Standing quietly before the gleaming bluestone platform, Xiao Yan swept his gaze across it and found a neatly stacked set of medicinal ingredients atop the stone table. A thin sheet of paper lay quietly in front of them. Embedded before the bluestone platform was also a jade mirror, flickering with faint blue and red light.
Picking up the thin sheet, Xiao Yan scanned it with his eyes. To his astonishment, it was actually a prescription for a second-tier medicinal pill. What left him most speechless was that the prescription had clearly just casually copied down such things as the quantities of the ingredients. Its format was completely at odds with the standard form of an orthodox prescription.
On the Dou Qi Continent, alchemists' prescriptions were highly particular. They had to be read with Soul Power, allowing the reader to grasp, in the shortest possible time, every issue that required attention during the refinement of that medicinal pill. Yet the contents recorded on this thin paper merely told one the general method of refinement.
All the other details had to be grasped entirely by oneself. This undoubtedly raised the failure rate for refining medicinal pills to a terrifying level.
At least, that was true for most alchemists.
What left Xiao Yan utterly speechless most of all was that the medicinal ingredients laid out on the stone platform were clearly only enough to refine two batches of pills. In other words, each person had only two chances. If they still failed to refine a finished medicinal pill after exhausting all the ingredients, then it was obvious—they had failed... And the consequences of failure went without saying.
"As expected of a competition held once every eight years. This level of difficulty... is immense." Holding the thin sheet, Xiao Yan shook his head with