Inside the pill-refining chamber, Yang Kai was drenched in sweat. Pill after pill emerged from his hands, and Zong Ao's eyes widened as he stared at Yang Kai without blinking.
When the sun dipped behind the mountains, the day's pill refining came to an end. Yang Kai collected the final pill, tossed it into the jade bottle without even glancing at it, and remained seated cross-legged on the floor. He pulled out another pill and swallowed it to restore his depleted Divine Sense.
Zong Ao moved with startling speed, striding directly to the jade bottle. He snatched it up and poured out the ten pills that had been refined today, examining each one carefully.
"How is this possible? How can this be?" After a moment, Zong Ao muttered to himself in a daze, his face full of disbelief. Those ten pills seemed to have dealt him a devastating blow, leaving the philosophy he'd held firm for a hundred years teetering on the brink of collapse.
His complexion turned pale. He stared blankly at Yang Kai, then let out a bitter laugh. As if all the strength had been drained from his body, he slumped to the ground.
Ten pills—and three of them had pill veins!
The probability was simply beyond Zong Ao's wildest imagination.
He was a master alchemist who had spent decades racking his brain before finally devising a pill-refining method based on sheer volume. He'd come to Rain Waterfall Star and, using the herbs supplied by the Heng Luo Trading Company, had spent nearly a century painstakingly refining pills—always dozens at a time.
Even so, only when his luck was exceptionally good would three pills with pill veins appear simultaneously. When fortune frowned, he sometimes got none at all.
But that kid had demonstrated an almost miraculous ability. Refining them one by one, fully thirty percent of his pills came with pill veins.
This wasn't a one-day fluke—it had been going on for nearly a month!
He refined exactly ten pills each day, no more, no less, and yet two or three of them developed pill veins every single time!
The impact on Zong Ao had been staggering.
From the time Yang Kai started refining Li Fire Pills until now, two months had passed. During the first month, he'd produced three hundred ordinary Li Fire Pills, and Zong Ao had ruthlessly mocked him for it, convinced the boy couldn't even produce pill veins—let alone pill clouds.
But starting from the second month, Yang Kai had bombarded Zong Ao's pride with the relentless force of facts.
On the first day of the second month, Yang Kai refined two Li Fire Pills with pill veins. Zong Ao had chalked it up to luck and offered a halfhearted compliment, his tone dismissive—he could do the same on a good day.
On the second day, the same thing happened. Zong Ao's contempt began to fade.
On the third day, it happened yet again, and Zong Ao could no longer sit still.
By today, he was nearly going mad.
A hundred years of conviction and philosophy had been smashed to smithereens by the pills Yang Kai produced day after day. Every shred of his pride had been stripped away.
If pill veins were this easy to produce, then what had he been doing all those hundred years?
All that effort, all that trouble to develop his one-of-a-kind volume-based refining technique—it looked laughably naive when compared to these pill-veined Li Fire Pills, one after another.
Gripping the still-warm jade bottle, Zong Ao's hands trembled. Regardless of the fact that Yang Kai was in the middle of recovery, he strode up to him and demanded urgently, "Boy, tell me—what secret does this old man not know? How can you produce so many pill veins?"
Yang Kai opened his eyes slowly and found himself staring into Zong Ao's bloodshot gaze, the whites laced with crimson veins—a clear sign of prolonged sleeplessness.
Zong Ao had been racking his brains this entire time, but he simply couldn't figure out what Yang Kai was doing. Making pill veins appear so easily had turned his eyes red—from exhaustion, perhaps, but also from jealousy.
"There's no secret. Just luck," Yang Kai said.
He had barely finished speaking when Zong Ao shot him a withering look. "This old man isn't an idiot—do you think I can't tell whether this has anything to do with luck? Stop being stingy with your knowledge, boy. Come clean, and I'll give you a reward."
He wished he could invade Yang Kai's sea of consciousness and peer directly into his thoughts.
Yang Kai shook his head. "Elder Zong, you know that every school guards its pill-refining techniques as treasures—they're not shared lightly."
"Blast it, boy! Didn't you once peek at my spirit arrays in my herb garden? Didn't you rummage through all the texts in my study? When did I ever say a single word about it?" Zong Ao bristled, his beard bristling with indignation.
"That's different, Elder Zong. Guiding juniors was your duty in the first place, and what I saw then was nothing but peripheral trivia—hardly worth mentioning. But my method for producing pill veins is the core secret of my lineage. How can you compare it to a few spirit arrays?"
"I don't care! If you don't tell me today, I'll crack your skull open and refine your soul!"
Shameless—actually resorting to threats!
Yang Kai inwardly sneered with contempt.