An Alchemist's Path to Eternity

In the cultivation world, pills were divided into nine tiers. The first three were the ones most people had heard of, the wondrous spirit pills and miraculous medicines that circulated through the lower reaches of the world. From the fourth tier onward, however, their medicinal properties became far more profound, and such pills were collectively known as Golden Pills. Even at the ninth tier, the name remained, though pills of that tier were more often called Nine Revolutions Golden Pills.

Among the nine tiers, fifth-tier pills occupied a special place. They carried a mark of divinity that none of the lower-tier ones did, and those who could speak of them called them divine pills or sacred medicines; all were said to contain a measure of the fortune of heaven and earth. It was this that gave rise to the title of Saint Alchemist in the Central Continent of the Mountains and Seas Realm, for only those capable of refining sacred medicines were worthy of such a title.

Luo Chen faintly remembered how he had once declared, in the reckless confidence of his younger days, that he would one day stand shoulder to shoulder with such figures. At the time, it had been nothing more than a young man’s boast, words spoken without any real weight behind them. He had never imagined he would one day find himself actually attempting to reach that point.

Still, if an undertaking like this could be easily accomplished, any random cabbage could become a Saint Alchemist.

A month later, a violent roar sounded from the Primordial Unity Cauldron atop the mountain’s highest peak. The medicinal force within had broken free of the restrictions, and the shockwave burst outward in a circular ripple that swallowed everything in its path.

BBOOOOOMMM!!!

Luo Chen’s sleeves snapped out, deflecting most of the blast, but enough of the remaining force caught him to send him hurtling backward several hundred zhang. The Profound Dust Armor he wore surged to life, a layer of qi armor rising around his body to absorb the last remnants of the shockwave.

He drifted back down slowly, and his expression darkened with every passing moment. The failure had come faster than he had expected. Worse than that, it had come at the very first stage, during the decomposition and fusion of the ingredients, a mistake so basic that it was difficult to accept.

The cause traced back to the primary ingredient. The Jade Palace Vermilion Fruit had not yet developed sentience, but the force contained within it was far purer than its raw appearance suggested, and that purity had become the very thing obstructing the refinement.

He pushed through the dying shockwave to the cauldron, waved away the nauseating stench still curling off the failed batch, and directly climbed inside to see what had gone wrong. Not long afterward, he emerged carrying a large pile of charred dregs. He spread them across a jade plaque he had prepared beforehand and began studying them carefully.

Several days later, Luo Chen’s expression eased slightly. ”The technique and steps are both correct. The problem is somewhere in the minor details. Since the system let me reach the Beginner level, it must believe I can refine this successfully. I just need to work through the details more carefully.”

With that, he sank into thought once more.

***

Half a month later, the refinement began once again. This time, Luo Chen slowed down every movement when decomposing and melting the medicinal ingredients. Not only that, he fully activated his Spirit Eyes, determined not to miss even the smallest change.

The Spirit Eyes he had practiced to Perfected Mastery in his youth had played a tremendous role throughout his cultivation journey. Whether in formations, alchemy, cultivation, or combat, they had repeatedly aided him in different ways. Now, as he attempted to refine a fifth-tier pill, they proved even more indispensable.

Even so, the first step alone consumed three full months before he managed to scrape through it. By then, his eyes were swollen and bloodshot from the strain. Yet he could not afford to rest. Once the refinement of a Law Scrutiny Pill began, it could not be paused for any reason whatsoever, so all he could do was push through the discomfort and move on to the next step.

This pill could not be refined through a single technique. Its formula required three different approaches to work in concert: water and fire had to be balanced against one another, while a qi-type technique was needed to guide the final transformation. Fortunately, none of the three were unfamiliar to him. Fire-element techniques had always been Luo Chen’s strength, and after refining Imperial Nectar and Black Sovereign Paste over the years, he had also become proficient in water-element techniques. With all three approaches under control, the refinement proceeded steadily through the stages that followed.

Another three months later, Luo Chen’s eyes brightened with anticipation. ”They’re almost fully fused. All that’s left is to use the Qi Control Art and complete the refinement.”

But as the tension in his mind loosened for the briefest instant, a low hum sounded from within the cauldron.

”Uhhhh...”

Luo Chen froze. Before he even examined the cauldron, he already knew something had gone wrong. Sure enough, when he sent his divine consciousness inward, he found that the pill embryo had failed to take shape. Without a stable form, it could not gather spirit energy.

”I was so close. I only had one step left!”

Luo Chen gritted his teeth, his heart filled with unwillingness. But no matter how unwilling he was, he could only swallow it down.

In the end, he returned to the work that followed every failed refinement. After cleaning the cauldron, he gathered the medicinal dregs and studied the remnants of the failed pill, tracing the process back through each step he had taken. He had repeated this process too many times to count over more than a century of alchemy, and he carried it out with the calm patience of someone who understood that failure was only another part of refinement.

