Take Them! Take Them All!

Li Ping'an looked up at the mountaintop belching black smoke.

Another explosion?

Li Ping'an pinched the two still-warm Body-Tempering Pills in his hand and shook his head helplessly.

The commotion this junior sister made while refining pills was greater than all his sixty years of smithing combined. In less than one incense stick's time, she had blown up two furnaces in a row.

Li Ping'an thought it over. He would still have to rely on this junior sister to steadily produce scrap in the future, so he ought to maintain the relationship.

In a place like Waste Hall, aside from the discarded pills from the pill room, the spiritual energy in the remnants of broken artifacts and other scrap was nowhere near as easy to extract. A win-win partnership, after all.

Having made up his mind, Li Ping'an put away the Body-Tempering Pills, turned around, and headed back toward the pill room.

By the time Li Ping'an panted his way back up to that clearing, he found it even livelier than before. The onlookers had not dispersed; there were even more of them now, packed three layers deep around the stone house without so much as a drop of water getting through.

"Junior Sister, how about... we call it a day?" an inner sect disciple asked bitterly.

"Yeah. Why put yourself through this? The furnaces you've blown up this month outnumber the pills our pill room refines in an entire year."

"Our sect already has no real masters of alchemy. Even if you keep at it like this, you won't produce more than a few pills a month. You'd be better off trading all those spirit herbs for spirit stones and buying pills outside."

"Exactly. With your talent, if you had focused on the sword path, you'd be at the Spirit Condensation Realm by now at the very least. Why pick a fight with the pill furnace?"

Listening to the chatter around him, Li Ping'an roughly grasped the situation. This dark-faced junior sister was something of a prominent figure in the inner sect.

She had a high status and exceptional cultivation talent, yet she loved alchemy and was determined to make a name for herself through pill refining.

Pills were an important resource to any sect. But the Heaven-Piercing Sword Sect had been founded on the sword, and its alchemy inheritance was practically nonexistent.

This junior sister had talent and passion, but no renowned master to guide her. She could only pore over common, mass-market pill formulas and grope her way forward alone, so naturally her success rate was low.

To her fellow disciples, she was simply wasting her cultivation talent.

"What do you know! I'm sharing the sect's burdens!"

The dark-faced junior sister stamped her foot in anger, her voice carrying a trace of grievance.

"When I refine a divine pill, you'll all see how formidable I am!"

"All right, all right, stop talking. If you keep this up, junior sister really will add something extra to the pills she gives us next month."

A burst of laughter rose from the crowd.

Li Ping'an frowned as he listened.

He pushed through the crowd and stepped forward. "Junior Sister only wishes to share the sect's burdens. Aren't you all being too hurtful by speaking of her this way?"

His voice was not loud, but the noisy scene fell silent.

Everyone's gazes landed on the old man wearing a brand-new but ill-fitting inner sect disciple's uniform.

Ignoring their stares, Li Ping'an looked at the puffed-up junior sister and continued, "Junior Sister, to blow up two furnaces in such a short time, you must have been refining two batches of pills at once, correct?"

"Pill refining and artifact forging may be different disciplines, but their principles are connected. The greatest taboo is distraction, and the most important thing is focus. A restless, impatient heart is a grave mistake."

Li Ping'an spoke calmly.

Seeing an old man come forward to speak for junior sister, and in such a lecturing tone at that, the inner sect disciples all showed a measure of displeasure.

"Who's this old man? Where did he pop out from?"

"Look at his clothes. Is he a new inner sect disciple? How is he only at the third level of Body Tempering at his age?"

A young disciple looked Li Ping'an up and down. "How did an old fellow at the third level of Body Tempering worm his way into the inner sect? And you talk about artifact forging and pill refining as if you know it all. Old man, can you even forge artifacts? Don't pretend to understand when you don't, just to make a spectacle of yourself!"

An old man with withered qi and blood was a joke even in the inner sect. To them, Li Ping'an's words carried no weight at all.

