Chapter 165

Usually, the disciples made progress to varying degrees every month.

The night before the monthly assessment in particular, many disciples were spurred into drawing out their potential and refining higher-quality medicinal pills.

But this time, the Inner Sect mentors fell into thought as they looked over the pills laid out before them.

They could open any porcelain bottle, catch a whiff of its contents, and tell roughly how many days ago the pill had been refined.

"Strange. This is Feng Du's work. That kid usually hands in a freshly refined pill an hour before the deadline, and he makes considerable progress every time. Why did he submit a pill from half a month ago?"

Another mentor said, "And Yan Hongyu, too. Her pill was refined half a month ago. She's obsessed with alchemy—she'd spend every day in the Alchemy Pavilion if she could. Why has she been slacking off this month?"

"Nearly eighty percent of the disciples submitted work from half a month ago. Did something happen over the past two weeks?"

With so many disciples' cultivation affected, the mentors were deeply worried.

After discussing it, they went to the Alchemy Pavilion together to find out what was going on.

As they approached, they saw that quite a few of the Sect's core disciples had gathered there.

Many were cultivation fanatics they barely ever saw, yet now they stood around the hall chatting in twos and threes.

[Host, there's a man in the Medicine King Sect named Pei Yanghua. He grew up with a childhood sweetheart. After he learned he had a Spiritual Root, he became determined to refine a pill that would let her cultivate too. He trained hard and studied formulas every day, spending nearly all year in the alchemy room and visiting her only once a year.