Vessel of Worlds

Following the text's instructions, Andy regulated the intensity of the Innate True Fire with precision. After roughly an hour, he finally caught a thread of the Qi-Gathering Powder's medicinal fragrance drifting from the furnace—the sign that the pills were about to take form. He waited a moment longer, then withdrew the flame and eagerly lifted the furnace lid.

A rich wave of medicinal fragrance billowed out.

"Inferior pills," Andy muttered, disappointment plain on his face. The furnace had produced a dozen-odd pills the size of beans, but almost nothing remained of their spiritual energy and potency—a batch of inferior Qi-Gathering Powder.

Most likely he had opened the furnace slightly too early, before the pills had stabilized, letting the spiritual energy escape along with the medicinal essence. So Andy reasoned.

There was still time. He began the next batch.

Again the meticulous control—but this time with greater patience, waiting until the fragrance from the furnace grew richer still before withdrawing the Innate True Fire.

Yet when he opened the lid, a whiff of scorching greeted him. Inside the furnace was not a single formed pill—only blackened dregs.

Worse than before: a furnace of utterly useless, even harmful, waste.

And so it went. Andy ruined five batches in a row before the sixth finally yielded a dozen-odd Qi-Gathering Powder pills. He refined another seven or eight batches, succeeding with two, which brought his success rate up to roughly twenty percent.

Qi-Gathering Powder was reputed to be the easiest of all pills to refine, and his success rate couldn't even reach thirty percent—a distinctly talentless showing. As far as he knew, Liu Yingying, an alchemist of the most junior rank, managed better than sixty percent with the same pill.

A bleating cry, like a goat's, sounded from several kilometers away. The first beast had come calling.

Andy stopped his refining at once, mounted the Wind-Treader Dragon, and sped toward the sound.

Moments later he spotted an enormous crab, all over red and five or six zhang across, waving two colossal pincers as it hauled itself up onto the island.

It spared Andy a single glance where he hovered, then ignored him entirely, making straight for the Heavenly Fragrance Beguiling Formation.

"A Supreme Yang Crab—the very first catch, and it's a rank-five!" Andy said softly. He took out a red formation disc crackling with threads of lightning and struck a seal into it, activating the Heavenly Thunder Earth Fire Formation.

In an instant, thunder and lightning erupted all around the great crab, while fire serpents burst from a dozen points in the ground, all converging to pen the beast inside the array.

Before the crab could react, Andy shook his sleeve, and twenty or thirty balls of light rained down onto the ground behind it, unfolding into twenty or thirty life-sized puppets.

The moment they touched down, at Andy's command each drew from the hide bag on its back a mid-grade spirit tool—shield or bow.

The puppets formed three ranks. The eight nearest the crab gripped shields two-handed, raising overlapping defensive barriers that sheltered themselves and the puppets behind. The two rear ranks all held longbows of various kinds.

Another command flowed through Andy's spiritual sense, and the bow-wielding puppets drew as one, loosing volley after relentless volley at the great crab.

Spiritual light of every color took shape as fire serpents, golden blades, wooden spears, ice spikes, water arrows, and needle-sharp barbs, sweeping down on the crab like a collapsing sky. The spectacle was terrifying.

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The barrage was the equal of twenty or thirty Foundation Establishment cultivators casting spells in unison—even the rank-five crab's great bell-round eyes filled with an almost human terror.

The crab's maw gaped and spewed a cloud of fiery mist that wrapped its body round, while its two pincers whirled in a frenzy, batting attack after attack aside.

But the fire of twenty-odd ceaselessly loosing bows was simply too dense. Most of the attacks crashed into the crab's fiery mist—which, remarkably, held.

After the crab weathered two or three full volleys, Andy—intent on a quick kill—hesitated no longer and deployed the high-grade spirit tool, the Blazing Heaven Blade. Hovering in midair, he gripped the hilt in both hands and swung with all his strength.

