After that explosion left him covered in soot, Xiao Yan stopped refining pills for a while. For one thing, testing things blindly was like a headless fly buzzing about: inefficient and extremely dangerous. For another, His Holy Son with a blackened face and blasted hair had evidently become an urban legend in Spirit Hall. One group firmly believed they had seen the Holy Son like that and even greeted him, while another group of Xiao Yan's die-hard fans was convinced that the haggard, disheveled figure could never have been Xiao Yan himself. At the center of the storm, Xiao Yan was naturally mortified and did not dare try again anytime soon.
I'm afraid I'll have to try Soul Rings after all... Xiao Yan pondered as he walked, his head lowered. But in a moment of inattention, he crashed straight into someone coming toward him.
Xiao Yan scratched his head, sprang to his feet and held out a hand to the person he had knocked down, full of apology. Yet just as he was about to pull the person up, something else seemed to catch his attention. He suddenly withdrew his hand and bent down to pick up a crystalline blue object, while the poor young man he had knocked over fell on his backside again as a result. He really was having a miserable time of it.
"What... what is this?" Xiao Yan held the little blue sphere up to the sunlight and examined it closely. Without a doubt, it was a pill. Perhaps the principles behind it were vastly different from those of pills on the Dou Qi Continent, but in essence, they had quite a few similarities.
The young man had now fallen twice, and his spirits had sunk to rock bottom. But he did not dare leave the Holy Son's question unanswered, so he steeled himself and said, "This... this is called a Mystic Water Pill. An ancestor of my family refined it using the blood essence of Soul Beasts and special plants. It can cleanse the sinews and marrow... and increase cultivation speed. If Your Holy Son needs it, you may have it...?" Xiao Yan, however, was in no mood for pleasantries. He took a small Storage Soul Tool from his pocket and tossed it to the young man as thanks, then raced toward the Pope's Hall. He had never heard that the Douluo Continent had a method of refining pills, too. Although the Mystic Water Pill could hardly be considered a true pill by comparison, and at most could only be called a tonic, and although its refining method was still extremely crude and backward, it was clearly a method native to this world. Xiao Yan's heart leaped. Perhaps, from this native pill, he could find a way to refine true pills without Magic Cores and make pills from another world shine in this one.
The young Soul Master caught the Soul Tool flying toward him and tried to open it to see exactly how much the gift of thanks was worth. A gift from the Holy Son shouldn't be meager, should it...? he thought, but a moment of inattention left him buried beneath the things that poured out. Everything in the Soul Tool was medicinal ingredients, and they were extremely precious ones that Bibi Dong had gathered for Xiao Yan, likely worth a considerable sum. The poor young Soul Master found himself on the ground for the third time that day, but presumably he was quite satisfied.
"This object is rather marvelous... even Spirit Hall has no records of it." Bibi Dong studied the pill, evidently full of interest. "I suspect this was a method that old Soul Master devised himself. There's some ingenuity to it..." With that, she handed the pill back to Xiao Yan and said helplessly, "I don't understand pills, and there isn't much I can do to help you. But since that young Soul Master told you this was made from plants and Soul Beast blood essence, perhaps that blood essence is the important element your pills have been missing all along."
Hearing this, Xiao Yan nodded in agreement. To refine true pills, he would probably have to make another trip to the Star Dou Great Forest.