At the referee's command, the round officially began.
The two Pill Kings participating in the wager were both sealed inside isolation barriers. Outsiders could see in, but those inside could not see out.
This way, there was no need to worry about plagiarism.
Jiang Chen, across both his past and present lives, was most familiar with alchemy. The moment the isolation barriers activated, he slipped into his zone immediately, forgetting both self and surroundings.
Forty-eight types of spiritual medicine materials kept surfacing in his mind, ceaselessly forming combinations. Jiang Chen's brain worked like a high-precision computer, rapidly cycling through every possible arrangement.
For Jiang Chen, this was as routine as eating or sleeping.
The forty-eight materials were all of modest grade—merely Saint-grade spiritual medicines. Saint-grade corresponded to the Yuan Realm of martial artists.
True Saint-grade was what corresponded to actual Saint-level powerhouses.
And among these forty-eight spiritual medicines, those of True Saint-grade were pitifully scarce—only a mere seven or eight at most.
Those seven or eight materials, however, obviously could not be combined into a viable pill formula.
Jiang Chen's mind raced. With two lifetimes of alchemy experience, the one thing he never lacked was expertise. He knew these spiritual medicines as intimately as his own fingers.
Countless thoughts and inspirations flooded in.
Several pill formulas surfaced in Jiang Chen's mind in an instant.
However, none of these formulas were particularly high in grade. They barely qualified as quasi-True Saint-grade, which was not the result Jiang Chen wanted.
"This round is extremely strict. As long as the pill itself is high enough in grade, it wins. So what matters here is height, not precision."
Jiang Chen understood the rules—higher-grade pills won automatically. Only when grades were tied would they compare the precision of the pill's refinement, its purity and intrinsic quality.
Jiang Chen's gaze swept over the spiritual medicines once more. Once, twice…
This round lasted one full hour. Crafting a pill of excessively high grade wasn't realistic. But if it was too low, there was no guarantee of success.
Suddenly, following his train of thought, inspiration struck like a flash of lightning.
Over these past days, he had studied the Bizarre Pill Style extensively, devoting considerable time to it. And wasn't the Bizarre Pill Style famous for its bizarre materials and unusual formulas?
The most direct pursuit of the Bizarre Pill Style was to use strange and unexpected ingredients—methods no one would think of—to refine pills that everyone recognized.
The Bizarre Pill Style pursued cost efficiency. For the same pill, the Bizarre Pill Style might use less than half the materials that others would.
The Bizarre Pill Style, with its uncanny craftsmanship, could often take cheap, common materials and refine them into high-end pills. Time and again, it produced miracles—turning stone into gold, transforming the mundane into the extraordinary.
This was the greatest charm of the Bizarre Pill Style. Without it, the style could never have become such a distinguished school within the Dao of Alchemy, driving countless alchemists mad with devotion and turning them into die-hard fans.
In plain terms, the Bizarre Pill Style used unusual ingredients and pursued uniqueness—but its ultimate goal was to save costs through special techniques and maximize the potential of every pill.
Many Pill Kings possessed excellent technique and formidable skill in alchemy. But most of them shared one problem: they wasted an enormous amount of materials.
When refining high-grade pills, they piled on batches upon batches of premium spiritual medicines.
Because their skill was superb and their success rate high, they rarely failed—so even with the waste, it was still what set them above their peers.
But the Bizarre Pill Style hated failure above all else.
If a pill could be completed using Saint-grade materials, they would never use True Saint-grade materials. That was the charm of the Bizarre Pill Style.
Their pursuit of cost savings had reached a level of near-madness.
Following this line of thinking, it did not take long for numerous inspirations to bloom in Jiang Chen's mind.
Suddenly, the name of a pill jumped to the forefront of his thoughts.
Three Lives Pill!
This Three Lives Pill could form three pills within the body—Earth, Wood, and Fire.
The so-called "Three Lives" referred to a triple-cycle pill. Earth gives birth to Wood, Wood gives birth to Fire, Fire gives birth to Earth…
This Three Lives Pill was different from the grand Five Elements cycle. It was an internal triple-cycle that could allow martial artists who cultivated Earth, Wood, and Fire-type divine abilities to instantly recover their true qi.
Any martial artist—even an emperor-level powerhouse—did not possess an inexhaustible supply of true qi in their qi sea.
Martial artists refined qi, and qi was a consumable resource. In battle, during long-distance travel, and even during cultivation, true qi was consumed in massive quantities.
Even a Titled Great Emperor, if engaged in a fierce battle and forced to unleash powerful techniques and divine abilities, could experience true qi exhaustion.
The Three Lives Pill was precisely a pill for replenishing true qi.
Of course, its target audience was highly specific—martial artists who cultivated Earth, Wood, and Fire-type divine abilities. It was tailor-made for them.
And most remarkably, the Three Lives Pill had no grade restrictions. Yuan Realm experts could use it, Saint Realm experts could use it, and Emperor Realm experts could use it as well.
Who used it depended entirely on the pill's own grade.