All the herbs were laid out in a single line on the stone platform. Nine herbs, ranging from first-grade to eighth-grade, a span so wide it was extremely rare in the entire alchemical history of the Cangwu Realm.
Lai Li’an’s gaze swept over each herb, one by one, then he reached out and picked up all of them from the stone platform.
He lifted the lid of the elixir furnace and tossed all the herbs inside in one go.
crash
The sound of herbs hitting the furnace floor was unmistakably clear, and Ruan Qin’s pupils sharply contracted.
She instinctively raised her hand, about to say something, when a hand suddenly pressed down on her arm.
Ruan Qin turned her head and met her sister’s gaze.
Ruan Se gave her a slight shake of the head. There was no trace of surprise in her eyes, only a faint hint of a smile lurking within.
Ruan Qin’s lips pressed into a thin line. She stared at her sister’s eyes for a long moment, then slowly withdrew her raised right hand and crossed her arms over her chest again.
‘This man just threw all the herbs into the furnace without even separating the order. Is he refining an elixir or boiling a soup?’
For an eighth-grade pill, the timing of when each herb entered the furnace had been honed and verified through thousands of years of trial and error by generations of alchemists. The slightest deviation meant total failure. Surely this elixir couldn’t be refined this way.
And this man, he just casually dumped everything in.
Ruan Qin took a deep breath and suppressed the urge to turn around and walk away.
Lai Li’an acted as if he hadn’t heard anything behind him. He took the Qingxuan Root from its box, held it between his fingertips and examined it for a brief moment, then tossed it into the furnace as well.
With that, all ten herbs were inside.
Lai Li’an closed the furnace lid, turned around, and set his gaze on Ruan Se.
“Ignite.”
Ruan Se nodded, walked to the ignition platform, placed her right hand on the firestone, and slowly channeled her spiritual power into it.
Spiritual flame rose from beneath the furnace, tongues of fire licking the furnace walls, bathing the entire vessel in a halo of light.
The temperature in the alchemy room began to climb steadily.
Lai Li’an stood before the furnace and closed his eyes, withdrawing his spiritual consciousness.
Ruan Qin looked at him and furrowed her brow into a tight knot.
‘He’s closing his spiritual consciousness while refining?’
Closing his spiritual consciousness meant giving up all perception of the outside world, entrusting his entire mind and spirit to… what?
To intuition?
During the pill refining process, an alchemist needed to constantly monitor every subtle change inside the furnace, the state of the herbs, the fluctuations of the spiritual flame’s temperature. All of this required the alchemist’s spiritual consciousness to watch at all times. One moment of negligence and everything was lost.
Ruan Qin’s mouth twitched slightly. She glanced at her sister, searching for even a shred of agreement on Ruan Se’s face, even a hint of confusion would do.
But there was no confusion on Ruan Se’s face at all.
She stood one step to the side of Lai Li’an, hands properly resting at her sides, gaze focused intently on the furnace.
Ruan Qin felt her temples throbbing.
‘This master and disciple… no, they aren’t even officially master and disciple yet. What in the world are they up to?’
Time trickled by, and half an hour passed.
The herbs inside the furnace began to change under the assault of high temperature.
These changes, under a normal refining process, would allow an alchemist to clearly perceive the state of each herb through spiritual consciousness.
But Lai Li’an kept his eyes shut, as if he were asleep. He just stood there, completely motionless.
Ruan Qin’s expression grew increasingly sour.
She opened her mouth to ask a question, but every time the words reached the tip of her tongue, she caught sight of her sister’s almost devout expression and swallowed them back down.
What Ruan Qin didn’t know was that inside Lai Li’an’s mind, an operation so precise she couldn’t possibly imagine it was unfolding at this very moment.
Spiritual power surged from Lai Li’an’s dantian, silently threading through his meridians and into the furnace, wrapping around each of the ten herbs individually, forming a membrane of spiritual power on the surface of every single medicinal plant.
This membrane perfectly insulated the herbs from the outside high temperature, allowing them to maintain a critical state within the spiritual flame.
Ten herbs, ten different levels of protection, all happening simultaneously within the same furnace.
All of this was occurring inside the furnace, enveloped by the spiritual flame, hidden in the gaps between churning medicinal liquids.
From the outside, Lai Li’an was just standing there with his eyes closed, doing nothing.
Another hour passed.
The changes inside the furnace intensified.
