This was only Little Leopard's guess. Though legend spoke of a realm above the Ninth Rank, known as Profound Passage, in the martial world that realm was nothing more than a legend. And the best explanation of that legend lay in a single saying: "Leap beyond the Three Realms, stand outside the Five Elements!"
Leap beyond the Three Realms, stand outside the Five Elements!
What sort of person could do that?
An immortal. Only an immortal could leap beyond the Three Realms and stand outside the Five Elements!
Little Leopard did not dwell on any of this. It was not something he ought to be thinking about now. All his attention was on the pill formulas in his hands. Each of the five formulas came with detailed instructions for refining the medicine, rather like the study notes he had made in his previous life-exhaustively thorough.
These formulas have been tucked inside this copy of the Tangtou Song all along. That brat Sun Hua is a proper wastrel. He can read, but I bet it was the first two books that interested him. As for this one in my hands, heh, he probably never even glanced at it! Little Leopard sighed inwardly, but his mind never paused as he committed the five formulas and their refining methods to memory.
Memorizing a text was hardly a challenge for Little Leopard, who had passed the College English Test Band Six and majored in Chinese!
The tiny, fly-head-sized characters covered the sheet densely, but however much writing there was, it was still only one page. Memorizing it would take no more than a few days. Besides, in this life he had already memorized the entire Flameheart Method, so he had some experience with committing secret manuals to memory.
The next day, he stopped going out and stayed at the Wu Ironworks to forge iron while silently reciting the formulas. After several days, he knew the formulas and refining methods so well that he could recite them backward. Once he had checked them a few more times, he finally burned the sheet.
Over those days, however, he had been reciting the formulas even while forging iron, almost to the point of obsession, and had ruined several weapons as a result. He paid this no mind, but Qin Xuanlong, whose duties included some supervision, noticed that something was wrong. A few days later, during a meal, he called Little Leopard over and asked whether something was troubling him. How had he managed to ruin several weapons in just a few short days?
Little Leopard had already prepared an answer. He merely said that he had been out of sorts lately and wanted a couple of days to rest.
Qin Xuanlong was obliging. After hearing this, he agreed and gave Little Leopard three days off.
There was still plenty of time left in the month anyway. With Little Leopard's current skill, meeting his monthly quota would be no problem.
After taking his leave of Qin Xuanlong, Little Leopard left the Wu Household ironworks and wandered through the streets. He spent several hours making the rounds before finally carrying an assortment of large and small packages back to the Wu Household ironworks.
The others at the workshop found his appearance with all those packages odd and came over to ask about them. When they learned that Little Leopard had bought medicine for his elderly parents, they asked no further questions.
"Whew, I'm exhausted!" As soon as he returned to his room, Little Leopard hurriedly dumped all his packages onto the bed. They did indeed contain medicine, but he had not bought it for his parents. These were ingredients for making Soul-Dazing Pills.
The formulas on that sheet looked seriously impressive, and he had memorized them all. But were they genuine or fake? He needed to find out.
How could he do that?
By refining the pills, of course. But neither the Bone Tempering Pill nor the Sinew Changing Pill called for ingredients he could obtain at present. He had memorized the Tangtou Song, and there were quite a few medical books in his room, yet the ingredients required for those two pills were beyond anything Little Leopard could currently imagine.
Little Leopard had read plenty of medical books and could recite the most basic text, the Tangtou Song, from memory. He therefore considered himself quite knowledgeable about the medicinal ingredients of this world. Yet of these six formulas, only the Soul-Dazing Pill used commonplace ingredients. As for the others-the Bone Tempering Pill, Sinew Changing Pill, Meridian Stabilizing Pill,
Blood Changing Pill, and Marrow Washing Pill-the ingredients they required grew stranger with each successive formula. The Bone Tempering Pill was not too bad. He recognized most of its ingredients, and apart from one or two, he had at least heard of them all. They were exceedingly precious medicinal ingredients, and with his current means, he could not afford them even if he sold everything he owned. Still, at least he had heard of them. The Sinew Changing Pill was different. Aside from a tiny fraction of its ingredients, he had never even heard of the rest. As for the Meridian Stabilizing Pill, he recognized only a scant few ingredients, and every one he knew was a rare treasure of this world, some even virtually unobtainable. There was no need to mention the Blood Changing Pill and Marrow Washing Pill that followed. He held out no hope for those whatsoever.
Still, although the ingredients for the Bone Tempering Pill were precious, he might be able to scrape them together if he gave it everything he had.
Before doing that, of course, Little Leopard needed to verify that the formulas were genuine. It would be no fun to expend the strength of nine oxen and two tigers gathering the ingredients, only to discover helplessly that the formula was a fake.
The Soul-Dazing Pill, whose formula appeared on the same sheet and whose ingredients were easy to obtain, therefore became his first choice.
The ingredients for the Soul-Dazing Pill were not precious. In fact, apart from one ingredient called bitter grain grass, which had sent him to several shops, he had bought everything else with ease. He had also bought a small earthenware pot for simmering the medicine.
The sheet listed not only the ingredients needed to refine the pills, but also detailed instructions: which ingredient to add first, which to add afterward, the proper sequence, which ingredients had to be crushed beforehand, which had to be fresh, how long and at what heat one ingredient had to simmer before the next could be added, when to add water, how much water to add, how much more to add during simmering, how much to add after three bowls of water had boiled down to one, when to use a high flame, when to use a low flame, how high or how low that flame should be, and so on and so forth. It was extremely complicated. A mistake at any step would affect the medicine's potency.
Refining pills did not require an alchemical furnace or anything of the sort, as it had in the cultivation novels he used to read. Making these Soul-Dazing Pills required only a small earthenware pot. He placed it over a stove to simmer, added the medicine, poured in water, and lit the fire in the sequence prescribed by the formula. Finally, he cooked it down into a paste, rolled it by hand into soybean-sized pills, and set them in the sun to dry. That was all.
Most pills in this world were made this way. As for things like alchemical furnaces, those were used for burning incense in Buddhist and Daoist temples. Few people used them to refine medicine.
Since this was his first time refining medicine, Little Leopard was terribly clumsy. He tried several batches, and only when he had nearly wasted all his ingredients did he finally succeed, simmering a large bowl of gray medicinal paste. He then rolled it into soybean-sized pills one by one. Though the pills were not perfectly spherical, the few dozen gathered together did look rather like medicinal pills.
Once dried in the sun, they became finished pills, thirty-four in total.
The pills were finished, but what came next? He still needed to test their effects.
The formula claimed that the medicine was extremely potent, but just how potent it was, and whether it actually worked, could only be established through testing.
Fortunately, the Wu Household ironworks kept quite a few large wolfdogs to guard the premises. Little Leopard secretly dissolved five pills in the large water vat reserved for the dogs. He could hardly be blamed for that—the vat was enormous, and the Soul-Dazing Pills were so small that he feared there would not be enough. The eventual result left him dumbstruck.
These Soul-Dazing Pills were peculiar. Even after drying, they dissolved readily in water-indeed, they melted on contact. Once dissolved, they were colorless and odorless. Even the large wolfdogs, renowned for their keen noses, noticed nothing amiss. Not long after drinking, every one of the dozen or so wolfdogs kept at the Wu Ironworks fell asleep, and no amount of calling could wake them.