On their way back, Lu Ming and Wu Qingfeng suddenly spotted Elder Xu Li. Wu Qingfeng's eyes lit up, and he called, "Elder Xu!"
The moment Xu Li saw them, he covered his face and fled.
Lu Ming: "..."
Wu Qingfeng: "..."
Wu Qingfeng's face darkened. He had been thinking of borrowing a little from Xu Li, who had received a large sum of money from the Lin Family earlier.
From the look of things, that clearly wasn't going to happen.
Back in the courtyard, Wu Qingfeng sighed. "Without medicinal ingredients or a large sum of money, there's no way to refine a Breakthrough Pill now.
"Even if you went through a thousand hardships and somehow gathered a complete set of ingredients for a Breakthrough Pill, you would still need to hire a skilled alchemist to refine it.
"There are only two or three alchemists like that in all of Qingning Prefecture City.
"And not one of those two or three could guarantee success. Most likely, your ingredients would be money thrown into the water. At the very least, a single set would be nowhere near enough.
"The only person in Qingning Prefecture City who could reliably refine Breakthrough Pills was the Medicine Emperor, Xie Yun. Now that he's dead, there's no one left."
That's not necessarily true, Lu Ming thought.
He now had the Nine Turns divine ability. Not only did his alchemy improve more than a hundred times faster than other people's, but the ability itself could also turn trash into treasure.
With enough medicinal ingredients, he believed he could refine a Breakthrough Pill.
But medicinal ingredients were precisely what he lacked most!
The city's many alchemists were firing up their furnaces to refine pills. Once this village was behind them, there would be no other shop ahead—they