Breaking through to the Spirit Realm wasn't exactly a difficult thing for Jiang Chen. As long as he wanted to, he had an eighty to ninety percent chance of doing it within a month.
However, even though Jiang Chen was pressed for time, he didn't want to rush things that carelessly.
The pill he intended to refine this time was called the "Five Dragons Open Heaven Pill."
The name sounded quite domineering. In reality, it was a pill designed to open and shape the Spirit Sea.
Jiang Chen certainly had better pills at his disposal, but given the current conditions of the Tiangui Kingdom, the Five Dragons Open Heaven Pill was already the absolute limit of what was feasible.
For anything better, Jiang Chen couldn't gather the necessary ingredients, nor did he have the confidence to successfully refine it.
The Five Dragons Open Heaven Pill was what Jiang Chen considered the most suitable option right now — and the one he had the best chance of successfully refining.
The batch of quality materials he'd extorted from Lü Wuji last time happened to be exactly the ingredients needed for this pill.
Jiang Chen knew full well that the success rate of this pill wasn't high, so he'd demanded a full ten sets of materials with an outrageous price. That way, he'd have enough room for failure.
The so-called Five Dragons Open Heaven Pill — the "five dragons" actually referred to the five primordial qi of metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. Within the human body, these five qi existed innately, corresponding to the five primordial organs.
The "five dragons," as the name implied, meant cultivating these five qi and channeling them like dragons.
"Open heaven" meant opening the Spirit Sea.
Using the five primordial qi, channeling them like dragons, to open the primordial Spirit Sea — that was the origin of the pill's name.
Jiang Chen knew clearly that even in the Tiangui Kingdom, this pill most likely didn't exist.
If it ever appeared on the market, it would absolutely cause a frenzy.
Of course, Jiang Chen wasn't stupid enough to release such a pill into the market.
This was different from the Divine Show Creation Pill and the Blue Sea Pill — those were merely supplementary pills.
But the Five Dragons Open Heaven Pill was different. In the larger worlds and grander planes, this pill was generally a must-have for anyone entering the Spirit Realm.
First, this pill could guarantee a ninety-nine percent success rate, ensuring that True Qi Realm martial artists attempting to break through to the Spirit Realm wouldn't encounter any accidents.
Guaranteeing no accidents during a Spirit Realm breakthrough — if that were to appear in the Tiangui Kingdom, it would be absolutely revolutionary.
After all, in the Tiangui Kingdom, peak True Qi Realm experts were as numerous as oxen hairs. But among those who attempted to break through to the Spirit Realm, fewer than one in a hundred survived.
Some didn't dare to try, fearing failure and death — body destroyed and dao extinguished.
Some had missed their prime years and knew success was impossible, so they gave up.
Some attempted it but failed, ending up either dead or crippled.
And only a tiny handful of lucky ones succeeded in breaking through, transcending the mortal to enter the Spirit Realm, becoming the kind of Spirit Realm powerhouses that all True Qi Realm martial artists envied and looked up to.
"Until true qi transforms into spirit, you're nothing but a worm."
That was an absolute truth of the martial path.
The Spirit Realm represented transcendence from the mundane, the first step into true mastery.
The True Qi Realm, on the other hand, meant you hadn't shaken off the shackles of the mortal world — you were still just a mortal. No matter how powerful your martial prowess, it was ultimately limited, and your lifespan compared to Spirit Realm cultivators was nothing.
So the Five Dragons Open Heaven Pill, with just this one function alone, would be enough to send the Tiangui Kingdom into a complete frenzy.
But for the Five Dragons Open Heaven Pill, guaranteeing the success rate of a Spirit Realm breakthrough was merely its most basic function.
The pill's most important function was stimulating the five primordial qi, channeling them like dragons to shape the Spirit Sea, break through to the Spirit Sea, unleash the potential of the Spirit Sea within the body, and excavate the innate talents hidden in that Spirit Sea.
This function was the Five Dragons Open Heaven Pill's greatest feature.
From Jiang Chen's encounters with those Purple Sun Sect disciples, he could tell that while Spirit Realm powerhouses held an overwhelming advantage over the True Qi Realm, their shaping of the Spirit Sea had clearly not been very successful, and their excavation of talent was extremely one-dimensional.
From beginning to end, he'd almost only seen those Purple Sun Sect disciples use water-attribute talents.
And water-attribute talent was merely one of the five primordial qi — just a single type among many.
In the greater world, in grander planes, a martial artist who could only unearth one or two talents was practically at the very bottom — a nobody, a third-rate fighter.
Even if such a person reached the Spirit Realm, they were most often the lowest-quality martial artists with the poorest backgrounds and the harshest conditions — the poor-background martial artists.
These martial artists had no means of obtaining quality pills. They relied solely on their own grueling effort and instinctive cultivation to open their Spirit Sea.
Such martial artists were invariably the lowest existences in the cultivation world.
"The poor pursue literature; the rich pursue martial arts" — this saying was by no means baseless.
The martial path, without a family fortune, without money, without powerful economic backing — fall one step behind, and you'd be behind for life.
Unless you were a rare genius of truly shocking talent who could crush the scions of great families through sheer, jaw-dropping natural ability. Such extraordinary poor-background martial artists did exist, but they were exceedingly rare — like finding a needle in a haystack, a chance encounter that couldn't be sought.
Jiang Chen right now, compared to those sect disciples, was a poor-background martial artist.