Lighting the fire, preheating, extracting the essences, forming the pills, opening the cauldron...
Soon, the little cauldron gave off a familiar medicinal fragrance again.
This time, Liu Yu learned from his previous failure and deliberately waited a little longer.
But in those few short breaths, the medicinal fragrance vanished, replaced by a scorched smell.
Without a doubt, another failure!!
"."
Liu Yu's face showed neither sorrow nor joy, and his heart was likewise "as calm as still water."
For beginners, failure was commonplace. Every alchemist went through this stage.
After all, failure was the mother of success.
"Alchemical Notes"
Liu Yu took a deep breath. Rather than continue refining pills, he took out a small booklet and recorded the problems he had encountered.
He carefully considered his shortcomings, leaving the questions he could not resolve for later, when he could consult texts in the Scripture Pavilion or had an opportunity to seek an alchemist's advice.
Only half an hour later did his seemingly calm state of mind truly return to normal, allowing him to resume refining.
Lighting the fire, preheating, forming the pills, opening the cauldron...
In the blink of an eye, another half month passed.
Inside the thatched hut, Liu Yu looked somewhat haggard. His black hair hung loose over his shoulders, giving him a slightly unkempt appearance.
His eyes, however, were exceptionally bright.
Over the past half month, Liu Yu had refined two or three batches of pills every day.
Nine days earlier, he had finally succeeded in refining a batch of Spirit-Gathering Pills, producing eight pills.
With that success as a reference, he had subsequently succeeded roughly once every four or five batches, obtaining twenty-four Spirit-Gathering Pills in total.
After using up the medicinal herbs for Spirit-Gathering Pills, Liu Yu began refining Pure Spirit Pills.
These pills were more difficult to refine, however. They required one more medicinal herb than Spirit-Gathering Pills, making the process considerably more complicated in every respect.
After using up fifteen sets of medicinal herbs, he had succeeded in refining only two batches, obtaining fifteen Pure Spirit Pills.
"Not bad."
"A month of forgetting food and sleep has finally yielded something."
Looking at the five jade bottles before him, Liu Yu smiled, his face still haggard.
Then he wrote all his insights and difficulties from the past several days in his Alchemical Notes.
Once he finished recording them, Liu Yu waved his sleeve, putting the jade bottles containing the pills and the little booklet of Alchemical Notes into his Storage Bag.
Generally speaking, Spirit-Gathering Pills cost one spirit stone each, while Pure Spirit Pills cost three.
Altogether, these pills were worth approximately sixty-nine spirit stones.
One set of spiritual herbs for refining Spirit-Gathering Pills was worth about three spirit stones, while a set for Pure Spirit Pills was worth five.
The medicinal herbs consumed this time were worth approximately one hundred and sixty-five spirit stones.
Yet the pills he obtained were worth only sixty-nine spirit stones-a full ninety-six spirit stones lost.
Just one round of practice had cost him ninety-six spirit stones.
To become a qualified alchemist, he would have to practice countless more times and invest thousands upon thousands of spirit stones.
Such a rate of loss was enough to make some small cultivation factions cough up blood and go bankrupt.
It was precisely this high barrier to learning alchemy that made alchemists so rare.
Perhaps because he had lived two lives, Liu Yu's Divine Sense was slightly stronger than that of cultivators at the same level.
During pill refinement, he could perceive changes in medicinal potency more clearly, giving him a slightly higher initial success rate than ordinary apprentice alchemists.
He stood up and shook the dust from his body.
Then he put the Purple Copper Cauldron into his Storage Bag and removed the three spirit stones embedded in the miniature formation.
This was already the third set of spirit stones he had used; the spiritual energy in the previous two sets had long since been exhausted.
Liu Yu opened the door and windows to air out the room and disperse the lingering medicinal fragrance, then erased every trace of the formation.
Finally, he made sure to take out a piece of cloth, wrap up the powder and impurities left by the medicinal herbs, and put the bundle into his Storage Bag to take away.
Later, he could bury it somewhere at random, leaving neither gods nor ghosts any the wiser.
Over the past month, Liu Yu had collected many medicinal herb seeds, most of them for herbs commonly used in the Qi Refining Period.
A small portion were seeds of rare medicinal herbs that were difficult to buy in the outside world.
But he had few spirit stones left now, so there was no need to rush into accelerating their growth.
After taking one final look around and carefully checking that he had overlooked nothing, Liu Yu left the room.
Liu Yu sat cross-legged on the wooden bed.
He slowly circulated the Wood Spirit Art through a greater celestial circuit, refining the spiritual energy of heaven and earth.
Once he finished his daily meditation and cultivation, he placed the wooden box containing the medicinal herb seeds in his palm.
He extended a strand of Divine Sense toward the emerald point of light in his Niwan Palace, and the familiar suction immediately came.
His vision went black, and the world spun around him.
When Liu Yu opened his eyes again, he had become a red ball of light, with the wooden box floating beside him.
