"Senior brother."
In the underground pill chamber, sandalwood mingled with the fragrance of medicinal herbs.
Jiang Li turned at the voice and saw Lu Changfeng and Princess Taiping, Li Lingyue, enter one after the other.
"You're back?" Jiang Li closed the pharmacopoeia in his hands, his tone calm.
Lu Changfeng nodded, his gaze sweeping over the many herbs and vessels arranged in the chamber. "Her Highness said you'd made a discovery, senior brother?"
Jiang Li nodded, his eyes bright. "I have made some progress. In fact, much of the inspiration came from those records you brought back about Li Qianli's Soldier Blood Tonic."
He walked over to a jade table, where several sets of old and new notes lay spread out alongside a few refined samples. "The man did receive the Pill Sage's true teachings. At its core of 'awakening potential and stimulating blood and qi,' his formula was actually close to the proper path, and its side effects were already greatly reduced compared with the old formula."
"The problem was that he mixed in large quantities of mind-bewitching hallucinogens meant to control the mind and amplify pain and bloodlust, turning it entirely into a 'deadly poison' for manipulating puppets."
"What I did was strip away these harmful foreign influences and restore its original purpose as 'medicine' that awakens the human body's innate vitality. This pill formula is founded on the 'nine steamings and nine sun-dryings' extraction method for 'discarding the chaff and preserving the essence' in the Supplement to the Thousand-Gold Prescriptions, along with the principle of 'supporting the healthy and expelling the harmful' from the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon. It uses hundred-year-old poria as the principal ingredient to strengthen the foundation, supported by heavenly mountain snow lotus, crimson blood lingzhi, and other ingredients that greatly replenish origin qi.