, testing and summarizing... that research approach was simply genius."

"However." As Jiang Lin polished the Magic Core Fossil smooth, he murmured inwardly:

I wonder whether this senior ever left behind a great name? Taking his line of thought one step further means refining Magic Cores into magic pills. One step further, get a huge pill furnace and directly refine magical beasts into pills... one step further... uh, fine, that line of thought is a little dangerous. Better not make any more progress for now.

Jiang Lin immediately stopped entertaining such dangerous thoughts.

"Eh? So the memories of 'Alchemy' and 'Weapon Refining' were actually part of one connected sentence?"

As Jiang Lin polished his precious Magic Core Fossil, inspiration suddenly flashed through his mind, linking together a fragment of broken inheritance knowledge.

"This is... the conclusion?"

At that moment, deep within Jiang Lin's memories, the fragments pieced together into a complete sentence:

"Danqizi: A cook who couldn't make pills wasn't a good Artifact Forger!"

Ah, right, I forgot to send this together.