Pill refining

Inside Jiang Yan's room.

Although the Bear-Tiger Pill Formula was Ninth Grade, he had already swiftly comprehended it with the Stone Book's help. Now he was about to fire up a batch to try his hand.

All the tables and chairs had been put away. In the small room, a Pill Furnace half a person's height occupied nearly half the space.

Jiang Yan brought his hands together and bowed, holding a stick of burning incense as he silently recited the ritual text.

Smoke drifted from the incense, circled the incense burner several times, then spread throughout the room.

This was burning incense to purify the altar, and this Pill Furnace was the ritual altar Jiang Yan would open today.

In a moment, he would use this altar to perform the Fire-Element Pill Refining Method.

Beside Jiang Yan, several kinds of materials stood ready, each held in either a jade bottle or a wooden box.

Once he finished purifying the altar with incense, he swept his Daoist robe back and sat cross-legged on a meditation cushion.

The Pill Furnace stood directly before him, its lid open and its interior polished clean.

He took out a Flame-Tending Talisman and slapped it onto the outside of the furnace's base.

Fire immediately sprang up inside. The furnace had a small internal formation that could control the size of the flames.

Jiang Yan had heard, however, that higher-grade Pill Furnaces had their own pill-fire formations and needed no additional talismans to control them.

Beyond that, some Alchemists sought out and refined fire seeds themselves. When used to refine pills, these often bestowed other wondrous properties upon the resulting medicine.

But such things were beyond what Jiang Yan could dream of now.

He gathered his wandering thoughts, held his breath, and focused.

The flames raised by the Flame-Tending Talisman churned within the Pill Furnace until its internal temperature reached a certain threshold.

Only then did Jiang Yan reach into a wooden box beside him and take out two yellowish-brown bones.

Their surfaces gleamed with oil and were covered in layers of red, tadpole-like markings. He tossed them straight into the Pill Furnace.

A tiger that had become a demon was also called a mountain lord. These were precisely Mountain Lord Bones.

They were also one of the main ingredients of Bear-Tiger Pills.

Once thrown into the furnace, the bones did not fall onto its bottom. Instead, Jiang Yan held them suspended in midair with his Law Power.

He controlled the furnace's flames, wrapping them around the tiger bones to process them.

For any living creature that embarked upon the path of cultivation, once its physical body reached perfection, every part of its body contained its own will.

This tiger demon was naturally no exception. Although the tiger was dead, demonic nature still lingered within its bones.

This step required the might of the furnace flames to expel that lingering demonic nature.

The tiger bones tumbled within the furnace until all their demonic nature had been worn away.

Only then did they crack apart under the furnace flames, becoming a small, floating clump of powder.

He opened the furnace lid, and a thin wisp of black smoke immediately escaped. This was the residue left after processing the demonic nature.

After taking out the powder and setting it aside, Jiang Yan drew out a length of shade-dried bear sinew from beside him.

The sinew had been cut to size beforehand. It was dark yellow and slightly translucent, with a barely perceptible fishy, rank odor.

He likewise tossed it into the furnace to expel its demonic nature. Before long, the bear sinew became a soft, sticky mass of gelatin.

Jiang Yan did not remove it, instead keeping the gelatin warm at the very top.

With the two main ingredients prepared, the remaining materials were much simpler. Most were plants, minerals, and metals, with no demonic nature to expel.

He simply threw them all into the furnace to process.

Once the supplementary ingredients were ready, Jiang Yan gauged the amount of bear sinew inside the furnace, measured out the corresponding portion of tiger-bone powder, and sent it in.

He sealed the lid, and the two main ingredients began refining within the furnace.

Jiang Yan monitored the situation inside through the openings left in the furnace.

At times, he adjusted the flames; at others, he opened the lid to add supplementary ingredients.

Nearly two hours passed before Jiang Yan poured in the final supplementary ingredient, a spiritual liquid.

By then, the various materials in the Pill Furnace had blended into a pool of liquid under its influence.

At this point, the pill refining was already eighty or ninety percent complete.

Yet this was also the most crucial moment. Next, the contents still needed to be slowly processed over a gentle flame.

Another hour passed, and the movement within the Pill Furnace subsided. Jiang Yan cut off the Flame-Tending Talisman's flames.

Only once the furnace's temperature had stabilized did he open the lid.

Several Bear-Tiger Pills bobbed within the Pill Furnace. Jiang Yan took out jade bottles, separated the pills into superior and inferior grades according to their color and luster, and bottled them separately.