The medicinal power of the nine auxiliary herbs each operated independently within the furnace, rotating slowly in their distinct forms without interfering with one another.
And the Qingxuan Root, it remained quietly at the very bottom of the furnace, like a sleeping seed.
It was waiting for the medicinal power of all the auxiliary herbs to be fully released, waiting for that moment when all the power could be fused into one.
All of this, Ruan Qin couldn’t see.
All she could see were the occasional wisps of medicinal fragrance drifting out of the furnace, and Lai Li’an’s indifferent face.
So she thought the man was idling.
Taking a nap.
Wasting her time.
Ruan Qin’s breathing grew a little ragged. Her arms fell from her chest to hang at her sides, her fingers unconsciously clenching tight.
She held back, and held back, and held back, until finally—
“What is he—”
“Shh.”
Ruan Se raised a finger to her lips and glanced sideways at her sister, her eyes carrying both a plea and a warning.
Ruan Qin took a deep breath and forced the words back down her throat. Fine, she wouldn’t speak.
She’d just see what this unfathomable Senior Lai could possibly produce.
Time continued to pass.
The changes inside the furnace had entered the most critical phase.
The medicinal power of the nine auxiliary herbs had been fully released, and the Qingxuan Root finally began to react.
That cyan-white root lightly trembled at the bottom of the furnace, like a seed sensing the breath of spring, preparing to break through the soil.
The patterns on the root’s surface began to glow, and a clear radiance seeped out from the lines, slowly spreading across the furnace floor.
Wherever the light passed, the medicinal power of the nine auxiliary herbs seemed to be drawn by something, converging toward the Qingxuan Root of their own accord.
One by one, the medicinal power fused into the root, pulled in by its guidance.
That color was difficult to describe in words, but if one had to describe it, it could probably be called, life force.
Inside the furnace, the swirling mass of cyan-white light rotated slowly. With every revolution, the mass shrank in size, and the nascent form of the pill gradually took shape.
Ruan Qin’s expression slowly changed.
From the moment Lai Li’an closed his eyes to now, several hours had passed.
Countless times she had wanted to speak up. Countless times she had wanted to lift the furnace lid to see whether there was a pot of paste or a pile of ash inside.
But now, the medicinal fragrance drifting from the furnace was becoming increasingly unusual.
At first, only faint traces of herbal aroma seeped out. Any alchemist, as long as their herbs were of decent quality, could produce such a fragrance in the early stages of refining.
But as time went on, those herbal aromas began to transform.
Every single scent was improving in quality at an inconceivable speed.
And what shocked Ruan Qin the most was that these fragrances were beginning to merge. Like different instruments in an orchestra, guided by a conductor, each played its own melody, yet harmoniously interwove into a complete symphony.
Every fragrance appeared exactly where it should be, not a hair more, not a hair less.
Ruan Qin’s body leaned forward slightly, her eyes locked onto the furnace.
‘Impossible.’
She had cultivated the alchemy path for decades and had never seen a refining process like this.
No spiritual consciousness probing, none of the operations an alchemist should perform.
That man had stood there like a wooden post the entire time with his eyes closed.
But the fragrance from the furnace didn’t lie. Those scents were clearly fusing at top speed, and the medicinal power within was taking shape at a rate she couldn’t comprehend.
Ruan Qin’s eyelids began to twitch. An emotion she had never experienced before was spreading from the bottom of her heart, sour, swelling, clogging her chest, making it hard to breathe.
She couldn’t quite name it. Perhaps it was shock. Perhaps it was unwillingness. Perhaps it was, envy.
She, Ruan Qin, was the genius disciple of the main sect of the alchemy sect. In the alchemy path, none of her peers could surpass her.
But now, breathing in the medicinal fragrance drifting from the furnace, she had to admit one thing.
She didn’t understand. She didn’t understand what this man was doing, didn’t understand his methods, didn’t even understand why his medicinal fragrance was fusing in this way.
Decades of alchemy knowledge had just been reduced to scrap paper in this single moment.
Those alchemy theories she thought she had fully mastered were, before this man, as thin as a layer of window paper, ready to be punctured with a single poke.
Ruan Qin’s finger trembled slightly.
Ruan Se stood nearby, taking in her sister’s reaction.
She said nothing. A smile flickered beneath her face veil.
‘Sister, you’ve finally seen it. Finally seen what that man carries within him.’