A fire dragon over ten zhang long, claws bared and fangs snapping, leapt from the blade and streaked at the crab.

The crab panicked. Abandoning all defense, it scuttled sideways on all eight legs to flee. In the sea, its speed might truly have saved it—but on the little island, the fire dragon was plainly far faster. It swept over the crab, devouring the fiery mist entirely and laying the beast's body bare.

In that moment another wave of golden blades and ice spikes arrived. The crab's pincers whirled madly, but could turn aside only half of them.

Soon the crab's body had been punched through with a dozen great holes by the golden blades and ice spikes wrought of spiritual power, and it died where it stood.

Andy rummaged through the carcass and drew out a fiery-red orb about a cun across—the beast's rank-five core.

Then he produced a small black bottle and, using the Soul-Drawing Technique, slowly extracted the beast's soul and sealed it inside.

The Soul-Drawing Technique demanded a strong spiritual sense; as a rule, only mid-stage Foundation Establishment cultivators could wield it. But Andy's spiritual sense far outstripped his rank. During his half year of flight, he had taken up the technique on a whim—and mastered it without any great difficulty.

He still didn't know what marvels a high-ranked beast's soul might serve, but he wasn't about to squander heaven's gifts. Since beast souls fetched high prices and sold briskly, a use would present itself in time.

Andy glanced once more at the crab's carcass, shook his sleeve—a flash of silver—and severed the pair of colossal pincers at the root, storing them in his pouch.

The crab's remaining materials were beneath his notice. A light flick of his finger sent a fireball to reduce the carcass to ash.

He gathered up the twenty-odd puppets, shut down the Heavenly Thunder Earth Fire Formation, and withdrew into the concealment formation at the island's heart to continue his study of alchemy.

Not long after, a rank-four beast crawled up onto the island. This time Andy never touched the Blazing Heaven Blade—a single ferocious volley from the puppets destroyed it with ease.

He collected its core, soul, and choice materials, then returned once more to the concealment formation.

In this fashion Andy remained on the little island for five days, in which seven or eight beasts came ashore—and every one was slain.

By his estimate, the Heavenly Fragrance Beguiling Formation had by then drawn in every beast within several hundred kilometers. So he struck the formations, packed everything away, and left the island on the Wind-Treader Dragon.

A few days later he established himself on another similar islet, spread his net of heaven and earth once more, and quietly awaited the beasts.

With the Heavenly Fragrance Beguiling Formation and his puppet corps, Andy's hunting efficiency was staggering: a few days on a single islet yielded what other cultivators earned through a year or more of bitter toil.

A mere half year passed, and Andy had gained nearly a hundred beast cores of ranks three through five, along with a rich hoard of rare materials. Common beast materials no longer even merited his glance—they burned to ash along with the carcasses. Had any other beast hunter witnessed that, he would have howled at the waste.

Beyond this, after burning through great quantities of raw material in relentless practice, Andy's alchemy had made modest progress. He now began using rank-three cores to refine Foundation-Nurturing Pills—a medicine that advanced the cultivation of early-stage Foundation Establishment cultivators, perfectly suited to his current realm.

The Foundation-Nurturing Pill required three kinds of rank-three cores as primary ingredients. Two were fairly common around Island Five, and Andy held plenty of both. The third was exceedingly rare in these waters; he had only seven or eight, all bought in the market—enough for a mere seven or eight furnace attempts. Hence he had dared attempt the pill only after gaining real confidence in his craft.

This was exactly why Andy had begun his alchemy studies with the lowest Qi Condensation pills: their ingredients were cheap and plentiful, free for him to practice on at will. And while his skill climbed, he accumulated a great heap of "byproducts"—low- and mid-tier Qi Condensation pills and inferior pills alike, from Qi-Gathering Powder and Spirit-Clearing Pills up to the finer Marrow-Cleansing Pills, in no small quantity.

The pills were useless to Andy now—but throwing them away seemed too great a pity. He found several wooden boxes and packed them all away.