This was how it happened.
On the spring equinox, Shao Chunxi, master of White Deer Cave on Su Xian Ridge, stormed into the Haoran Alliance's branch in Three Xiang, right on Mount Jiuyi, and publicly produced a magnolia bud so vividly colored it seemed ready to drip.
This bud was an Elixir Bottle. Some elixirs had special storage requirements. The kind Daoist Shao presented as evidence, for instance, had to be kept inside a living thing. Moreover, it could not be exposed to light, fire, soil, or blood.
Shao Chunxi explained where this elixir had come from.
It turned out that this pill was called the "Purple Essence Seed-Jade Pill," a new elixir Dragon-Tiger Mountain had developed within the past century or two. It was extraordinarily difficult to refine and kept secret, barely circulating in the cultivation world, its existence passed on only by word of mouth between old friends. Without an acquaintance on Dragon-Tiger Mountain, one would never even have heard of it, let alone found a way to buy it.
The pill was in such short supply, of course, because it was exceedingly difficult to refine, and that difficulty was owed to its heaven-defying effects.
According to Shao Chunxi himself, this pill could increase a cultivator's chances of achieving Fetal Formation!
That alone sounded utterly inconceivable!
Every school and sect had different methods of cultivating a Nascent Soul. In the Internal Dao of Alchemy, for instance, one first combined Elixir Qi with Kidney Essence to form an Immortal Sprout, then achieved Fetal Formation through Divine Illumination. The Talismanic Registers Dao, by contrast, began with nurturing a register seed, then watering it with spiritual awareness and supplementing it with Yin-Yang, causing the seed to flower and bear fruit, from which a true spirit was nurtured. As for the Unorthodox