After a while, the three of them landed in Ruan Se’s courtyard.
Lai Li’an’s legs were a bit weak as he climbed down from the crane’s back, but his expression betrayed nothing.
He walked with unhurried composure, heading straight toward the alchemy room.
His dark cyan robe rustled gently in the breeze, giving him an air of profound mystery.
“Wait.”
Ruan Qin’s voice came from behind.
Lai Li’an paused mid-step and turned around.
Ruan Qin stood in the center of the courtyard, arms crossed over her chest, her gaze like two scalpels, dissecting Lai Li’an piece by piece from head to toe.
“You’re not going to prepare anything before starting the alchemy?”
Lai Li’an blinked.
Prepare? What was there to prepare for alchemy?
His mind raced for a moment, then realization struck—oh, right.
The array.
When he had refined the Changchun Life-Prolonging Pill before, Ruan Se had set up a concealment array to seal the supernatural phenomenon within the courtyard, preventing any greater trouble from being attracted.
The pill he was about to refine now was eighth-grade.
The commotion would only be greater, so setting up an array beforehand was indeed necessary.
“Ruan Se,” Lai Li’an nodded.
“Go set up the array.”
Ruan Se was about to step forward, but she suddenly stopped, a hint of hesitation showing on her face.
“Senior,” she chose her words carefully, her tone carrying apology, “forgive this junior for her incompetence, but the supernatural phenomenon of an eighth-grade pill… is beyond what I can conceal.”
The set of formation flags in her hands was already struggling against sixth-grade pills.
Eighth-grade was utterly out of the question.
If she forced this array to suppress the commotion of an eighth-grade pill, the only result would be the array shattering the moment the pill took shape.
The alchemy room would explode, medicinal power would leak out, and every cultivator within several li would sense the disturbance.
At that point, forget refining the pill—just dealing with the various factions that came sniffing around would be trouble enough.
“I can do it.”
Ruan Qin spoke up from the side.
She uncrossed her arms and casually produced four formation flags from her sleeve.
“I can suppress the supernatural phenomenon of an eighth-grade pill.”
Ruan Qin twirled the flags in her hand, but her gaze remained fixed on Lai Li’an.
“But that’s not the preparation I’m talking about.”
Lai Li’an raised an eyebrow slightly.
“An eighth-grade pill isn’t an ordinary pill,” Ruan Qin said slowly.
“Alchemy requires Heaven’s timing, Earth’s advantage, and Human harmony. If the hour is wrong, the earth vein is unfavorable, or your mind is unsettled, it will affect the quality of the pill. An ordinary alchemist refining fourth or fifth-grade pills might not care about these things, but eighth-grade is different. A slight difference leads to an error of a thousand li.”
She paused, her eyes narrowing slightly.
“You didn’t even know that?”
Lai Li’an’s expression remained utterly still.
Know? Of course he didn’t know.
But so what? He had cheats.
Heaven’s timing, Earth’s advantage, and Human harmony might be the deciding factors for other alchemists, but for him, they were nothing more than embellishments.
With the System in hand, he had the world at his feet.
Even without any of those conditions, he could still refine the pill, and the quality wouldn’t be any worse than anyone else’s.
That was the confidence of someone who cheated.
But he couldn’t say that out loud.
He needed to sound profound, to make someone like Ruan Qin—a genius alchemist—hear his words, find no fault in them, and come away feeling that his level of understanding was unfathomable.
Lai Li’an was silent for a moment.
His masked face revealed nothing, only his eyes calm and unruffled.
“Fellow Daoist Ruan,” his voice came unhurried.
“This Venerable Self would like to ask you a question.”
“In your opinion, what is the essence of alchemy?”
Ruan Qin was momentarily taken aback.
The question was too broad—so broad that any alchemist could answer it, yet no alchemist’s answer could fully capture the word “essence.”
“To temper medicinal herbs with spiritual flame, fusing Heaven and Earth spiritual energy with the medicinal nature of plants in a single furnace, transforming the useless into the useful—that is alchemy.”
Lai Li’an nodded slightly.
“Then what do you think is the essence of Heaven’s timing, Earth’s advantage, and Human harmony?”
“Heaven’s timing is the movement of sun, moon, and stars, the rhythm of yin and yang’s ebb and flow.” She chose her words carefully.
“Earth’s advantage is the direction of mountains and earth veins, the position where spiritual qi converges. Human harmony is the alchemist’s state of mind, the condition of their spiritual consciousness. With all three in place, alchemy yields twice the result with half the effort; missing any one, and it’s the reverse.”
She spoke with clear logic, every word holding up to scrutiny.