At the very bottom of the furnace was another patch of black impurities: materials that had been burned up.

This was understandable. Jiang Yan was merely Ninth Grade and did not yet possess Divine Sense.

Working through the furnace, he was bound to make occasional mistakes.

He paid it no mind, instead examining the two bottles of pills in his hands. This batch had yielded seven pills in total.

Two were superior-grade Bear-Tiger Pills, while the other five were inferior-grade Bear-Tiger Pills.

The materials he had put in earlier were exactly one portion as recorded in the Pill Formula.

According to the Pill Formula, a novice refining this formula for the first time need only succeed in producing pills, without insisting on any particular quantity.

Someone of intermediate skill could produce five to seven pills, with one or two of superior grade. A practiced hand could produce nine or more, with over half of superior grade.

Seen this way, Jiang Yan had already reached an intermediate level on his first attempt at refining this formula.

With a little more time spent refining, becoming an expert should not be difficult.

Of the credit for this, Jiang Yan's diligence accounted for only twenty percent. The remaining eighty percent belonged to the Stone Book.

Holding the pills, Jiang Yan thought for a moment, then put away the superior-grade pills. He intended to keep these for his own cultivation.

As for the remaining inferior-grade pills, he would exchange them for Spirit Stones at the Market.

Setting down the bottles, Jiang Yan began cleaning the Pill Furnace. His was the most basic model and had no formation to clean itself.

Once he had put the Pill Furnace in order, Jiang Yan fired it up to refine pills again. A batch of Bear-Tiger Pills took four hours.

After setting aside time for his own cultivation, he could refine roughly three batches a day.

He had best turn all the materials he had bought into pills as soon as possible.

The Golden Crow sank, and the Jade Rabbit rose. Inside the room, Jiang Yan put away the third batch of pills and shook his head.

This batch could originally have yielded seven pills.

But halfway through refining, the Flame-Tending Talisman attached beneath the Pill Furnace had exhausted its firepower.

Although Jiang Yan had been quick enough to replace it with a fresh one, one pill had still cracked apart from the change in temperature, becoming a ruined pill.

In the end, he had produced only six pills, still with two of superior grade.

Jiang Yan looked at the ruined pill in his hand, a deep crack running across it.

It seemed that after exchanging these pills for Spirit Stones, he would first have to get a better Pill Furnace.

Otherwise, whenever something went wrong, wasting a few materials would be tolerable, but if the furnace exploded one day, he would truly suffer.

Although these cracked pills were called waste, their medicinal potency had not actually diminished. It simply had not been evenly harmonized by the flames.

After taking one, a Daoist would need more time to digest and regulate it, so they would not fetch a good price.

Fortunately, Spirit Beasts like Jinbao did not mind such things. To them, these were no different from ordinary pills.

He could feed them to Jinbao, so they would not go to waste.

Casually tossing the pill to Jinbao as a snack, Jiang Yan fired up the furnace again.

Early the next morning, as he put away the fifth batch of pills before him, Jiang Yan could not help rubbing his forehead.

Last night, apart from spending a little time practicing his Cultivation Method, he had refined pills without stopping. By now, he had produced five batches in succession.

Pill refining demanded complete concentration and consumed considerable mental stamina.

Had he not used the Stone Book often, allowing his mental stamina to recover extremely quickly after depletion, he truly could not have kept going for so long.

"I'll leave the furnace off for now. These pills should be enough to fetch a sum of Spirit Stones."

Across these five batches, Jiang Yan had refined thirty-six Bear-Tiger Pills in total.

Apart from the nine superior-grade pills he kept for his own use, the remaining twenty-seven pills could fetch twenty-seven Spirit Stones.

Pill refining truly yielded enormous profits. After all, Jiang Yan had spent only five or six Spirit Stones on five portions of materials.

Judging by his yield, five portions of materials could produce thirty-six pills, including nine of superior grade.

If he sold them all, with superior-grade pills fetching two Spirit Stones each and inferior-grade pills one each, he could get forty-five Spirit Stones!

Between buying and selling, he would pocket a profit of seven or eight times his outlay!

Of course, ordinary Alchemists did not have the Stone Book, and the cost of practicing would not be low.

Once everything was accounted for, their profits certainly would not be as high as Jiang Yan's.

After packing up all the pills, Jiang Yan did not rest. He went out and hurried toward the Market again.