Late at Night.
Long Xiaoshan bathed and changed his clothes, and after washing his hands, he stepped into the courtyard.
In his hand, he now held a crimson fruit that was crystal clear, emitting a faint red glow in the darkness of the night, with a light fragrance diffusing through the air.
This was the Vermilion Fruit aged a hundred years.
It was also one of the seven hundred-year-old dicines that he had cultivated.
After several days of frenzied alchemy, today he finally planned to take out this spiritual dicine to refine the Lesser Qi Nurturing Pill.
The elixirs he had refined previously were just ordinary, while the Lesser Qi Nurturing Pill already belonged to the category of spiritual dicines.
Therefore, he must exercise extre caution.
Because he had only one chance.
He took out the Hundred Ghosts Banner and summoned Yue Ling, saying, "Brother Yue, I need your help to protect ."
"Don’t worry!"
Yue Ling stepped forward, blending into the darkness, his ghostly eye enveloping a radius of a thousand ters.
With Yue Ling protecting him, Long Xiaoshan felt at ease and sat cross-legged in front of the pill furnace. Facing the furnace, Long Xiaoshan ran through the steps of refining the Lesser Qi Nurturing Pill in his mind once more, then he tossed the wood into the furnace, flicked his fingers, and boom! Flas surged up.
One by one, the auxiliary herbs were smoothly fed into the furnace.
After several days of practice, Long Xiaoshan’s technique had beco much more proficient, and he continually manipulated the furnace.
He extracted the impurities from each herb, leaving behind their essential essences. As ti ticked by, he successfully refined the essence of all the auxiliary herbs.
Taking a deep breath, he added the hundred-year-old Vermilion Fruit that had been prepared on the side.
As soon as the fruit entered, the pill furnace imdiately began to tremble.
A hundred-year-old dicine possessed strong dicinal power.
Moreover, the hundred-year-old dicine cultivated by Long Xiaoshan with Spiritual Liquid had a potency equivalent to that of two-hundred-year-old dicinal materials on the market.
Crackling! Crackling!
Within the flas, the century-old dicine rolled about, stubbornly refusing to lt, the fire not hot enough!
Long Xiaoshan’s gaze sharpened, and he imdiately channeled his True Qi into the flas. With True Qi infusing it, the fire’s intensity dramatically increased, and the flas changed from deep red to a hint of purple.
Under the burning of True Fire, the hundred-year-old Vermilion Fruit finally began to lt.
Long Xiaoshan controlled the flas inside the furnace, scorching away impurities in the Vermilion Fruit, extracting stream after stream of crimson essences.
Consuming nearly half of his True Qi, the essence of the Vermilion Fruit was finally refined, and all essences were now within the furnace. Following the combination steps for the Lesser Qi Nurturing Pill, he first rged a clump of purple essence with a clump of green essence, followed by a clump of pale yellow essence…
The Lesser Qi Nurturing Pill required more than a dozen kinds of auxiliary dicines alone.
The dozens of refined essences had to be fused one by one; the order could not be mistaken, the dosage had to be exact, and the fusion technique flawless.
If there was even a slight error during these processes, the pill would surely be destroyed and the furnace would explode.
And given the potency of the hundred-year-old dicine.
If the furnace did explode, it would likely be completely destroyed.
Thus, alchemy is an extrely challenging skill. Had it not been for Long Xiaoshan’s Heavenly Eye, which allowed him to see inside the furnace at any ti, the difficulty would have been much greater.
Even so, Long Xiaoshan put his entire spirit into this round of alchemy.
The entire process of alchemy had been repeated in his mind thousands of tis, as if by reflex, each essence was successfully fused one after another. Now, only the last essence of the Vermilion Fruit was left.
Without hesitating, Long Xiaoshan rged the essence of the Vermilion Fruit into it.
Boom!
The addition of the Vermilion Fruit essence imdiately destabilized the combined essences. The Vermilion Fruit’s powerful dicinal strength far exceeded that of the auxiliary dicines, causing instability and potentially failure of the fusion.
The two clumps of essence repelled each other as if they were opposing magnets.
This caused the essence to boil violently, and the lid of the pill furnace, impacted by the high-pressure current, convulsively jumped about, ready to fly off at any mont.
Long Xiaoshan’s eyes fiercely contracted while veins of blood spread within them.
He let out a roaring shout!
The third eye on his forehead also split open, and a beam of golden light poured into the furnace.
His spiritual power reached its limit as True Qi also surged out frenziedly, pushing the fire inside the furnace to its peak.
Flas gleaming with hints of purple burned ferociously.
Long Xiaoshan’s spiritual force was doing its utmost to stabilize the essences.
It’s uncertain how much ti had passed; it felt as long as a century. At last, the essence inside the furnace began to contract slowly, and at this point, Long Xiaoshan was soaked with sweat—pushed to the limits of both his spiritual power and True Qi, he was as exhausted as a dead dog.
However, he had finally completed the most crucial step of fusion.
Inside the furnace, a white essence tinged with red churned.
The fusion of the essence was a success!
Now, only the forming of the pill remained.
Long Xiaoshan, barely holding up his body, stuffed several pills into his mouth one after another, pills that he had refined the day before. Although they were not as effective as the Lesser Qi Nurturing Pill, they were still superior-grade elixirs that could restore his strength.
Solidify!
The flas scorched the essence.
The moisture within the essence gradually evaporated.
The elixir pills began to condense...
Fragrant odors wafted out from the pill furnace in waves...
