Xia Ningshang had been given an important role. Not only did she now have her own independent pavilion, but she also had several young, beautiful, and nimble maidservants attending to her daily needs. All she needed to do was focus on refining pills for the Crimson Moon Lord.
Everything was going exactly as Yang Kai had predicted.
"Miss Xia, these materials have been allocated to you by the Lord. She hopes to see finished pills within one month." Inside the pavilion, a maidservant in green robes extended a space ring toward Xia Ningshang.
"Give it here." Yang Kai smiled, taking the space ring from her.
The green-robed maidservant's delicate brows furrowed slightly, clearly reluctant, but she didn't refuse outright and gently placed the ring in Yang Kai's hand.
Yang Kai swept his spiritual sense over it and chuckled. "Why are there only this many materials?"
"Only this many? This is already forty sets of Void-grade pill ingredients." The green-robed maidservant frowned.
"Mm, it's a bit thin. Can we get more?" Yang Kai asked.
"We could, but… the other masters in the residence only receive this same amount each month. Any more than that, and they simply wouldn't have time to refine them all."
"How can those people be compared to my little senior sister!" Yang Kai curled his lip with undisguised contempt. "Go fetch more materials. The more, the better."
The green-robed girl looked helplessly toward Xia Ningshang. Truthfully, she didn't much care for Yang Kai. Rumors about him being nothing but a pretty boy who lived off women and was a shameless philanderer had long since spread throughout the entire residence.
No woman could have a favorable impression of a man like that.
He already had a woman who was an Alchemy Grandmaster, yet that wasn't enough for him — he'd even extended his claws toward Lady Shan Qingluo. And the tragic thing was, Lady Qingluo seemed to have been blinded to the point where she couldn't see through this shameless man's true nature, couldn't perceive the filthy soul lurking beneath his handsome exterior.
Nearly everyone in the residence felt sorry for Shan Qingluo, lamenting that such a beautiful flower was willingly sticking itself into a pile of cow dung. It filled them with indignation and grief.
Now Yang Kai was talking as though the sky itself wasn't high enough. This only deepened the green-robed maidservant's distaste for him.
However, the Lord seemed inclined to favor this newly arrived Alchemy Grandmaster, so she couldn't simply refuse. She could only look to Xia Ningshang for guidance.
"Let it be as my junior brother says," Xia Ningshang said softly. "If the Lord asks about it, just tell her I requested it. She won't refuse."
"Yes!" The green-robed maidservant nodded reluctantly.
"Oh, one more thing — what's the usual pill success rate among the masters in the residence?" Yang Kai asked.
"Twenty percent!" the green-robed maidservant answered flatly. "Out of ten sets of materials, they succeed twice."
"Understood. Many thanks!" Yang Kai clasped his fists with a smile.
The green-robed maidservant studied him intently, as though she had something she wanted to say. But after hesitating for a long while, the words never came. She merely offered Xia Ningshang a courteous apology and turned to leave.
"That girl really seems to hate me," Yang Kai remarked, watching her retreating figure with an easy laugh. He understood perfectly well why she wore such a look of loathing toward him, but he wasn't about to take it to heart.
"Junior brother, is what we're doing perhaps… not quite right?" Xia Ningshang gazed at Yang Kai with worry.
"How is it not right?"
"They're Void-grade materials, after all — they're quite valuable. Doing this is essentially swindling materials from the Crimson Moon Lord…" Xia Ningshang sounded uneasy, tinged with guilt.
"That's not right at all," Yang Kai shook his head. "Think about it, little senior sister. That girl just told us the other masters in the residence succeed at roughly twenty percent when refining Void-grade pills. That means eighty percent of their materials are wasted. But you're different, little senior sister. If you refine at full capacity, I won't even say a hundred percent success rate — eighty or ninety percent is the bare minimum. The occasional failure is no big deal. All you need to do is convert those materials into thirty percent finished pills, and for the Crimson Moon Lord, that's already an enormous profit. We'd simply be skimming a little for ourselves — it benefits everyone."
"What you're saying is true, but it still doesn't feel right to me." Xia Ningshang pressed her red lips together lightly.
Despite feeling in her heart that she and her junior brother were behaving like thieves, she wouldn't refuse if Yang Kai asked her to do it.
The two soon threw themselves into the great undertaking of pill refining.
For Xia Ningshang, the process of refining pills was itself a form of Cultivation — it was an enjoyment, not a chore. She had already reached the first level of the Void Return Realm, and after studying the Alchemy Dao Compendium, her accomplishments in the art of alchemy were already far beyond ordinary. On top of that, her successful refinement of a pill that manifested a pill cloud in Huiyue City had been a tremendous gain, providing her with deep insight. Her current understanding of alchemy was something even Yang Kai admired.
Set after set of materials were converted into finished pills under her hands, with remarkable efficiency.
Yang Kai was far from idle either. He was experimenting with the final pill-consolidation techniques described in the Alchemy Dao Compendium. If his experiments succeeded, a single set of materials would yield not just one pill, but multiple.
One could only imagine the impact such a breakthrough would have on the field of alchemy as a whole.
It would be nothing short of a groundbreaking advancement.
Unfortunately, Yang Kai still had no clear leads for the time being. He could only continue refining pills while studying the Alchemy Dao Compendium side by side.