A dark void, an azure barrier, a floating island.
A month had passed, yet the Immortal Abode Space had not changed in the slightest, as though time had lost all meaning here.
Liu Yu guided the wooden box with his Divine Sense and floated toward the small wooden hut on the left.
Inside the left-hand hut, rows of wooden boxes were neatly arranged on the cabinet. This was where he stored his medicinal herb seeds.
He opened one of the wooden boxes and took out a pitch-black seed the size of a soybean-a jade spirit mushroom seed.
Controlling the seed, Liu Yu floated straight toward the spiritual field.
Today, he intended to test the black spiritual field's ability to accelerate growth once again.
He turned over the black spiritual soil, planted the jade spirit mushroom seed, and waited patiently beside it.
Rustle~
Before long, a tiny green shoot broke through the Spirit Soil where the seed had been planted.
Then it grew at a speed almost visible to the naked eye!
It was as though the flow of time around it had accelerated countless times over!
About twenty hours later, the tiny green shoot had become a mushroom three inches across, with green lines on its surface.
At that point, it stopped growing, as though it had reached its limit and time had returned to normal.
"It seems to have a medicinal age of around two hundred years."
Liu Yu approached and examined the jade spirit mushroom from every side, reaching a preliminary conclusion.
He had once read information about jade spirit mushrooms in a sect text and knew their sizes and distinguishing features at each stage of maturity.
A jade spirit mushroom could grow for up to a thousand years and could even be used to refine pills that increased the magic power of Nascent Soul Realm cultivators.
Could the Immortal Mansion's accelerated growth be limited to two hundred years?!
The thought flashed through Liu Yu's mind, leaving him anxious about what he might gain or lose.
What insatiable greed!
But he quickly adjusted his mindset. Even if it could only accelerate growth to two hundred years, that was already an extraordinary defiance of the heavens.
If he grew too greedy, he would eventually pay the price.
It was only natural for such a miraculous Immortal Mansion to have certain limitations.
Perhaps this was the unseen balance of the Great Dao!
Why did the Immortal Mansion turn into an emerald point of light and travel across worlds with my soul?!
Why could a mere Qi Refining Period cultivator like me refine such a heaven-defying treasure?!
Could my cultivation be too low, restricting the Immortal Mansion's abilities?!
Countless conjectures flashed through Liu Yu's mind.
But even after pondering for a long time, he still found no answer, nor did he currently have any way to test his theories.
He could only rein in his thoughts and stop dwelling on these questions.
His Primordial Spirit floated over, and Liu Yu took a wooden box from the right-hand hut and packed the jade spirit mushroom inside.
With a thought, he left the Immortal Abode Space.
His vision went black again, and his Primordial Spirit returned to his body.
Although entering and leaving the Immortal Mansion greatly drained his mind, Liu Yu still rallied his spirits and circulated his cultivation art to complete his daily cultivation.
I've already cultivated the Qi Refining Fourth Layer to perfection.
The opportunity to break through to the Qi Refining Fifth Layer should come within the next few days.
As he circulated his art and sensed the growth of his cultivation, this thought flashed through his mind.
With Liu Yu's aptitude of three spiritual roots, reaching the Qi Refining Fifth Layer at eighteen would place him around the middle of the Primordial Yang Sect's ranks.
At this rate, he had a fair chance of breaking through to the seventh layer of Qi Refining before thirty.
The Primordial Yang Sect stipulated that those with heavenly spiritual roots or Mutated Spiritual Roots could become Inner Disciples directly.
Cultivators with other spiritual roots had to reach the seventh layer of Qi Refining before thirty to become Inner Disciples.
The treatment afforded to inner sect disciples far exceeded that of the outer sect.
Not only did they receive more pills and spirit stones each month, but they also had to carry out missions less frequently, leaving more time for cultivation.
More importantly, Inner Disciples had a far greater chance of obtaining Foundation Establishment Pills than outer sect disciples!
Shortly after he finished cultivating, faint fluctuations came from the barrier.
It should be the fellow disciple taking over from me.
Liu Yu made this guess, then looked through the barrier.
Looking out from inside, he saw a gray-robed outer sect disciple holding a token, waiting outside the barrier.
Seeing nothing amiss, Liu Yu stepped forward to make inquiries.
After confirming the newcomer's identity, he quickly completed the handover without excessive pleasantries.
He slapped his Storage Bag, and the Cold Light Sword, a standard-issue magical artifact provided by the sect, appeared in his palm.
Hum~
He poured in magic power, and in the blink of an eye, it expanded to ten feet in length.
Tap~
Pushing off with his toes, Liu Yu leaped onto the flying sword and formed a hand seal, turning into a streak of gray light that flew toward Clear Spring Peak.
In the morning light, he vanished among the mountains in just a few blinks.
On the way, Liu Yu found an uninhabited, barren mountain, dug a hole, and tossed in the cloth bundle containing the impurities from pill refinement before taking flight again.
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