Chapter 16: Anyway, He's Not the One Eating It — Who Cares!
Watering the sect's spirit fields required at least the first level of Qi Refining to channel Qi and stimulate water flow, activating simple techniques to nourish the spirit seedlings.
Sweeping the Artifact Pavilion required Qi Refining first level or above, using Spiritual Energy to condense force and brush away dust from the artifacts without damaging their spiritual nature.
Standing guard at the mountain gate's side post required Qi Refining second level, as one needed to channel Qi to sense the auras of low-grade spirit creatures lurking in the wilderness.
Venturing into the mountains to gather mid-grade spirit herbs such as Condensing Mist Flowers and Inkline Grass required both the ability to identify the Spiritual Energy pockets where the herbs grew and the power to drive off the insect and vermin spirits that guarded them — Qi Refining second level was the minimum.
Assisting the pill chamber with grinding spirit materials required Qi Refining first level to control force with Spiritual Energy, ensuring the ground powder was of uniform fineness.
Organizing the outer-section jade scrolls in the Scripture Repository also required Qi Refining first level just to enter the building.
Sweeping the training grounds had no cultivation requirement, but it had to be coordinated with the Qi Refining disciples' practice schedule — today's session was already complete, so the task was temporarily unavailable.
Bai Chen frowned at the task board, his brow furrowing at the sight of "Qi Refining first level" as the minimum requirement for nearly every listing.
So almost none of these tasks were available to someone with "zero cultivation" like him. And the few tasks that required no cultivation at all — wouldn't all the newly inducted disciples be fighting tooth and nail over those?
Just as he was feeling disappointed, the corner of his eye caught an inconspicuous old wooden plaque propped against the wall in the corner of the room. He walked closer and found it was a long-term standing task.
Long-term purchase of Inedia Pills — every 10 pills exchanged for 1 contribution point.
Required herbs: polished round-grain rice, dried Chinese yam slices, white poria, kudzu root, bland bamboo leaves…
Bai Chen's eyes lit up instantly.
He hadn't expected that the recipe for Inedia Pills would consist entirely of ordinary grains and herbs. He absolutely had to give this a try!
Bai Chen immediately sought out the task hall disciple in charge of registrations.
The disciple had his head down, recording entries in a ledger. When he saw Bai Chen stride quickly up to the counter, he didn't even look up and asked casually, "Which task do you want to take? Give me your name and I'll log it."
"Pardon me, Senior Brother," Bai Chen said. "I'm not here to take a task — I have a question. I noticed the long-term Inedia Pill purchase task in the corner, and I wanted to ask: can the materials needed to refine these Inedia Pills be exchanged for silver?"
The disciple looked up at him with a puzzled expression.
He wants to take on the Inedia Pill task but doesn't even know how material exchanges work in the sect? Does he actually know how to refine Inedia Pills?
Still, he didn't ask further. His job was to log tasks and answer questions — someone asks, he answers.
"The materials for Inedia Pills can be exchanged at the medicine hall using contribution points. One contribution point gets you enough materials for one batch of Inedia Pills."
Bai Chen's expression immediately turned sour.
He had zero contribution points to begin with — that was precisely why he wanted to earn some through Alchemy. And now he needed contribution points first just to get the materials? Wasn't this a perfect dead loop?
The disciple sized Bai Chen up, clearly reading that he had no contribution points, and added:
"I can exchange silver for contribution points here — one hundred taels of silver for one point, with a cap of one thousand taels. Would you like to exchange?"
Bai Chen nodded immediately. "Yes! Please wait, Senior Brother — I'll go get the money right now."
He still had around one hundred and twenty or thirty taels on him, just enough to exchange for one contribution point's worth of materials.
Silver was useless in a cultivation sect — it couldn't buy techniques or Spiritual Energy — so he might as well spend it on a batch of materials and test the waters.
With his hundred-percent pill formation talent, who knows — maybe he could actually pull it off?
Bai Chen left the task hall and ran back to his small wooden cabin, rummaged through his pack for a few pieces of broken silver and some small ingots, then hurried back to the task hall.
After exchanging for the contribution point, he spent the remaining twenty-odd taels of broken silver to sweet-talk the task hall disciple into selling him a stone pot.