It’s done!
Long Xiaoshan stood up, forcefully slapped the top of the pill furnace, and with that, the lid flew off. Imdiately after, one pellet after another leapt out of the furnace and flew into his hand.
In the palm of his hand lay seven spirit pills, each the size of a dragon’s eye, completely milky-white in color. Within the white, striations of crimson patterns erged, and in the night, a faint halo of pill light radiated from them.
"Excellent dicine! Excellent dicine!"
Although he hadn’t taken any yet, just holding the pills in his hand, slling their fragrance, and examining their patterns, he could deeply feel the extraordinariness of the spirit pills.
The previous pills were indeed superior compared to ordinary dicinal pellets.
But compared with these true spirit pills, they were vastly inferior.
This feeling was like the difference between brass and gold; they seem similar from a distance, but when placed side by side, the disparity was enormous.
Moreover, producing seven in one go, especially on the first attempt using hundred-year-old dicine, was already perfect.
Long Xiaoshan was holding the seven Lesser Qi Nurturing Pills.
His eyes sparkled with brilliance. With these pills, breaking through to the Qi Introduction Fourth Layer was a matter of course.
He sat down again, took out the last remaining spirit stone, and began drawing out spiritual energy from it.
The alchemy process had exhausted him, but as the spiritual energy from the stone continually replenished him, his condition gradually returned.
Two Chinese hours later, the sky began to brighten slightly, and Long Xiaoshan was back to peak condition, although the spirit stone in his hand had dimd considerably. Explore stories at empire
He didn’t mind that and put away the spirit stone.
He took out a Lesser Qi Nurturing Pill, pinched one between his fingers, and placed it in his mouth. The pill instantly dissolved into a liquid that flowed down his throat.
Boom!
The violent potency of the dicine surged to life.
This dicinal power was far superior to that of the hundred-year-old spiritual dicine.
And so pure and domineering, the potency roiled and spread through Long Xiaoshan’s abdon. He imdiately activated the Longevity Technique and began to absorb the massive dicinal power, aiming to break through to the Qi Introduction Fourth Layer.
Under the assault of the dicine’s power, Long Xiaoshan’s dantian quickly swelled.
Since the Lesser Qi Nurturing Pill was a spirit pill, it naturally couldn’t just be compared to century-old dicine. At this point, consuming hundred-year-old dicine had little effect on Long Xiaoshan, but the Lesser Qi Nurturing Pill was a true cultivation pill.
Even in the pharmacopoeia left to him by Master Chang, it was one of the few spirit pill formulas available.
Under the effects of the Lesser Qi Nurturing Pill, Long Xiaoshan’s cultivation inflated as if it had devoured a dose of a tonic in spring.
After several cycles of flowing qi through his ridians, his cultivation quickly surged from the late stage of the Third Layer of Qi Drawing to the peak of the third layer.
The transition from the third to the fourth layer of Qi Introduction is fundantally different.
This was a major barrier.
Just as there is a difference between a Spirit Practitioner and a Spirit Master, ascending to the fourth layer ant becoming a revered Spirit Master. Even within the Sorcery World, it granted one a standing, and if one were to join a Taoist sect like Black Scale Gate, one could well serve as an Elder.
In the ancient martial circle, it represented the gap between a Huang Level Martial Artist and a Mysterious Rank Warrior, and might even be more difficult.
Because the path of cultivating Taoist arts was even more challenging than that of martial cultivation.
This was also why the Sorcery World was waning and not as strong as the ancient martial arts world.
Wave after wave of potent dicinal force hamred away.
The Longevity Art constantly circulated, challenging the barrier of the fourth layer of Qi Introduction.
The barrier was brutal, and after one Lesser Qi Nurturing Pill, it seed to barely yield, hesitating just shy of the threshold.
Long Xiaoshan clenched his teeth and decided to take another one.
If he had nothing else, he at least had plenty of pills. Last ti, he treated hundred-year-old dicine like cabbage, and now with seven Lesser Qi Nurturing Pills at his disposal, he could afford to treat them like jelly beans. His eyes flashing with determination, Long Xiaoshan took out and swallowed the second Lesser Qi Nurturing Pill.
As one wave settled, another surged.
The new dicinal power, like a raging torrent, enveloped the remaining power of the first pill and smashed against the barrier of the fourth layer.
Bang!
The barrier of the fourth layer finally shattered.
Powerful spiritual energy burst forth, shredding his clothes.
Waves of dicinal force penetrated Long Xiaoshan’s body.
They forced out impurities and transford his bones and blood.
The dantian expanded under the onslaught of dicinal power, swelling increasingly, with the dicinal force rapidly being converted to True Qi, enhancing Long Xiaoshan’s cultivation.
With each repeated absorption and consolidation...
Long Xiaoshan’s dantian finally ceased its expansion.
If before it was the size of a pond, it had now beco a lake, and that was the difference between the third and fourth layers of Qi-Refining. Both the quantity and quality of spiritual energy were many tis greater than in the third layer.
The streams of spiritual energy swirled as if they were a nebula.
Exhilarating!
Truly exhilarating!
Long Xiaoshan, feeling the abundance of spiritual energy, stood up, bellowed a long cry to the sky, feeling light as a feather without any weight, as if he could ride the wind away. He even felt that at a certain level of cultivation, he truly could traverse the heavens and the earth.
His body was filled with power, as if it had been reborn from the inside out, and the mighty force pulsing through him seed to have induced a trendous transformation.
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