Before the VIP seating, Fa Ma stood with his hands behind his back. His gaze was fixed on the gray-robed youth in a remote corner of the plaza. Watching the skillful techniques he had displayed while refining medicine—techniques comparable to those of some of the guild's elders—Fa Ma frowned and murmured, "Such practiced methods could never be acquired without decades of hard training... This person truly is strange. But why have I never heard of such a high-tier alchemist appearing in the Izumo Empire? Is he a newcomer?"
"Let's first see whether he can pass this round..." Fa Ma sighed and turned his gaze back toward Xiao Yan and the other two. "I hope you can make it through as well... Don't be careless."
As time slowly passed, some of the more capable contestants in the plaza had already extracted the necessary medicinal essences. After hesitating briefly, they gritted their teeth and poured those refined essences into their medicine cauldrons, beginning the final refinement.
Xiao Yan stared intently at a medicinal ingredient tumbling within the purple flames. Worried that some unexpected problem might arise, he refined it rather slowly this time. By the time many contestants had finished extracting their ingredients, he was still carefully refining his at an unhurried pace.
"Seems there's no problem..." After another half hour passed, Xiao Yan looked at the ingredient, which had been reduced by the purple flames to a pile of pale violet powder. He murmured to himself, lifted the lid of the cauldron, drew out the powder, and stored it in a jade bottle.
His gaze slowly swept over the nine jade bottles before him. He had completely refined all the ingredients needed to concoct the Wind Walking Pill. All that remained was the final step: fusion.
His palm slowly brushed