This time, Zhang Yu learned from Daoist Yusu that the current art of alchemy was divided into the Ancient Method School and the Modern Method School.
The Ancient Method School had many branches. Daoist Yusu commanded one branch of it, but in Celestial Xia today, the Modern Method School was the mainstream.
The Ancient Method School had the greatest number of inheritances in Upper Firmament Heaven. This was also one of the few areas in which it surpassed Celestial Xia.
One had to know that cultivators' alchemical arts were unlike those of the mundane world, used merely for consumption and regulating the body. They could likewise be used to attack enemies and bring about transformations.
Some pills, once consumed, could temporarily grant cultivators a formidable technique or even divine powers and Daoist arts. When Zhang Yu had contended with Yan Qiying, that man had used a pill of evasion.
Beyond that, there were many wondrous pills. One of the more famous was the "Transforming Pill." After this pill was refined into one's body, a cultivator could even transform into all manner of primordial divine monsters from Ancient Xia legends, possessing their various strange powers as well.
But while the transformations of the Ancient Method were ingenious, they were difficult to refine. For instance, Daoist Yusu had just refined only three pills. To refine more of the exact same kind was nearly impossible.
Of course, the alchemical arts of his branch had their own peculiarities, but this alone offered a glimpse of the whole.
Take the pills refined in Upper Firmament Heaven. If purity was sought, a single furnace often yielded only several pills, at most a dozen or so. Yet when Celestial Xia's Modern Method School refined pills, it followed strict pre-established procedures, never speaking of fated affinities or heavenly