Fortunately, as the Spirit-Nourishing Pill took effect, the Heavenly Heart's light slowly brightened again, shining into the Sea of Consciousness. The Spirit Terrace gradually showed signs of recovery.
He swallowed another handful of Spirit-Nourishing Pills as though they cost nothing. Their power spread slowly, sending a warm current into his Sea of Consciousness and bringing a pleasure beyond words.
Ancient pill manuals often described such a state as sweet dew falling upon Mount Sumeru: the wine of detachment, the foundation of creation.
Spirit-Nourishing Pills were meant to aid Spirit Refinement. Refined with Wishfire formed from Sky Silver, they were exceptionally pure, with impurities reduced to a bare minimum.
Using ordinary Pill Refining methods, a pill would probably have to undergo four or five turns to reach such purity.
Four or five turns meant refining it four or five times, with a terrifying risk of failure. It was rather like combining high-level equipment in certain unscrupulous, money-grabbing games: you could combine it up to nine times, but one failure and your equipment was gone for good...
And the old method of refining Golden Elixirs was just such a heart-stopping game.
That was why legend held that a true Nine-Turn Golden Elixir was an Immortal Elixir. It could bring the dead back to life and grow flesh on bare bones; a single pill could let an ordinary person ascend to immortality in broad daylight...
But the odds of refining one were pitifully small. Spending an entire mountain of gold without producing a Nine-Turn Golden Elixir was perfectly normal.
So the pill refiners in the days of Qin Shi Huang and Emperor Wu of Han might not have deliberately deceived their rulers or refused to produce the elixirs... They might simply have had rotten luck...
Despite the enormous expense and the burden on