Chapter 128: Seventh Grade Pills
Xiang Yu’s consciousness materialized within his spiritual sea. He glanced around, noting that the sea of qi had grown a little since his last visit, stretching a few meters further in each direction.
Without hesitation, he stepped into the sea. The moment his form made contact, a refreshing sensation washed over him—like plunging into a mountain spring after days of exhaustion. The qi-enriched currents swirled around him, dissolving his mental fatigue and clearing his mind.
Xiang Yu made his way toward the center where his soul infant floated peacefully. The miniature version of himself bobbed gently on the surface, eyes closed, completely oblivious to his presence. Studying the tiny being, Xiang Yu couldn’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment.
"Hey, wake up. Time to pay the bills lil bro," he spoke.
The infant remained motionless. But after Xiang Yu shook it a little, its eyelids fluttered open momentarily. It gazed around with unfocused eyes until settling on Xiang Yu’s face—then promptly closed again, returning to its slumber.
Xiang Yu sighed deeply, his expectations deflating. He had harbored such high hopes for this guy, imagining the extraordinary capabilities it might possess. But reality proved far more mundane—the infant did nothing but eat and sleep all day. Still, he reminded himself, its experience hadn’t even reached one percent completion yet. Perhaps patience was required.
Accepting the current limitations, Xiang Yu left the soul alone and settled into his meditation position, focusing his mind.
As his concentration deepened, something unexpected occurred. The soul infant slowly awakened, its tiny eyes blinking open. It observed with interest as spiritual energy gathered around Xiang Yu’s meditating form.
Slowly, the infant floated toward him, positioning itself directly before Xiang Yu’s cross-legged figure. After studying his posture with childlike curiosity, it began mimicking his form—trying once, twice, three times before successfully assuming the lotus position. Not stopping there, it imitated Xiang Yu’s qi circulation patterns, creating a matching energy flow around its diminutive body within seconds.
Hours passed in harmonious synchronization, until Xiang Yu’s internal alarm prompted him to end his meditation. As his eyes opened, he found himself staring directly into the awakening gaze of his soul infant. The sight of qi circulating around the small being stunned him—it had been perfectly mirroring his cultivation technique!
A theory instantly formed in his mind. He summoned his system interface:
[Mind: Level 5 (240/5000)]
[Soul: Infant (80/100,000)]
The results shocked him. His experience points had doubled overnight! Normally, his solo practice yielded sixty mind experience and twenty soul experience, but with the infant’s participation, these numbers had doubled. This unexpected synergy offered tremendous cultivation potential.
"Looks like you aren’t so useless after all," he remarked with appreciation, only to discover the infant had already returned to its unresponsive state.
After tapping it several times without response, Xiang Yu realized the small being had completely exhausted itself. He gently lifted the tiny form and placed it back into the nourishing waters of the spiritual sea. Through their connection, he could sense its energy slowly recovering.
Once satisfied with its condition, Xiang Yu withdrew from his spiritual sea.
...
In the shimmering waters of the spirit spring, Xiang Yu opened his eyes, consciousness returning to his physical form. His first instinct was to check on his roommate—the wild boar still paddling aimlessly through the spiritual waters, completely oblivious to the extraordinary environment it inhabited. The creature seemed fundamentally unchanged despite days of exposure to concentrated spiritual energy.
"Still no signs of transformation," Xiang Yu murmured, observing the animal’s mundane movements. "Perhaps not every creature has the potential to become a spirit beast."
He rose from the spring, water cascading off his body as he stepped onto the stone floor of the cavern. After quickly drying himself, he donned fresh robes. According to his planned schedule, it was time for pill and weapon refining—particularly crucial given yesterday’s bloodline training had depleted his entire supply of eighth-grade healing pills.
His breakthrough to seventh-grade alchemy had bestowed him with several new pill recipes, including an improved version of the healing pill. However, he had decided not to refine seventh grade pills at the moment.
"The seventh-grade herbs are too precious to waste on experiments with such a low success rate," he reasoned, "especially when the eighth-grade pills work perfectly fine for my current needs." Xiang Yu nodded to himself. "If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it."
He traversed the spacious cavern, harvesting the herbs he needed to refine the eighth grade pills. After gathering what he needed for pill refining, he visited his personal garden.
Kneeling beside the plots, he irrigated them with water collected from the spirit spring, watching with satisfaction as the plants seemed to stretch toward the liquid, absorbing its energy. Each seedling displayed remarkable vitality, their leaves vibrant with qi.
Not forgetting his roommate, Xiang Yu gathered some low-level herbs and tossed them into the spring for the boar.
Returning to his workspace, Xiang Yu retrieved his alchemy furnace, positioning it carefully on a flat stone surface. Before committing to a full production session, he decided to test a few things that were nagging him.
He began by refining several ninth-grade pills, followed by eighth-grade pills, and despite his earlier reservations, even attempted a small batch of seventh-grade pills.
As the final pill cooled in his palm, Xiang Yu’s lips curved into a satisfied smile. The experiment had confirmed his hypothesis about success rates in alchemy. Just as he had theorized, enlightenment and mind level established the base success rate—with his Superior Enlightenment and Level 5 Mind, his base rate was forty percent.
And with each breakthrough in alchemy proficiency, the success rate doubled for pills of lower grades, he concluded. At eighth-grade alchemy, the success rate for ninth-grade pills was eighty percent. Now at seventh-grade alchemy, it had reached one hundred percent.
Of course, this didn’t guarantee absolute success. External interference or deliberate errors would still cause failure. But since his cultivation environment remained controlled and his technique disciplined, such failures seemed unlikely.
For eighth-grade pills, his success rate had improved to eighty percent. For the newly accessible seventh-grade pills, he calculated a forty percent chance of success—respectable, but still too wasteful for the rare ingredients they required.
The Abyssal Void Flame materialized at his command, its dark energy enveloping the furnace in perfectly controlled heat. Xiang Yu worked with unwavering focus, each movement precise, each ingredient measured exactly. After some time, he had successfully produced two hundred eighth-grade healing pills.
He thought to himself that they should be enough for two days of bloodline training, carefully storing them in jade containers within his spatial ring. By then, his alchemy would have advanced again, increasing his success rate further and reducing resource consumption.
Though the improvement from eighty to one hundred percent might seem marginal to some, Xiang Yu took such efficiencies seriously. The spirit vein’s resources, while abundant, weren’t infinite.
Although he hadn’t spent much, he didn’t want to go rogue before he figured out how to grow them at a faster rate. At the rate at which the young ones were growing, if he finished the mature ones, he would have to wait a long time before a new batch matured.
His gaze drifted to his garden again, evaluating the nearly mature herbs. He could harvest them immediately for low-level pill refining, but he decided to give them an extra day just to be safe.
With his personal supply secured, Xiang Yu turned his attention to ninth-grade pill production for the sect. He didn’t do this because he was such a nice elder, in fact the sect was already being overloaded with pills, he did this mostly for the love of the game(farming exp)...
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Author’s Corner:
Last Chapter this month.
PS: Same time next month