Then he excitedly ran to the medicine hall to exchange for a batch of Inedia Pill materials.
Cradling the stone pot and carrying the materials, he ran back to his wooden cabin.
Bai Chen gathered some rocks on the hillside, propped up a simple makeshift stove by the cabin window, stuffed some dry branches underneath, and ladled half a scoop of clear water into the stone pot.
He rubbed his hands together as he looked at the materials spread out on the table.
He had only just joined the sect today and hadn't even managed to draw Qi into his body yet, so naturally he had no idea how Inedia Pills were supposed to be made.
But so what?
He'd just wing it like cooking.
These were the proper materials for Inedia Pills, after all. This was the perfect chance to see just how powerful his hundred-percent pill formation talent really was.
He let his fingers hover and sway over the spread of ingredients.
"Who goes in first?"
In his hesitation, a faint, hazy intuition arose — his fingers drifted down of their own accord and landed on the round-grain rice.
Rice first, then.
Following that faint intuition, Bai Chen tossed the rice into the stone pot.
After that, he went entirely by feel — he grabbed a few slices of Chinese yam and broke them into small pieces, tore up a handful of bland bamboo leaves and kudzu root and crumbled them, then tossed everything into the pot and stirred with a wooden stick.
At first, the pot held nothing but clear water mixed with loose ingredients.
As the heat built, the water began to bubble and gurgle, drawing out the fragrance of the rice and the clean, fresh scent of the bamboo leaves — it actually looked somewhat presentable.
But after about thirty minutes of simmering, the smell changed.
The rice fragrance was gradually smothered by a strange, fishy sweetness, laced with a faint scorched undertone.
Bai Chen checked his intuition — he didn't sense anything… wrong?
Never mind!
He gripped the wooden stick and stirred even more vigorously.
He continued tossing in more herbs one after another, operating on the principle of throwing in whatever caught his eye.
As more and more went in, the contents of the pot grew thicker and stickier.
The originally pale yellow color slowly deepened into a murky grayish-brown. The stuff clung to the wooden stick and stretched into strings — impossible to shake off.
Bai Chen pulled the wooden stick out of the gooey mass and muttered, "Is this right? It's right… isn't it?"
His intuition still wasn't raising any alarms, so he kept stirring.
Bai Chen casually added more fuel to the fire. The bottom of the pot instantly let out a sizzling, sticking sound, and the grayish-brown paste transformed again.
The color darkened to a near-black, and a strange oily sheen floated on the surface — it looked disturbingly like something that had come out the wrong end after a bad meal.
A pungent, fishy-sweet odor mixed with a scorched stench wafted out, growing stronger by the moment.
Bai Chen instinctively held his breath and endured it, but eventually he couldn't hold on any longer and took a sharp involuntary breath — the smell hit him so hard he dropped the pot, leaned out the window, and dry-heaved for a good while.
And it was at that moment that his intuition told him it was time to take the pot off the heat — the pills were ready.
He turned back in disbelief to stare at that pot of "excrement," his face scrunching up like a crumpled rag.
"Holy shit! This stuff can actually form pills?"
Pinching his nose, he poked a little bit out with the wooden stick and brought it close to smell — he nearly retched up everything he'd eaten that morning.
"That's absolutely disgusting!"
These were all the proper Inedia Pill ingredients — he hadn't thrown in anything extra.
How on earth had it ended up smelling this foul?
Bai Chen stared at the mess in the pot, the corner of his mouth twitching, then gritted his teeth.
The pill-formation intuition still hadn't faded — which meant there was at least a ninety percent chance it had actually worked.
Besides, he wasn't the one who'd be eating these things. Who cared what they smelled like? Screw it!
He put out the fire. Bai Chen wrapped a cloth around his nose, waited for the mixture to cool a little, then steeled himself and began rolling the paste into pills.
To preserve his access to fresh air, Bai Chen moved the pot to the windowsill to work.
The pungent stench drifted out through the window and spread into the distance.
* * *
At that same moment, Zhou Shi and Fang He were walking back together from the dining hall.
Both of them were new outer sect disciples who had just been inducted today.
When choosing their wooden cabins, they had both picked spots near the low bamboo grove.