An older disciple in the crowd tugged at his companion's sleeve and whispered, "Wait... this old gentleman looks familiar."

"Look carefully. Isn't he the one who... rang the Heaven-Ringing Bell this morning?"

The surroundings erupted in noise.

"The Heaven-Ringing Bell? The Li Ping'an who spent sixty years at the forge and forcibly hammered his way through the gates of the inner sect by forging artifacts?"

"It seems... it really is him!"

"My heavens, I heard that for the sake of a promise, he swung a hammer in the menial workers' quarters for sixty years. That perseverance is simply inhuman!"

"His cultivation may be trash, and his lifespan may be nearly at its end, but when it comes to artifact forging—when it comes to that craftsman's heart—there are few people in the entire Heaven-Piercing Sword Sect who can compare to him."

The way everyone looked at Li Ping'an changed.

Disciples of the Heaven-Piercing Sword Sect might look down on cultivators with low cultivation, but they would not look down on craftsmen who had honed their craft to its utmost limit.

There was now respect and regret in their eyes.

As the atmosphere around him changed, Li Ping'an instead felt a little embarrassed.

He was merely a worn-out old man who had spent sixty years hammering iron. He had no cultivation, and he had never even forged a true flying sword. What kind of craftsman did that make him?

The dark-faced junior sister, still puffing up in anger, moved closer.

"Is what they said true? Was it really you who rang the Heaven-Ringing Bell?"

Li Ping'an looked at her and nodded earnestly.

The junior sister stared at Li Ping'an for a long while before asking again, "Then what you said just now... that I was sharing the sect's burdens—did you truly mean it?"

"Of course."

Li Ping'an replied.

"This old man has only ever known smithing. I do not understand the ways of alchemy, but I know that one can draw inferences from one thing to another. Whether forging artifacts or refining pills, if one's heart is not calm, one cannot do anything well."

After hearing him out, the junior sister fell silent for a long time.

She straightened her back, and even her originally unremarkable chest strained to puff itself out as she declared, "Hmph! You old man may be a little old, and your cultivation may be a little poor, but what you said was fairly reasonable!"

"Fine! This senior sister has decided to take you in as her little brother!"

"It was rare for someone to stand up for me just now. Go on, tell me what reward you want. So long as this senior sister can do it, I will not refuse!"

Her generous manner left the surrounding disciples dumbfounded.

Li Ping'an froze for a moment, scratched his head, and looked somewhat troubled.

"Um... Senior Sister, there's no need for a reward."

Li Ping'an pointed at the blackened medicinal dregs by the stone house's entrance.

"Just give me these discarded pills."

"I was halfway there when I heard another bang from this direction, so I thought I might as well come back and take them all at once."

The expression on junior sister's face stiffened.

"Just... that?"

"You came back... just to pick up this trash?"

So he had not come back specifically to help her out of trouble?

Li Ping'an added, "Yes. I'm getting on in years, and my legs aren't convenient. Going back and forth once is truly exhausting."

"Anyway, these things will be sent to Waste Hall sooner or later. Just hand them all over to me at once, so I won't have to make another trip."

"You!"

Junior sister's face flushed crimson. She glared at Li Ping'an, unable to say a single word for a long while.

At last, she stamped her foot and swept her sleeve. A gust of wind rolled up all the discarded pills and medicinal dregs from the ground and hurled them into Li Ping'an's arms.

"Take them! Take them all! You old man with nothing but trash on the brain!"

Li Ping'an hurriedly caught the bundle of scalding scrap with his robe.

Without even looking at him, junior sister turned and ducked into the stone house, slamming and locking the door with a bang. No matter how the people outside called to her, she made no sound.

Holding the heavy discarded pills in his arms, Li Ping'an scratched his head in bewilderment.

Why was this junior sister's temper more explosive than a furnace?

He did not think much of it. He kindly nodded to the surrounding disciples, then hugged the discarded pills and turned to continue toward Waste Hall.