Chapter 50 — Seeking a Method

Back at the West Wind Courtyard, Zuo Yan was utterly dejected. He had thought he had found a way to make a fortune, only to discover it was the moon in the water, visible but beyond reach. For days on end he was listless. No spirit crystals to be earned, no contribution points to be gained, no sword art to practice—in his helplessness, Zuo Yan had no choice but to throw himself into bitter practice of the Embryonic Breathing Spirit Refinement.

In the stone chamber's spirit vein, Zuo Yan woke from meditation. The Embryonic Breathing Spirit Refinement, which had always advanced with astonishing speed, had lately begun to stall—the first time such a thing had happened since he broke through to the first breath. Was he about to break through to the second breath?

According to the records in the Embryonic Breathing Spirit Refinement, after the first breath came the second. If he could reach the second breath, not only would every acupoint in his body be able to breathe, but his whole aura could then be drawn inward, so that even cultivators of far higher cultivation than his own would be unable to detect him.

This method was far superior to the techniques for concealing and restraining one's aura recorded on Senior Wei Nan's jade slip.

At that thought, it struck Zuo Yan: Senior Wei Nan had also refined pills, and had also been a spirit-herb cultivator—might he have run into the same problem? The moment the idea came, he hurried to dig out the jade slip and examine it closely.

Sure enough, he soon found something.

Among the pill-refinement experience Senior Wei Nan had summarized, Zuo Yan found a similar method—except that Senior Wei Nan had not used fire refinement, but the rather rare water refinement.

The methods of refining spirit pills were countless and varied; the most mainstream today was naturally the use of the pill furnace, that is, fire refinement. The core of fire refinement was to use the power of fire to draw out the spiritual power within the ingredients, so that spiritual powers of various attributes would blend with one another and form a spirit pill. But many spirit herbs and spirit medicines were of a cold, yin nature—the water-born spirit herbs, for instance—and fire refinement would destroy their medicinal power. In such cases other methods were needed, water refinement among them. Beyond water and fire, there were many other refining methods as well, beyond counting.

Water is gentle by nature, far less fierce and forceful than fire, and so water refinement generally takes a long time, following the path of warming and nurturing the pill.

Only now did Zuo Yan understand that the cold spring in the stone chamber had such a wondrous use; he had previously ignored that spirit spring entirely. He had even wondered why Senior Wei Nan should have bothered to carve a spring into the stone chamber, when once a cultivator reached Foundation Establishment his need for food and drink became all but negligible.

The jade slip recorded a method by which Senior Wei Nan had used the Lesser Cloud-Rain Art to refine Moistening Pills. The Moistening Pill was a pill that could not be graded at all, and its effect was worse than useless: it could improve a person's complexion and skin, but only for cultivators of the third layer of Qi Refining and below.

This pill, which in Zuo Yan's eyes was utterly without use, had, once Senior Wei Nan refined it with the Lesser Cloud-Rain Art, entered the first grade as a spirit pill. Its efficacy rose accordingly, and it could improve the complexions of cultivators up to Foundation Establishment. According to the jade slip, this became one of Senior Wei Nan's important means of amassing wealth. But because water refinement took too long, Senior Wei Nan had used it only for a time before switching to other methods.

Unlike Zuo Yan's haphazard groping, Senior Wei Nan's explorations had been thorough, and his records were correspondingly clear.

Senior Wei Nan believed that the greatest key to combining the two lay in water. The Lesser Cloud-Rain Art was a quintessentially water-element art, and paired with water refinement it naturally brought out the best in each. The slip also recorded a great deal of his analysis of the causes of failure.

Zuo Yan read on, word by word, sentence by sentence, and the more he read, the clearer his thinking became. No wonder he had been able to refine Strength Pills! The Scarlet Flame Art was of fire, and the Grain-Avoidance Pill was made by fire refinement; when the essence of the sun drawn in by the Scarlet Flame Art was transformed into the Grain-Avoidance Pill, it became a Strength Pill.

There was only one key to it all.

—And that was fire!