When Yang Kai burst into the valley, the old man refining pills detected him instantly. His brow furrowed, and a terrifying, soul-chilling force surged from his emaciated frame.
This valley was the forbidden zone of the entire Rain Waterfall Star — no one was permitted to approach, and no one dared. Today, of all days, some clueless brat had disrupted his peace.
Fury roared in his chest. He had no intention of letting this slide. He wanted to take Yang Kai's life right then and there, using the boy's death to warn others what would happen if they disturbed his pill refinement.
A mere nobody like Yang Kai wasn't even worth a second glance.
But just as he was about to strike, one of the pill furnaces arranged around him suddenly let out a strange noise. The old man's expression twisted with bitterness. He thrust a stream of Saint Yuan into the furnace to stabilize the chaotic medicinal liquid inside, muttering, "Pills are so damned hard to refine! Fine, fine — I'll let you live for a little while longer. I can't let you ruin an entire batch of good pills for me. Damn it, pills really are hard to refine!"
Muttering to himself, his hands constantly shifted through spirit seals, channeling his Saint Yuan into the various furnaces one after another. The space ring on his finger gleamed without pause as pre-prepared medicinal herbs were fed into each furnace — the quantities, the heat, and the timing all precise to the fraction.
More and more furnaces began emitting noise. The old man's expression remained composed, utterly devoid of panic, though his hands had noticeably quickened.
Half an hour later, a sharp gleam flashed in his deep-set eyes. Every pill furnace on the field hummed in unison, crisp sounds ringing from within as a rich, intoxicating pill fragrance wafted into the air.
With a wave of his hand, dozens of pill furnaces of varying sizes all opened at once. Pills of different sizes and colors — yet each brimming with spiritual energy — shot out like rain, landing in several jade bottles nearby.
*Tink, tink, clink* — the pleasant sounds rang out as three jade bottles were filled to the brim.
The old man showed no fatigue whatsoever. If anything, he looked quite excited. He rubbed his dry, gnarled hands, rushed over to the jade bottles, picked them up, and carefully inspected each pill that had just come out of the furnace.
"Nothing… nothing… still nothing…" With each pill he examined, the old man muttered a cryptic phrase, and the hopeful look on his face gradually faded away entirely, replaced by ever-deepening disappointment.
By the time he had finished checking all the pills — nearly forty in total — across the three jade bottles, he still hadn't found what he was looking for.
As though struck by some devastating blow, a look of despondency settled on the old man's face. He let out a heavy sigh. "Pills really are hard to refine. Why are there no pill patterns? Could it be that my method of quantity over quality is flawed? That shouldn't be!"
As he spoke, he tossed the jade bottles aside with a casual flick, as if they were worthless trash, not even sparing them a glance.
In the corner of the chamber, hundreds of jade bottles were stacked in a massive pile — no fewer than a hundred. Each one was filled with pills, and none of them was below the Saint King grade. Some of them were even Void-grade pills.
The old man sat down in dejection, pondering the gains and losses of his pill refinement, searching for the root cause of why he couldn't produce pill patterns. He thought and thought, scratching at his hair, making his already sparse white locks even thinner.
He sat in the same spot for three days and three nights, motionless as a dead man — only his eyes shifted between light and shadow, gleaming with the depths of contemplation.
Then, suddenly, a subtle wave of energy rippled from the medicinal fields outside. The disturbance broke through his reverie. He raised his head unhappily and looked toward the fields.
That was when he remembered — three days ago, an uninvited guest had shown up. He simply hadn't had time to deal with the boy at the time. Then he'd completely forgotten about him.
"Still here?" Suspicion flickered in the old man's eyes. He quietly sent out his Divine Sense to probe the outside. An instant later, he let out a soft murmur of surprise — he seemed to have discovered something quite interesting — and began paying attention to what Yang Kai was doing.
In the medicinal fields, Yang Kai sat cross-legged, his Divine Sense spreading outward in all directions like a tide.
Thread by thread, strand by strand, it sank into every inch of soil in the fields, probing the mysteries hidden within.
These medicinal fields hadn't been cultivated at random. Between each ridge and row, the principles of spirit formations were subtly embedded. Every plot of land was a different spirit formation, drawing on its power to gather the spiritual energy of heaven and earth, accelerating the growth of the spiritual herbs and medicinal plants within and shortening their years of maturation.
A medicinal herb planted here for fifty years could possess a hundred years of age — or even more.
Yang Kai didn't know whose handiwork this was, but it had to belong to the master of that palace — the alchemist hiding inside!
He poured himself entirely into studying the medicinal fields, deciphering the spirit formations hidden within them, completely lost to the world.
Yang Kai had studied many spirit formations before, all gleaned from the Alchemy Truth. On the Profound Sky Continent, these formations had greatly aided his pill refinement.
But the Alchemy Truth was, after all, a product of the Profound Sky Continent alone.
The Star Field possessed its own unique spirit formations.
Each had its advantages and drawbacks. As Yang Kai studied the formations hidden in the medicinal fields, he quietly compared them against the ones he already knew, discarding the weak and keeping the strong — and his gains were enormous.
The old man inside the palace saw this and immediately understood what Yang Kai was doing. After a moment's thought, he suppressed the killing intent in his heart and chuckled softly. "Fine, do as you will. You're actually someone with potential!"
He recalled the hardships he had endured back in his youth, learning the art of alchemy.
To study each new spirit formation, he had traveled across mountains and rivers, sought out renowned masters, endured scornful looks and mocking words, been turned away at the door more times than he could count, and been shown the exit as a matter of course.