"What? What do you mean?" Dan Chen did not understand Cao Ying's meaning at first.
Cao Ying did not explain much. She simply handed a jade slip to Dan Chen. As soon as Dan Chen probed it with her soul power, she immediately understood Cao Ying's meaning, being an eighth-tier alchemist herself. "This method... where did this come from?"
"Xiao Yan sent it to me before the competition began."
Compared to Cao Ying's outwardly expressive nature, Dan Chen had always been taciturn. But silence did not mean she had no thoughts of her own.
"So, these two pills were refined to solve our problem?"
"Most likely. I originally thought he could refine at most one in a single attempt, but it ended up being two pills from one cauldron. That truly caught me by surprise."
Dan Chen suddenly asked in a grave voice, "To be honest, merely looking at the pill formula does not give me complete confidence. It seems you have already made your preparations. Why do you trust Xiao Yan so much?"
Cao Ying gave a bitter smile. "If I do not prepare, what else can I do? Could I really join the Spirit Clan? With the way they do things, would we have any good outcome afterward?"
"As for Xiao Yan..." As she spoke, a different light finally appeared in Cao Ying's eyes. "If I told you that I trusted him only because of a vague, intangible feeling, would you believe me?"
Setting aside Cao Ying and Dan Chen's thoughts, after Xiao Yan finished refining the pills, he wiped the sweat from his forehead. Refining under such time pressure and ultimately producing two pills from one cauldron had been anything but easy. In truth, his final actions had been somewhat of a gamble. Fortunately, his self-created