Vessel of Worlds

After returning from Xianglu Peak, Andy spent nearly every day flying to the White Deer Archive. The cultivation world had accumulated tens of thousands of years' worth of bizarre histories, wondrous materials, and exotic techniques, and Andy was deeply interested in all of it. He also hoped to find some clue in the texts about the Heaven and Earth Bowl or the ancient characters from his past life. On top of that, he didn't dare take out the bowl to nurture pills in his stone dwelling, so he threw himself into reading instead.

The White Deer Archive—also known as White Deer Cave—was built inside a natural cavern on Bailu Peak, occupying nearly half the mountain's interior. It was far more spacious than all of Newcomer Valley.

Unfortunately, only the first floor was open to outer-sect disciples. The second floor and above were restricted to inner-sect disciples and Foundation Establishment cultivators.

Even so, the first floor's collection was staggering—tens of thousands of volumes. Roughly half were recorded on jade slips, with the rest written on paper, beast hide, silk, and other materials. Even with Andy's near-perfect memory and ability to skim at ten lines per glance, working through the entire collection would take him a good year or more.

After several days of casual browsing, Andy sorted the first floor's holdings into four broad categories.

The first was foundational cultivation technique manuals. There were over a thousand volumes covering more than a hundred different varieties of Qi Refinement foundational techniques, including several for Variant Spirit Roots. Every one of the dozen-odd foundational techniques Andy had seen at Liuyun Market was here. A major sect with thousands of years of accumulation behind it—even the foundational technique library was comprehensive beyond measure.

But none of them were useful to Andy. The Art of the Chasing Wave he was currently practicing had been in circulation for over a thousand years and was widely recognized as one of the fastest foundational techniques to cultivate. He would never be foolish enough to switch. Though the Archive held many techniques, the ones most practical for the majority of cultivators were still the same dozen or so that were most widely known. Andy skimmed the opening of each and moved on.

The second category consisted of reference texts on common materials, spirit herbs, and notable cultivation sites. There were quite a few of these, though the overlap between volumes was considerable. Andy selected a dozen or so of the most detailed ones for careful reading and set the rest aside.

The third category covered talisman crafting, artifact forging, alchemy, and formation techniques. These were the fewest in number—only about a hundred volumes—and all were rather superficial in their coverage. Yet these were precisely the most practical texts, and Andy read every last one without exception.

The fourth category was biographical and anecdotal works—accounts written by cultivators about the strange encounters and peculiar phenomena they had experienced during their cultivation careers, along with personal commentaries on various matters. These were the most numerous and the most disorganized. They were also the ones Andy read most of.

Among them, one ancient jade slip titled On Pills by Wang Lun caught his attention in particular. It had been written by a cultivator named Wang Lun some ten thousand years ago, containing his observations on the properties and effects of various pills. The dozen-odd pills mentioned in the slip were all unknown to Andy—they had likely vanished from the cultivation world ages ago. But Wang Lun's system for grading pills fascinated him.

In the jade slip, Wang Lun divided pills into four grades: Waste-grade, Sub-grade, Standard-grade, and Supreme-grade.

Waste-grade pills were the product of catastrophic refining errors—the medicinal properties had been fundamentally altered, producing toxic pills that must never be consumed. Sub-grade pills resulted from slightly imprecise temperature control or mistimed extraction, leaving the pill with almost all its potency lost. Sub-grade pills had virtually no effect when consumed, and taking too many could actually build up a resistance in the cultivator's body. They were largely useless.

Standard-grade pills were what people normally meant by "pills and elixirs."

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These first three grades aligned roughly with what Zhang the Pill Appraiser at Liuyun Market's Wondrous Pill Hall had described. But Wang Lun went further, proposing a fourth grade—the Supreme-grade pill—and the description stopped Andy cold.

According to the jade slip, in ancient times, if an alchemist happened to be using spirit herbs of exceptional age and potency, there was an extraordinarily slim chance—roughly one in ten thousand—of producing a Supreme-grade pill. Only an alchemist who had spent an entire lifetime refining the same one or two types of pills, accumulating tens of thousands of batches, might have a chance of witnessing a Supreme-grade pill come into being. The overwhelming majority of alchemists went their entire lives without ever knowing such a thing existed, let alone ordinary cultivators.

