Though it was only the results of the first stage, seeing Ouyang Chao ranked in third place was something Ouyang De could not accept no matter what.
In his heart, he had never once considered the possibility that Ouyang Chao would fail, let alone that he would be ranked third!
This ranking was not merely a humiliation for Ouyang Chao — it was a humiliation for Ouyang De himself.
Before the competition, his son had been the biggest favorite, with the highest expectations. Faced with praise and flattery from all sides, Ouyang De had savored every word of it, accepting it all without reservation.
If Ouyang Chao truly failed, then the entire Ouyang clan would become everyone's laughingstock.
Jiang Chen surged ahead in a league of his own, far outpacing the rest, and soon entered the fourth stage.
This fourth stage was a practical skills stage.
Practical skills naturally meant refining pills, cultivating spiritual medicine, and the like.
The practical skills stage comprised three tasks.
The first task was to cultivate a spiritual medicine seed. The requirement was to successfully grow the seed within three days, and it had to sprout. Completing this task was worth 20 points.
The second task was pill refining, worth 40 points. If the refined pill was low-grade, the contestant earned 10 points; middle-grade earned 20 points; high-grade earned 30 points; and supreme-grade earned 40 points.
The third task was comparatively more complex — it required inscribing an alchemy formation, and this was undoubtedly the grand finale of the entire assessment. It was also worth 40 points.
The scores of the three tasks combined totaled one hundred points.
Jiang Chen received his spiritual medicine seed and the allotted materials, then went to the cultivation area to inspect the soil and analyze it for a while. Only then did he return to the assessment area, make some slight adjustments to the provided materials, and head back to the cultivation area to plant the seed.
With that, he had completed the first step of the first task. Next, he would simply need to fertilize the seed at the appropriate times.
Jiang Chen calculated the timing, then moved on to the second task — refining Essence Restoration Pills!
Essence Restoration Pills were the most popular type of pill in Danqian Palace. Together with Spirit Stabilization Pills, they were the two most widely used pills in Danqian Palace, tied for the highest consumption rate.
Generally speaking, among the younger generation within the sect, not many could independently refine Essence Restoration Pills. To produce good ones typically required decades of dedicated practice.
Though Mu Gaoqi was self-taught, he possessed a natural Wood Spirit Body and had a gift for alchemy, making him one of the rare few who could refine Essence Restoration Pills independently.
As for some of the geniuses who had made it to the finals, this was almost certainly their first time facing the challenge of refining Essence Restoration Pills on their own.
As for Jiang Chen, he had never personally refined Essence Restoration Pills, but that did not mean he did not know how. He had simply never wanted to waste the time on it.
After all, he had received a thousand high-grade Essence Restoration Pills from Elder Yun Nie — more than enough to last him a very long time.
The materials for Essence Restoration Pills could produce roughly six pills per batch.
The competition required only that he submit the single highest-quality pill. For example, if a batch of six Essence Restoration Pills yielded even one supreme-grade pill, the other five could be complete failures and it would not matter at all.
Of course, the materials had all been specially marked, so using a pre-made Essence Restoration Pill to cheat was entirely impossible.
Jiang Chen entered the alchemy chamber and took out the Tiansuo Cauldron that Palace Master Dan Chi had gifted him.
"Palace Master Dan Chi gave me this cauldron with certain expectations. If I cannot use it to refine a supreme-grade Essence Restoration Pill, I would be doing this cauldron a disservice."
Jiang Chen thought to himself, but he did not rush. Instead, he mentally rehearsed the entire Essence Restoration Pills refining process once through visualization. After visualizing it, he ran through a mental simulation of the process.
Only after completing all of this did Jiang Chen begin the actual refining.
For the first attempt, he did not put all the materials into a single batch. Instead, he used only enough for one pill as a trial run.
The first pill that came out was high-grade.
Jiang Chen was not satisfied. He reviewed the details of the first refinement and started the furnace again.
By the third attempt, a supreme-grade Essence Restoration Pill was declared complete.
Essence Restoration Pills were not particularly complex. For such a common pill, many elders in Danqian Palace refined them in large batches.
Take Elder Yun Nie, for example — when he refined Essence Restoration Pills, he did so batch after batch, producing twenty to thirty pills at a time, and could still ensure they were mostly high-grade.
If one refined them carefully one at a time, the way Jiang Chen was doing, producing a supreme-grade Essence Restoration Pill was not particularly difficult. Even in batch production, Elder Yun Nie could achieve a twenty to thirty percent supreme-grade yield.
With the completion of the supreme-grade Essence Restoration Pill, Jiang Chen's second task was declared finished. Leaving the alchemy chamber, he went to fertilize the spiritual medicine once more.
After that, Jiang Chen rested briefly before entering the third task — the final task of this competition.
Once this task was completed, all the tasks would be finished.
Jiang Chen had performed the previous tasks to near perfection, with virtually no flaws. Most of those assessments were child's play for him.
However, this last task — inscribing the formation — did carry a degree of technical difficulty.
For Jiang Chen, the study of formations was something he had actually delved deeply into in his previous life. But in this life, he had not had much practical experience with alchemy formations.
Of course, this did not truly stump Jiang Chen. At most, it simply required a bit more of his time.
And time was the one thing Jiang Chen was least short of right now. He was nearly a full stage ahead of all the other geniuses. He had already entered the final task of the last stage, while many of the other geniuses were still stuck in the Mental Fortitude Stage.
At this moment, only a handful of geniuses had managed to reach the fourth stage at all.