Chapter 29 : Pill Chamber
Chapter 29: Pill Chamber
Within this month, the System would not be stirring up trouble.
Faced with these rare days of peace and quiet, Long Tao wished he could split every hour in half and use it twice.
The moment he stepped out of his residence, he immediately headed straight for the peak summit with a clear destination—the Pill Chamber.
The Pill Chamber on the Main Peak was no small operation with just a few furnaces set up.
It was a vast complex of buildings stretching as far as the eye could see, its scale comparable to factories from his previous life.
From the inside out, the hierarchy was strict.
The most central chambers refined the sect’s most closely guarded, top-tier pill treasures.
Not to mention an Outer Sect Disciple like him—even ordinary Inner Sect Disciples would not get to bask in the warmth at the doorway.
Long Tao was thoroughly familiar with the route and made his way to the lowest-tier Pill Chamber.
Rather than calling it a chamber, it was more like a large open shed.
Dozens of the most basic—some even somewhat dilapidated—pill furnaces were arranged in three rows.
Many low-level disciples like him were busy around the furnaces.
The scene looked exactly like walking into the “New Oriental Culinary School” of his previous life, except what simmered in the pots were not dishes, but various “pills” of bizarre colors and suspicious smells.
He had not come today to waste spirit herbs.
He was here to complete another preparatory step before his breakthrough.
“Long Tao? What wind blew you into the Pill Chamber today?” A familiar voice rang out.
Long Tao turned his head, smiled as well, and said,
“Wang Hanxiong? Why are you hiding out here too? Planning to switch careers and become an alchemist?”
The one greeting him, Wang Hanxiong, was a fellow sufferer who had entered the menial disciples’ courtyard in the same batch as him five years ago.
They were close in age and on good terms—the kind who could borrow a bit of money from each other in a pinch.
“Isn’t that so?” Wang Hanxiong patted the pill furnace beside him and sighed.
“Cultivation’s got no great prospects for me in this life. I’ve got to learn a skill to secure a stable living in the sect. After thinking it over, alchemy seemed the most practical. At least I won’t starve. What about you? Came here just to smell the medicine?”
“Don’t even mention it,” Long Tao sighed as well, though his tone carried a hint of drive.
“I’m planning to push for the Sixth Layer. I came today to get the ‘Nine-Vortex Return Flow’ step done, so…”
“Oh…!” Wang Hanxiong suddenly understood and broke into a grin.
“Looking for a warm place to mooch some heat, right? Hah! When I broke through this stage, I came here too! Fine—just stay by my furnace. This one still has to burn for a while. I can even keep an eye on things for you.”
“Great! You’re a real one!” Long Tao did not stand on ceremony and directly found a spot next to Wang Hanxiong, sitting down cross-legged.
The “Nine-Vortex Return Flow” he mentioned was the next step after using “Resonating the Viscera” yesterday to force impurities out.
Put simply, it meant using his will to control the nine streams of spiritual energy in his dantian, making them rotate and interweave along the specific pattern of “three following, six reversing,” ultimately forming a preliminary mist of spiritual energy within the dantian.
It sounded mysterious, but for a Fifth-Layer Qi-Refining disciple, as long as one was patient and proceeded step by step, the difficulty was not that high.
The only fatal part was that in the latter half of the process, one would feel as if they had fallen into an ice cellar—their entire body turned icy cold, with body temperature plummeting sharply.
Without a warm environment for protection, at best one would freeze stiff and fail; at worst, cold energy would invade the body and damage the foundation.
Therefore, for ordinary disciples like them who had no means to arrange warming jade or a Li-Fire formation, the ever-burning furnaces in places like the Pill Chamber or Artifact Workshop became the sect’s tacitly approved best “heaters.”
The process that followed was simple to describe but required grinding patience bit by bit.
Difficult to say? Not really—just follow the steps in order.
The only irritating thing was that this Pill Chamber was far too noisy.
Dozens of furnaces roared, while voices, furnace explosions, and complaints blended together, sounding like a marketplace brawl.
Fortunately, disciples like Long Tao who had been tempered among menials had long mastered the ability to “find stillness amid chaos.” He took a deep breath, quickly sank his mind inward, and began carefully guiding the nine unruly streams of energy within his body.
When every strand of spiritual energy completed its rotation and interweaving according to the manuals, he finally felt a very faint, very thin mist-like spiritual energy forming in his dantian.
It was extremely pure.
If he had not used Resonating the Viscera yesterday to shake the impurities out of his body, there would be quite a lot of impurities in his dantian right now, which would be very troublesome to remove afterward.
