Chapter 73: Boiling Stone and Cooking Gold to Refine the Grand Profound

At this very moment, inside the dim fire room.

After basically refining the Bait Stone Pill, Lu Yuan felt the extra wisp of True Qi within his body and was pleasantly surprised.

A wisp of True Qi formed by Refining Essence into Qi requires ten days to refine under the supply of a large amount of pills and medicinal materials.

He had anticipated that the effect of the Bait Stone Pill would not be bad, but he had not expected it to be this strong!

"This medicinal power is about four or five times that of a Leopard Fetus Essence Pill, and this is only a low-grade one."

The hard work of this night was completely worth it; he exhaled a breath of turbid air, his heart surging, feeling incredibly invigorated:

"If one Bait Stone Pill can refine a wisp of True Qi, then if I pop hundreds or thousands of them, wouldn't I be able to reach the perfection of Refining Essence into Qi very quickly!?"

In this world, Spiritual Machine does not exist, and relying solely on refining his own essence and Qi, his progress is truly slow; even with the support of the Food Consumption Technique and Medicine Tiaohua Shu, he can only refine three wisps of True Qi per month.

According to this progress, it would take at least twenty or thirty years to reach the perfection of Refining Essence into Qi.

But the powerful effect of the Bait Stone Pill brought him a huge surprise, letting him see the dawn of drastically shortening his cultivation time.

To say nothing else, if he can refine ten Bait Stone Pills a month, that would turn into ten wisps of True Qi, directly multiplying his cultivation speed by three or four times; this way, it would take less than ten years to bring the Refining Essence into Qi stage to perfection!

And just now, through experimentation.

Although refining the Bait Stone Pill is laborious, as long as the technique becomes proficient later on, refining ten pills a month does not seem to be a difficult task.

"Now I finally don't have to suffer through twenty or thirty years."

Seeing the sky outside the window about to brighten, a satisfied Lu Yuan immediately extinguished the fire platform, put away the pill furnace, and then left full of anticipation.

In the time that followed.

The turmoil of the Money Gang's destruction and the heads of the evil leaders—such as the gang leader Jin Taihong and his son, and the Assistant Prefect Zhang Taiming—being hung up for public display by Qingyike gradually faded, yet the common people still talked about it with relish and often brought it up.

At the same time, as if they had completely given up because they were helpless against Qingyike, the reactions of both the government and the Jingwu Division throughout the entire incident were quite indifferent; apart from handling the aftermath on the day of the incident, there were no other actions.

Lu Yuan was naturally happy to see this, or rather, he had no time to pay attention to their movements for the time being.

He practiced martial arts during the day as usual, and openly utilized the 【Earthly Fiend-Sword Art】 to practice the "Wind Thunder Death-Defying Sword," this mundane sword technique.

Because of the effect of Sword Heart Clarity, he was like a peerless genius of the Sword Dao; his progress in the Wind Thunder Death-Defying Sword was flying, and almost every practice session brought obvious insights and improvements, pushing toward the realm of perfection.

Of course, Lu Yuan carefully hid this astonishing speed of progress and did not openly reveal it.

Besides this.

After resting and consolidating his energy to completely digest the medicinal power of the first Bait Stone Pill, he took advantage of the dead of night on the third night to sneak out of Boxiyuan again and came to his secret stronghold to open the furnace and refine pills.

And compared to the luck of the first day, his stone-boiling and pill-refining that night were not so smooth; he wasted quite a lot of materials twice in one night, and both attempts failed completely.

Once, it was because the heat was not mastered well halfway through the pill refining, leading to insufficient melting of the gold and stone materials in the furnace, nearly causing the furnace to explode;

The second time, it was because his Dharma Power was exhausted, and the timing for the pill-forming technique at the end of the refining was not mastered well, leading to insufficient activation of the materials and Dharma Power, causing the Bait Stone Pill that had not yet condensed to turn into charcoal on the spot.

After failing twice in a row, it was almost dawn, and Lu Yuan had gained nothing that night.

However.

With the experience of these consecutive failures, after resting for a day and summarizing the experience and learning the lessons, the third time he opened the furnace to refine, it went much smoother, and he successfully refined one Bait Stone Pill that night.

Thereafter.

Because every pill refining session consumed a huge amount of spirit and Dharma Power, Lu Yuan could only go to refine once every other night.

With each furnace opened for refining, and the practice and mastery of the 【Boiling Stone】 technique, his refining method became more and more proficient, and the success rate of each furnace rapidly climbed to over fifty percent; as long as his luck wasn't too bad, he could basically harvest one Bait Stone Pill every night.

And with the improvement of proficiency, he also began to try increasing the amount of gold and stone materials put into each furnace, changing from single refining to multiple refining.

The so-called multiple refining is a method of putting in a large amount of materials to refine multiple pills at once, which is much more difficult than single refining.

Therefore, unsurprisingly, his first attempt at multiple refining ended in failure, and it failed during the initial process of melting the gold and stone materials.

Knowing that this was because his mastery of the 【Boiling Stone】 technique was not enough, Lu Yuan immediately stopped this overambitious behavior and honestly continued with single refining.

Just like this, half a month passed in the blink of an eye since the first time he refined pills.

Over the half month, he became skilled through practice and opened the furnace to refine a total of five Bait Stone Pills; although there were many failures, the success rate of single furnace refining later approached seventy percent.