***

It was still the same scene and the same mountain. Fifteen years had passed since Luo Chen entered the Land of Fallen Devils, thirteen since he entered the Alchemy Realm, and two since he stepped into the fifth trial. And it had been more than a year since he began refining the Law Scrutiny Pill. During this time, he had used the cauldron seven times, and it had ended in failure every time.

Each failure had exposed a different problem. Sometimes he mishandled the primary ingredient. Sometimes the medicinal energies fused unevenly. Other times, the strain of holding everything together for so long wore down his focus until a single slip ruined the whole attempt. There were also times his mana ran short at the wrong moment, or the switch between his Golden Core and his Nascent Core was done out of rhythm.

The most serious failure came during his latest attempt, when a partially formed Law Scrutiny Pill exploded inside the cauldron. The released medicinal force battered its walls so violently that the entire mountain trembled. Had the Primordial Unity Cauldron been an ordinary enchanted-treasure cauldron, it would have been destroyed by that explosion.

Although Heaven Refiner had left behind backup equipment for exactly this trial, Luo Chen had never considered using it. The Primordial Unity Cauldron was his life-bound treasure and the best alchemy tool he could possibly have; he would see this through with it or not at all.

The backlash from that explosion took him more than half a month to recover from. During that time, he also had to nurse the cauldron back to health.

Once both he and the cauldron had recovered, he sat cross-legged on the peak once again, and he let his mind drift back over everything from his past attempts. He reflected not only upon the causes of his past failures, but also upon the gains he had obtained throughout. When refining pills beyond one’s own tier, even failure could become part of the path forward.

The first of these gains was that the Withering-Flourishing Fire Sprite had become increasingly lively. As Luo Chen called upon it, an azure flame rose above him and formed into an azure fire tree. The fire tree swayed gently, spitting sparks as branch after branch extended outward. Before long, the tree’s radiance spread into a broad canopy above him, while streams of light fell from its branches and gathered around his body.

Luo Chen felt the vigorous vitality contained within the flame and smiled. The Withering-Flourishing True Fire had grown immensely stronger after devouring countless Sourceless Flame fire sprites in Blazing Purgatory, but for a long time, its power had been too scattered for him to control fully. Only after more than a decade of pill refinement in the Alchemy Realm, along with several failed attempts at the Law Scrutiny Pill, had his control finally caught up to its strength. Now, commanding the flame felt as natural as moving his own limbs.

He formed a hand seal; a branch of the azure fire tree swept through the air, and the ripples spread across the void before it. Seeing this, he felt immensely satisfied. ”This is the true power of the Withering-Flourishing True Fire! If I face Liu Jun again, even without the advantage of Blazing Purgatory, this fire alone can give me close to even odds. Against an ordinary Sage, it would be devastating.”

When he released the hand seal, the azure fire tree sank back into his body. This was only the first benefit. The second lay within his sea of qi, where a crimson Golden Core and a pure-white Nascent Core revolved around one another, like yin and yang in perfect balance. As he cultivated according to the Heavenly Phoenix Nirvana Scripture, the mana from the two cores flowed together when needed, yet each could also act independently without disrupting the other. This seamless coordination had come from one of his earlier failures, when the two sources of mana had fallen out of rhythm and caused the pill to collapse.

Truthfully, he had never thought much about the switch between his two cores in the past. Whenever the Nascent Core ran low on mana, he simply drew upon his Golden Core instead, treating the change as a matter of course. It was only after that weakness disrupted one of his refinements that he began carefully regulating the flow between them. By now, the two cores could respond to one another without the slightest delay and function together as a single whole. There was still a distinction between them, but it no longer had much practical significance.

Once he advanced to the Nascent Soul Realm, Luo Chen was fully confident that he could use this art to condense a second Nascent Soul. If he succeeded, his strength from the moment of his breakthrough would surpass that of any ordinary Sage. At the very least, his second Nascent Soul would not be weaker than the Sage-level puppet Han Zhan had once controlled.

The third gain was the Primordial Unity Cauldron itself. Each of the seven failed attempts to refine the Law Scrutiny Pill had damaged it in a different way. Luo Chen had repaired and nourished it after every failure, and as he did, he noticed signs that it was advancing further. More unexpectedly, its power to restrain and control had increased severalfold.

After examining the changes closely, he realized that some of the medicinal ingredients meant for the Law Scrutiny Pill had been absorbed during the failed refinements, allowing the cauldron to undergo this transformation. By now, he could no longer say whether he was refining the pill or whether the cauldron was using the pill to refine itself.

When he finally snapped out of his reflections, he let out a long breath. The gains he had made were real, but none of them could replace the Law Scrutiny Pill. ”What use are these gains? As long as the Law Scrutiny Pill remains unfinished, none of them truly matters. Haih, I wonder if this next attempt will succeed?”

For the first time, he found himself doubting the pattern he had deduced from the system years ago. Until now, he had believed that success would inevitably come within ten attempts, but a fifth-tier pill was far beyond anything he had previously understood about alchemy. He could no longer assume that the same rule would hold.

With that uncertainty weighing on him, Luo Chen began his eighth attempt atop the same peak.