Chapter 195 – War Breaks Out! The Gourd Spirit Weapon and the Crushing Might of a Fifth Rank Martial Artist - Part 3
With time to kill, Li Yuan struck up a casual conversation with Hua Yanmeng. After a while, he steered the topic toward Cleverseed Garden. He asked questions, and she answered openly, which gave him a clearer understanding of this world.
It turned out there were indeed cultivation pills here. However, they differed from what he’d read about in certain novels before crossing into this world. In those stories, spiritual herbs absorbed mystical energies from heaven and earth. In this world, however, plants usually thrived on Yin or Yang, meaning they needed to be grown near meat fields or ghost domains. Ordinarily, normal plants couldn’t survive in such places.
Cleverseed Garden specialized in selecting unusual plant species that could endure those conditions, cultivating them, and then handing them off for further refinement and eventually pill concocting. However, Cleverseed Garden only handled growing and harvesting; the actual alchemy was the Holy Tree Temple’s domain.
In past years, that connection had been severed, so Cleverseed Garden had dried and stored their herbs, hoping to preserve them. Fortunately, the dried plants remained usable, so when the Holy Tree Temple recently reestablished contact, the garden handed over everything in exchange for resources and an extra slot to study their life chronicle.
From daily exposure, Hua Yanmeng had learned the names of various pills. She counted them off on her fingertips for Li Yuan.
“Blood spirit pill, fasting pill, rejuvenation pill, clear mind pill, and breakthrough pill...
“The blood spirit pill, for instance, just one pill contains the essence of over five kilograms of demonic beast meat. The stronger the demonic beast, the harder the pill is to refine. Demonic beast meat doesn’t store well without freezing or special preservation, but the blood spirit pill only needs a simple ceramic container. It’s incredibly convenient to carry and keep.
“As for the fasting pill, once you swallow it, the medicinal power seeps out slowly, letting you go ten days or half a month without food. Granted, a sixth rank master like you would probably burn through it too fast for it to matter, but for most martial artists, it’s extremely helpful. It frees them to focus on closed-door cultivation without worrying about mundane needs.
“The rejuvenation pill is basically its namesake. It’s a pill that keeps ordinary people looking young. You have to take one every year for it to work.
“The clear mind pill helps clear the mind, banishing stray thoughts and making cultivation or meditation far more effective.
“Finally, the breakthrough pill... it’s by far the priciest and rarest of them all, containing a powerful surge of blood essence that can help martial artists push through to the next rank. But if the breakthrough fails, the user is left weak and vulnerable. As with the blood spirit pill, the higher the rank, the more difficult it is to produce and the more expensive it becomes.
“These pills aren’t mass-produced. They almost never appear on public listings; outsiders usually can’t buy them without connections.”