At this point… the first preparatory step for breaking through to the Sixth Layer of Qi Refining—vortex condensation into mist—was considered complete.
He opened his eyes to see Wang Hanxiong smiling at him, seemingly quite satisfied as well.
“How long did I take?”
“A little over an hour and a half.
That was pretty good this time—no mishaps at all.”
“Well… after practicing for so long, if something still went wrong, I might as well forget about Foundation Establishment.”
“Haha, the hard bones to chew are still ahead!” Wang Hanxiong patted him.
“But the important thing now is to hurry back and stabilize your qi meridians.
Listen to your big brother—take a full day off tomorrow, rest well, and don’t even think about the next step until at least the day after. Don’t rush it!”
Long Tao nodded.
What Wang Hanxiong said was exactly the rule Elder Wu had droned on about eight hundred times in the large lectures.
Every time one passed a stage, they had to spend a full day carefully “inspecting the goods,” checking whether the foundation results were stable and whether the body had any hidden injuries.
If problems were discovered at this time, one could still seek sect seniors for adjustment and remediation.
But if one charged forward blindly and only caused a major disaster later on, the trouble would be enormous—possibly beyond even immortals to save.
His future was too important; Long Tao dared not joke about it.
Just as he packed up and prepared to leave the sweltering Pill Chamber, a fierce argument suddenly erupted from the other end of the shed.
The volume was outrageously loud, forcibly suppressing the roaring furnace fires and low murmurs throughout the room.
For a moment, only the two arguing voices and the furnaces were still “speaking.”
Long Tao was standing far away and could not hear what they were arguing about.
Wang Hanxiong beside him also looked curious.
The two of them simply moved a few steps closer and asked a fellow disciple who was watching with great interest.
“Senior Brother, what’s going on over there?” Wang Hanxiong asked.
The fellow disciple, seeing someone inquire, immediately caught the gossip-sharing mood and said animatedly,
“Oh, it’s people from Blade-Tempering Peak and Zhiying Peak! They were originally talking about the sect grand competition four months from now. Somehow it got dragged back to that thing from three years ago. You know, right? That time, Blade-Tempering Peak lost to Zhiying Peak in the end… and well, one thing led to another and the fire got stoked!”
As the two argued more and more fiercely, spit nearly flying onto the furnaces, the onlookers around them began chattering about that highly controversial final match from three years ago.
This old score was indeed a perennial topic of after-meal discussion among the disciples.
But how could Long Tao have the mood to care about who won or lost? His head went “buzz,” leaving only four blood-red words pounding in his mind—Sect Grand Competition!
What did that mean? It meant the stage was set! It meant the spotlight was about to shine! It meant… that Child of Destiny, Nan Yuchen, was about to show off before the masses and start posturing! And even more so… it meant System Tasks would definitely be coming again.
Long Tao dared to bet his own life—barely preserved for a few days—that when the time came, that damned System would absolutely pop out on schedule and issue some garbage tasks with sky-high difficulty coefficients, like “Check in at such-and-such arena” or “Ensure Nan Yuchen defeats such-and-such Senior Brother”! Damn it… the bit of good mood he had built up from his smooth breakthrough earlier vanished instantly like green smoke blown away from a furnace.
He forced himself to think positively.
The sect grand competition… at most involved Foundation Establishment disciples fighting on the stage.
It would not involve Golden Core-level existences.
If he worked harder and got a bit of dumb luck, maybe he could muddle through? No matter what, it could not be more life-threatening than peeping at a Golden Core True Person bathing, right?
“Hey! Long Tao!” Wang Hanxiong nudged him, clearly still immersed in the gossip.
“You tell me—three years ago, who do you think really won? Didn’t we argue about it back then too?”
Long Tao was struggling to recall what nonsense he had spouted while joining the ruckus three years ago when suddenly a gust of wind swept through—the elder on duty at the Pill Chamber arrived upon hearing the commotion.
Without another word, the elder used his fan-like hands, one in each, and lifted the two flushed, arguing disciples like chicks.
With a “whoosh,” he tossed them straight out the door, shouting along the way, “What are you all staring at? Go back and watch your furnaces! If they explode, who’s responsible?”
That shout conveniently blew away the vague fragments of memory in Long Tao’s head as well.
He immediately lost interest and could not be bothered to ponder that old chestnut any further.
“Whoever won, won,” he waved at Wang Hanxiong.
“I’m heading off. Going back to rest.”