Half a year later.
Leng Ling and Xiao Yu arrived at Song Wen's cave abode.
"Sect Master, the pills have been refined. Please inspect them," Xiao Yu said.
Xiao Yu was a female cultivator at the mid Mahayana stage.
Holding a jade slip and a jade vial in both hands, she respectfully presented them to Song Wen.
With a thought, Song Wen drew both the jade slip and the vial before him.
First, he removed the restriction on the jade vial, pulled out the stopper, and poured out a pill.
The pill was roughly the size of a thumb, dark red throughout, its surface covered in fine, dense markings.
On closer inspection, those markings could be seen writhing slowly, like tiny blood vessels pulsing.
Even stranger was the pill's scent.
It had no medicinal fragrance. Instead, it gave off a cloying sweetness tinged with a faint odor of decay, as though something had rotted completely before being forcibly sealed in honey.
One glance was enough to tell that this pill was no benign thing.
Next, Song Wen carefully examined the jade slip, which contained detailed notes on refining the pill.
Judging solely from those notes, Song Wen found nothing amiss. They met his requirements perfectly.
"Have you tested its effects?" Song Wen asked.
Xiao Yu said, "We tested it on both demonic beasts and cultivators. To demonic beasts, this pill is a deadly poison. Even an ordinary eighth-rank demonic beast will suffer bodily decay and die after taking just one. It is considerably less toxic to human cultivators, but even an Integrated Body Realm Cultivator cannot withstand its poison. Taking it means certain death."
"If a Mahayana-stage cultivator takes it, they will also be poisoned, but their life will not be endangered. In addition, this pill rapidly consumes a cultivator's