Han Li extended two fingers and deftly plucked one of the beads from the box, holding it up before his eyes.
After studying it for a long while, he placed it back and slowly closed his eyes.
A picture from the jade slip surfaced in his mind.
A fist-sized orb radiating five-colored light, with a dozen or so smaller beads floating around it.
These beads were identical to the one Han Li now held in his hand.
That orb hidden within the five-colored glow was no stranger to Han Li — it was none other than the Heaven-Mending Pill that had flown out of the Void Heaven Cauldron.
Such a bizarre picture was one of the very few illustrations in the jade slip that carried no accompanying explanation whatsoever, lending it an air of deep mystery.
When Han Li had first caught sight of this image while scanning through the jade slip at the Cunjin Pavilion, his shock had been beyond words.
That was precisely why he had been willing to part with an additional talisman treasure in order to trade for this jade slip from Old Jade. Otherwise, per his original intention, a mere bottle of pills would have sufficed.
Aside from this illustration, the other pictures in the jade slip that lacked any text were equally strange. Some depicted items resembling magical artifacts or spirit treasures, while others portrayed what looked like exotic beasts or ghosts — all things Han Li had never laid eyes on before.
Considering that the Heaven-Mending Pill was among them, these eerie pictures likely pointed to items of extraordinary significance.
Han Li committed every image to memory with care — who knew when he might encounter the others in the future? When that time came, he would naturally treat them with the utmost gravity.
Yet for now, staring at the beads in the box, Han Li found himself in something of a quandary.
There was no doubt that these five-colored beads were intimately connected to the Heaven-Mending Pill; otherwise they would never have appeared in the same illustration.
Given that these beads had been refined from the ashes of Ji Xuan's bones — and Ji Xuan had possessed a Blood Jade Spider — the question arose: could this other rebellious disciple of Old Devil Xuan Gu have once entered the Void Heaven Cauldron as well, obtained a Heaven-Mending Pill, and consumed it?
That would explain why his bones had turned five-colored after death, and why firing them with flame had produced these beads.
Drawing on Han Li's extensive experience with pills, it was most likely that the medicinal essence of the Heaven-Mending Pill had either failed to be fully absorbed or had been too potent, requiring the body to recondense and refine the residual energy into a new form.
In that case, perhaps these beads were the true Heaven-Mending Pill in the fullest sense.
Otherwise, why would they be depicted so prominently in the illustration?
Using a cultivator's body as a living pill furnace to gestate medicinal pills — while this method was exceedingly rare in the modern world of immortal cultivation, Han Li had witnessed it firsthand. The Black Fiend Religion's "Blood Condensation Five Elements Pill" was one such ghastly and tyrannical technique.
But all of this was merely Han Li's own speculation. He naturally would not rashly swallow one on the spot.
After a moment's thought, he rose and left the secret chamber, heading toward the insect room.
The insect room was no longer the simple affair it had been back in Sky Star City. Han Li had carved out five stone chambers of varying sizes within it.
Two of them were dedicated to raising two separate batches of Gold Devouring Beetles. One batch comprised the tens of thousands of beetles that had displayed their fearsome power in the Void Heaven Hall, devouring large swarms of Iron Fire Ants. The other batch consisted of the nearly one thousand select beetles he had brought from his Sky Star City dwelling. Han Li had deliberately housed them apart.
It seemed — though he was not entirely sure — that devouring so many Iron Fire Ants had triggered something. The tens of thousands of beetles appeared to have entered another round of evolutionary breeding, with some already beginning to devour each other. For Han Li, this was a welcome surprise.
The remaining chambers housed his lone surviving Blood Jade Spider in one, the Howling Soul Beast — which did nothing all day but snore away in sleep — in another. The last was set aside for the Gold Thread Silkworms he had collected during his time in the Void Heaven Hall.
The Blood Jade Spider required no further comment. As for the Howling Soul Beast — though Han Li possessed the Soul Resonance Pearl, he still felt an uncomfortable chill whenever he thought about it and had not dared to refine the pearl. He had simply set the matter aside for the time being. At least the creature seemed perfectly normal.
The Gold Thread Silkworms — when Han Li had gathered them, it had not been a whim. These exotic insects were listed among the ranked奇虫, the wondrous bugs of the cultivation world.
Though their ranking was quite low — far below even the Blood Jade Spider, sitting at the very bottom of the list — the Gold Thread Silkworm was a second-stage evolutionary creature that few cultivators knew about.
Given sufficient time, they had the potential to evolve into a flying insect known as the Phantom Flame Moth. This creature was in an entirely different league from the Gold Thread Silkworm — it ranked seventeenth on the wondrous insects list and possessed an innate ability to cast illusions.
The records were frustratingly vague about just how powerful this ability was. It seemed that even in ancient times, the Phantom Flame Moth had been exceedingly rare, and no detailed account survived.
Still, a seventeenth-place ranking spoke for itself. Even if there were some exaggeration, the creature was undoubtedly formidable.
That was why Han Li had ignored the puzzled looks from the other old monsters and carefully collected those half-dead Gold Thread Silkworms.