Wang Lun had also described what a Supreme-grade pill looked like: brimming with spiritual power, several times—even more than ten times—that of a Standard-grade pill, with a notably more translucent quality, appearing semi-transparent.

Andy's heart lurched. This description matched almost exactly the pills nurtured by his mysterious bowl. Could what he had been producing all this time actually be Supreme-grade pills?

The jade slip also noted that Wang Lun himself had never taken a Supreme-grade pill, but had heard from cultivators who had. According to them, using a Supreme-grade pill merely to boost cultivation was a waste of its extraordinary potency. The pill's true value lay in breaking through bottlenecks—taking one at the critical moment of a breakthrough dramatically increased the chances of success.

Andy nodded to himself. What this cultivator from ten thousand years ago had recorded aligned perfectly with his own experience. Whenever he consumed a bowl-nurtured Supreme-grade pill during cultivation, he almost never encountered the sensation of hitting a bottleneck. As long as he had accumulated sufficient spiritual power, the breakthrough came naturally. This was precisely why he had been able to rocket from the fifth layer to the eleventh layer in just over three years. For other cultivators, the tenth-layer bottleneck alone could stall progress for two or three years.

Now certain of the Supreme-grade pill's remarkable properties, Andy adjusted his approach to pill consumption. Going forward, he would use ordinary pills—upgraded from Sub-grade—for his daily cultivation sessions, relying on them to steadily build his spiritual power. He would save the Supreme-grade pills specifically for when he needed to push through a bottleneck to the next layer. This way, he could avoid building up a tolerance from overuse of Supreme-grade pills, which might cost him a crucial breakthrough opportunity.

About a month after joining the sect, Andy received the formal notice he had been expecting: he was assigned as an artifact disciple and ordered to report immediately to Artifact Master Kuang on Zhaoyin Peak.

That old Ma actually kept his word. Took the spirit stone and delivered exactly what he promised. Andy reflected on this as he flew toward Zhaoyin Peak. He could respect a straightforward exchange of interests—it was far easier to deal with than the two-faced hypocrites who smiled to your face while scheming behind your back. Unfortunately, the latter were never in short supply.

After a flight of several shichen, Andy arrived in the vicinity of Zhaoyin Peak, which was wrapped in dense, roiling clouds. He was immediately drawn to the peak's signature feature—Zhaoyin Spring. At the foot of the mountain, countless streams flowed from cracks in the rock face and converged into a spirit spring, one of the three great spirit springs of the Kuanglu Mountains, renowned for its crystal-clear, jade-like water and its pure, sweet taste. Several flourishing spirit tea trees grew around the spring, producing the famous Cloud Mist Spirit Tea. A small, elegantly crafted four-cornered pavilion stood beside the water, where from time to time a few tea-loving cultivators would gather in small groups, brewing Cloud Mist Spirit Tea with Zhaoyin Spring water, sipping and discussing the path of cultivation—a thoroughly pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

Andy spotted two Qi Refinement cultivators already waiting in the pavilion, presumably also newly assigned artifact disciples. One of them he recognized—it was Ma Gao, the same young man who had first mentioned the "four great cultivation families of the Taixu Sect."

Ma Gao recognized him as well and called out a greeting from a distance. Andy landed beside the pavilion and put away his Flying Plume.

"Brother Zhao, you were assigned as an artifact disciple too?" Ma Gao greeted him with a bow.

Andy returned the bow to both cultivators. "I was. I take it you both were as well?"

"It seems we're fated to cross paths. We should look out for each other from here on. Brother Zhao, this is Brother Fang Fu. Brother Fang, this is Brother Andy Zhao." Ma Gao made the introductions.

Andy and the cultivator surnamed Fang exchanged clasped-fist salutes, each saying the customary "a pleasure."

Ma Gao added: "I arrived a little before you two and already sent a Message Talisman up the peak. A passage should open any moment now. This Zhaoyin Peak lives up to its reputation as one of the sect's key artifact forging and alchemy sites—the large-scale formation that shrouds the entire peak is kept active year-round. They say even a Core Formation cultivator couldn't easily break through it."

The three of them gazed up at the cloud-wrapped mountain before them, each lost in their own thoughts, and for a time no one spoke.