This success probability could be called a myth for someone who had just come into contact with pill refining, but for Lu Yuan, who had the Heavenly Book empowerment, it was just normal development.

There is no way; cheating is just that unreasonable.

At the same time, after half a month of high-frequency pill refining, many of the materials he purchased were consumed in large quantities and had been exhausted.

After they were exhausted, Lu Yuan stopped and specifically set aside one night to harmonize all the remaining Bait Stone Pills he hadn't had time to take during these days, and then refined them with the Food Consumption Technique.

Although he had no time to practice the Guiding Technique because of pill refining for nearly half a month, causing his cultivation to stagnate.

But when he successively harmonized and ingested the refined Bait Stone Pills, he instead ushered in a surge in cultivation; the True Qi in his body directly increased by several wisps, reaching as many as eighteen!

This speed of improvement could be called a rocket launch, which also made Lu Yuan joyful and high-spirited.

Because the surge in cultivation and True Qi undoubtedly greatly eased the restrictions on his use of Earthly Fiend Arts; at the same time, because his Dharma Power was sufficient, he would become much more relaxed when refining Bait Stone Pills, not as strenuous as in the past.

Of course, during this process, he also discovered a small problem.

It was that after taking five Bait Stone Pills, the speed at which his cultivation and True Qi grew was too fast, and the tempering and control could not keep up, leading to a feeling of emptiness in his own Dharma Power, as if stepping on clouds.

According to the Guiding Technique, the emptiness of Dharma Power is a sign of an unstable foundation, which seems to indicate that there was a problem with his taking of the Bait Stone Pills.

Of course, it was not the medicinal power of the pills, but the frequency of taking them that was the problem.

After Lu Yuan carefully searched, he discovered that he had overlooked one point; it turned out that according to the annotations of the "Shenxian Fue Danshi Lianyao Fa," the Bait Stone Pill can only be taken once every three days during the Refining Essence into Qi stage. Only with such a frequency combined with tempering practice can one achieve the best results; otherwise, it would lead to the signs of Dharma Power emptiness like he had now.

That is to say, he can take at most ten Bait Stone Pills per month of practice; more is not necessarily better.

After all, taking pills is only an auxiliary means; if it is too frequent and the primary and secondary are reversed, it will cause an unstable foundation, doing more harm than good.

Fortunately, the problem was discovered in time.

Having determined this, Lu Yuan no longer rushed to the secret stronghold to refine pills at night, but instead began to sit in meditation wholeheartedly, tempering his True Qi and stabilizing his foundation.

In just a few days, he had completely combed through his Dharma Power and solved the problem of a slightly unstable foundation.

At the same time, although he had paused pill refining, due to the large consumption in the previous half month, the various materials for refining Bait Stone Pills had been exhausted and were in urgent need of replenishment.

So Lu Yuan specifically set aside some time to go to the major markets to conduct another big round of purchasing.

This day.

Lu Yuan hired a laborer and a pushcart, returning fully loaded with the several large bags of materials he had purchased at the apothecary.

Because there was still a small amount of the most expensive Kongqing left over, the total cost for all the materials on this trip came to no more than one thousand Silver Yuan.

Very quickly.

After having the laborer move the items into the courtyard and paying him to leave, Lu Yuan personally moved the materials into the fire room to prepare them for use.

However, just as he arrived at the door of the fire room, his expression shifted slightly.

Because he was not usually at this residence most of the time and there was no one to watch the house, he had inserted a straw into the door crack as a marker to prevent any petty thieves from entering without his knowledge.

As it turned out, the straw in the door crack had vanished; it seemed an outsider had entered the fire room!

Lu Yuan immediately pushed open the door, his sharp gaze sweeping the area, and sure enough, he faintly discovered footprints that did not belong to him on the floor, which was covered in dust and coal ash.

He entered the fire room with a dark face, only to find that the remaining types of materials in the wooden box in the corner were not missing; it seemed the intruder had not taken a fancy to these things.

He turned and went to the main house and other rooms in the courtyard, only to discover traces of intrusion and even ransacking in all of them; clearly, someone had searched the inside and outside of this residence while he was away.

"To think they would steal from me."

Returning to the fire room, Lu Yuan felt both annoyed and speechless.

In reality, he had already transferred the massive fortune worth one hundred thousand Silver Yuan obtained from the Money Gang to this place, though it was all buried ten zhang deep underground, only to be retrieved when needed;

This included the bronze alchemy furnace and precious materials like Kongqing and gold, which he would seal in boxes and sink underground to hide after every alchemy session, making it impossible for anyone to discover them.

Therefore, although his home had been broken into this time, he had not lost a single thing.

It was just that for him, Lu Yuan—the famous and formidable Qingyike who had slaughtered his way through, striking fear even into the hearts of the government's Martial Pacification Bureau—to have his home robbed was somewhat laughable.

Relying on the few traces at the scene, it was clearly impossible to track the culprit, so he could only sigh and accept his bad luck.

Afterwards, night fell.

Having stabilized his Dharma Power and cultivation, Lu Yuan once again left Boxiyuan silently in the dead of night, arrived at his secret base, lit the fire platform, and prepared to start the furnace for alchemy.

And just as a billowing column of smoke rose from the chimney of his residence.

Not long after, in a certain place nearby.

A man hurried through a pitch-black alleyway and rushed back to a residence:

"Kong Ye, the person who bought that house has appeared!"

(End of this chapter)