"This assessment's subject is precisely the refinement of Pigu Pills! No matter how outstanding your spiritual root aptitude may be, no matter how impressive your family background, this assessment will judge only your pill refinement skill."
This did not come as a surprise to the crowd.
For the past thirty days, everyone had been refining Pigu Pills.
If they were tested on any other pill, none of them would know how to make it, and the assessment would lose its meaning.
Some had even purchased high-quality Pigu Pills from the market and hidden them in their own Alchemy Rooms, intending to switch them under the sky and steal the sun when it came time to refine pills.
If Zhou Xun swept his divine sense over everyone's eyes at this moment, he would find barely concealed excitement in several of them.
"Once you have finished refining, I will personally assess your pills. The higher the quality of the pills, the higher your ranking. The top fifteen will become Pill Refinement Apprentices!"
"Those ranked below fifteenth may also remain at Danbao Pavilion, but they can only serve as Spirit Contract Laborers!"
After Lin Zhishan finished speaking, he swept his gaze across the crowd before continuing.
"To ensure fairness in this pill refinement assessment, and to prevent any of you from trying to be clever, you will not refine pills in your original Alchemy Rooms. Instead, you will draw numbered room tokens and refine in the corresponding rooms."
"Very well, come forward and draw your Alchemy Room tokens. Then collect your Pigu Pill ingredients and begin refining!"
The moment Lin Zhishan's words fell, Wei Shangyi froze briefly before flying into a rage.
"They're changing the Alchemy Rooms!"
Didn't that mean the plans he and his brother had made would fall through?
His brother had spent a full thirty spirit stones, all of it going down the drain.
Wei Shangyi shot Zhou Xun a resentful glare.
"Consider yourself lucky!"
Then he began worrying about himself again.
"If those three rooms are drawn by people ranked behind me, then won't I still have no sure chance of winning?"
With a trace of unease, he joined the line to draw a room token.
"How many Alchemy Rooms had Pigu Pills found in them?"
Not far away, Lin Zhishan asked his junior sister and clan niece.
"Senior Brother Lin, are these people truly stupid enough to think you cannot tell whether a Pigu Pill was freshly refined?" Lin Xueying asked disdainfully.
"Why not simply expose them and throw them out? Our Danbao Pavilion has no use for people with such crooked hearts!"
"It is of no concern. Other than those few ranked near the bottom, the rest had no need to resort to such methods!" Lin Zhishan waved his hand.
"Let them take the assessment first. Once it is over, throw them out." With a single sentence, Lin Zhishan had decided their fate.
In the courtyard, under the steward's direction, everyone began drawing Alchemy Room tokens.
"B-3."
"B-9."
The crowd formed a line and stepped forward one by one to draw.
"B-13!" A round-faced youth looked at the token in his hand, delight appearing on his face.
He was one of those who had purchased Pigu Pills in advance and hidden them in his Alchemy Room.
"Anyone who draws their original Alchemy Room must draw again!" The steward's icy words shattered the youth's joy.
The youth could only draw again unwillingly.
Soon, it was Wei Shangyi's turn.
He stepped forward and rolled up his sleeves.
Then he thrust his hand into the cloth bag before him, swept it around, found a token, and carefully felt it over.
He wanted to identify the number on the token through touch.
But it was all in vain.
These tokens had been specially made and could not be identified by touch.
Helpless, after choosing for a long while, he finally grabbed one at random and pulled it out.
He stared at it closely.
"B-17!"
At first, he thought he had seen it wrong!
He rubbed his eyes and looked again.
There was no mistake. It was B-17, Zhou Xun's room!
In that instant, it was as though Wei Shangyi's head had been struck by a great bell, leaving it buzzing.
He had originally worried that those three Alchemy Rooms would be drawn by people ranked behind him, causing his and his brother's scheme to fail completely.
Yet he had never imagined that he himself would draw one of those three rooms.
Wasn't this spending money to expose himself?
He had failed to trap Zhou Xun and instead trapped himself!
Wei Shangyi revealed a bewildered expression.
His face turned from red to white, then gradually from white back to red, until it finally became a deep crimson.
He simply could not understand it!
"What, are you dissatisfied with this Alchemy Room?"
At that moment, the steward's words pulled him back to reality.
"No, no!" Wei Shangyi replied hoarsely.
Then he began looking around. He still had a chance!
He anxiously searched for the figure of that "Third Granduncle."
He needed to tell him that the deal was off!
Yet after sweeping his gaze back and forth several times, he did not see that Third Granduncle anywhere.
What he did not know was that although Third Granduncle was greedy for money, he was also the sort who, once paid, would seriously do the job.
In the business of taking money to get things done, as Zhou Xun would have put it in his previous life, he possessed quite a bit of professional ethics!
Old Steward Lin had long since stationed himself in his room. He took out the control token and kept constant watch over the activation of the earth-fire arrays in those three Alchemy Rooms.
He had already made up his mind. Once the earth-fire in those three rooms had been activated for a while, he would calculate the timing and trigger an eruption of earth-fire.
But he did not dare do such a thing too often.
Once every three or four years was already the limit.
Any more than that, and it would likely attract attention.
If the last eruption had not been five years ago, he would never have agreed to the Wei Brothers' request this time.
"Heh, once I finish this, I must get those two brothers to buy me a drink!"
After Wei Shangyi drew his token, it was soon Zhou Xun's turn.
Zhou Xun casually drew one, glanced at it, and did not pay it much mind.
The token he drew was B-5.
To Zhou Xun, this assessment was merely going through the motions. He had already successfully refined no fewer than eighty bottles of Pigu Pills.
He believed that among the other twenty-nine people present, not a single one could surpass him.
"Once the assessment ends, I'll refine those two furnaces of Qi Induction Pills!" Zhou Xun's thoughts were already on those two furnaces of Qi Induction Pills.
Yet what he did not know was that this B-5 Alchemy Room was precisely one of the three numbers Wei Shangli had proposed that day.
When he was halfway through refining his Pigu Pills, a tremendous surprise would await him.
Soon, everyone had finished drawing their tokens.
After receiving their ingredients, they each entered their Alchemy Rooms and began refining.
Feng Bao was seventeen years old. Among the thirty prospective apprentices, he had the poorest spiritual root aptitude, with a water spiritual root affinity of fifteen.
If not for his father, who served as a squad leader in the Enforcement Squad, he would not have been able to reach the third level of Qi Refinement at his age, much less successfully pass Danbao Pavilion's initial selection for Pill Refinement Apprentices.
Feng Bao had little talent for pill refinement. He was one of the eight who had failed to refine a Pigu Pill.
By this point, he had no hope of passing the assessment.
"If worse comes to worst, I'll join the Enforcement Squad!"
Having thought it through, Feng Bao smiled in relief. His mindset calmed, and he began refining pills.
He warmed the pill furnace and condensed the spirit rice.
He carried out every step with meticulous care.
Before you continue