Truly a genius disciple of the main sect of the Alchemy Sect.
Lai Li’an nodded again, then spoke four words.
“They are all external factors.”
Ruan Qin’s expression froze for a moment.
“Heaven’s timing is external, earth veins are external, and even the ‘mental state’ within Human harmony is merely a projection of the alchemist’s own condition—at its core, still external.”
Lai Li’an said calmly.
“But alchemy refines medicine. Medicine is internal. An alchemist refines medicine, not Heaven’s timing, not earth veins, not their own mental state.”
He paused, his gaze landing on Ruan Qin’s face.
“If an alchemist stakes their success or failure on these external factors, then their Alchemy Path has been narrow from the very beginning.”
Ruan Qin wanted to refute him, but for a moment, she couldn’t find an opening.
Because this man’s logic was terrifyingly self-consistent.
“A true grandmaster of the Alchemy Path,” Lai Li’an’s tone carried no fluctuation whatsoever, “does not refine pills when Heaven’s timing, Earth’s advantage, and Human harmony are all aligned. They refine the same pill under any conditions. If the timing is wrong, compensate with spiritual power; if the earth vein is unfavorable, harmonize with arrays; if the mind is unsettled, suppress it with willpower. When external factors are insufficient, supplement them with internal strength—that is the Alchemy Path.”
He said no more after that, simply standing with his hands behind his back, calmly watching Ruan Qin.
The courtyard fell silent for a moment.
Ruan Qin stared at him for a long while, complex emotions churning in her eyes.
She didn’t want to admit it, but there was truth in his words.
But she was Ruan Qin.
She wouldn’t change her judgment just because someone said a few nice things.
“Well spoken.”
Her aggressive edge had receded somewhat.
“But speaking and doing are two different things. An eighth-grade pill isn’t something you can refine with just words.”
Lai Li’an smiled faintly.
“Then let’s give it a try.”
Ruan Qin said nothing more.
She turned and walked to the four corners of the courtyard, planting her formation flags into the ground one by one.
The moment the four flags sank into the earth, an invisible translucent barrier rose from the ground, silently enveloping the entire courtyard.
From the outside, the courtyard looked no different than before.
But if anyone tried to probe it with their spiritual sense, they would find their consciousness slamming into an invisible wall, unable to penetrate no matter what.
“Alright, we can begin.”
The three of them entered the alchemy room.
Ruan Se took out the wooden box carved with sealing runes from her robes, walked to Lai Li’an, and handed it over with both hands.
“Senior, the Qingxuan Root.”
Lai Li’an took the box and gently pushed open the lid.
An extremely crisp and pure spiritual qi seeped out from within—so pure it was startling, as if it were the very first wisp of clear energy sealed within this spiritual herb since the beginning of Heaven and Earth.
Lying in the box was a root stalk about three cun long, its entire body a translucent celadon-white.
The surface of the root was covered in fine lines—growth rings naturally formed during the Qingxuan Root’s growth, each circle recording the years it had absorbed spiritual energy from Heaven and Earth.
Lai Li’an stood before the elixir furnace and silently closed his eyes.
“Fellow Daoist Ruan,” he announced the first ingredient, “Tianyuan Fruit. The older, the better.”
Ruan Se blinked, then quickly walked to the medicine cabinet and pulled open one of the drawers.
Inside lay a fruit the size of a pigeon’s egg, golden throughout, with a faint halo of pale gold light flowing across its surface.
She handed the jade box to Lai Li’an.
Lai Li’an took it without even looking, casually placing it on the stone platform beside the furnace.
He called out ingredients one by one, and Ruan Se retrieved them one by one.
Each time a medicinal herb was taken from the cabinet, Ruan Qin’s expression grew more subtle.
So these were the auxiliary ingredients for the Qingxuan Yangyuan Pill.
She silently committed them to memory, feeling curious about the herbs.
But there was one she couldn’t make sense of—licorice.
A first-grade ingredient.
The cheapest auxiliary material in alchemy, too low-grade even for refining first-grade pills.
Usually, only alchemy apprentices used it when practicing basic techniques.
And this man intended to use licorice in an eighth-grade pill.
Ruan Qin’s brow furrowed more and more tightly.
She opened her mouth, wanting to say something, but glancing at her sister’s expression, she swallowed the words back down.
Ruan Se was focused on retrieving herbs from the cabinet, without a trace of doubt.
As if every ingredient Lai Li’an announced was perfectly natural in her eyes.
Ruan Qin’s brow furrowed even deeper, but she didn’t speak.
She had promised her sister—she was only here to observe.
Fine, then.
She would observe.
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