On the spirit island in the Underground Cold Pool.
As Li Ping refined pills and puppets, time slipped by unnoticed, and the end of the year arrived in the blink of an eye.
He sat cross-legged in the plaza, surrounded by all sorts of processed spirit materials and neatly arranged bottles of pills.
The spirit materials were for refining puppets.
As for the pills, most were first-tier upper-grade Qi-Nourishing Pills, along with several bottles of second-tier lower-grade Essence-Nourishing Pills, second-tier mid-grade Essence-Gathering Pills, and second-tier upper-grade Vitality-Nourishing Pills.
After all, cultivating his second golden core did not mean starting from scratch.
With his existing golden core cultivation as a foundation, he had no need to work his way through lower- and mid-grade pills during the qi refining stage. He could go straight to the more potent Qi-Nourishing Pills.
Although this would be somewhat wasteful, it would greatly accelerate his cultivation. Li Ping considered it worthwhile; he was hardly short of those few first-tier spirit herbs.
Trading spirit stones for time was a very good bargain.
Second-tier pills were a different matter, however. He still had to begin with Essence-Nourishing Pills.
There were two main reasons for this. First, the vital energy within second-tier pills was fundamentally different from that in first-tier pills. Li Ping worried that taking second-tier upper-grade pills directly to accelerate his cultivation would leave his foundation unstable.
Of course, even if an unstable foundation damaged his vital essence or even his meridians, he could use the power of the Longevity Art to repair them.
The most important reason he took second-tier pills step by step, however, was that the spirit herbs needed to refine Vitality-Nourishing Pills were difficult to gather. Over all these years, he had only collected enough for a few batches.
A few bottles of