Since I didn’t have to worry about participating in another of the Palace’s competitions any time soon, I had all the time I needed to work on a bit of alchemy and push my cultivation base to the next level.

Thanks to my recent top-five finish, the Palace had given me free rein to purchase as many copies of whatever low-level herbs as I wanted—in theory, at least. In reality, the Palace didn’t exactly have a huge stockpile of herbs just sitting around. Yes, its herbalists grew copious amounts of herbs, but these herbs were consumed as quickly as they were produced—either used by the Palace’s alchemists or sold to outside forces.

So, when I asked for hundreds of copies of every possible Rank 1, 2, 3, and 4 herb, my request was immediately rejected. Instead, the elder in charge of the Palace’s Emporium assisted me in signing contracts with several herbalists—some in the Palace, and some from nearby Halls. These herbalists would need time to set up new fields, but once they did, they would be able to provide me with a steady supply of herbs every month.

The elder even went so far as to send letters of introduction to herbalists in both the Nine Rivers Domain and the True Martial Domain. With a competition between the Palaces on the horizon, herbalists from one domain might be reluctant to help someone from a different domain, but with any luck, this would give me access to at least a few of the herbs that were unique to other parts of the Western Island.

Of course, while these contracts would be helpful in the future, they weren’t of too much use in the present. So, without a large number of herbs to use for herbal tea experiments, I settled down in my cultivation chamber to get back to working on my advancement.

While the ambient pill qi in the Palace was as scarce as always, thanks to the Rank 5 formation that I had set up in my cultivation chamber, drawing in enough to power my advancement through the Grandmaster realm wasn’t much of a problem. Drawing in a sufficient amount of moon spade qi, on the other hand, was rather annoying.

Without a spirit fire to generate moon spade qi, I could only fuel my advancement through the constant consumption of Attunement Pills.

I was able to purchase a few sets of herbs that were capable of being turned into Perfect Rank 3 Attunement Pills, but such herbs were exceedingly rare. Most of the ‘high-quality’ herbs still had small gaps that needed to be filled with either a spirit fire or pill toxins.

To be fair, these gaps were rather tiny, and the amount of toxins that I would need to use to fill them was almost meaningless. Also, since the first pattern of each pill was dedicated to neutralizing these toxins, they would only cause future Rank 3 Attunement Pills to be slightly less effective.

Still, with the Return to Simplicity being an important part of the local culture, I might need to advance through the Grandmaster realm several times. Consuming a few toxins here or there might help me speed up my advancement now, but it would only hurt me down the road.

So, I decided to take things slow and only cultivate when I had Perfect pills to support me.

Because of this, I had a significant amount of downtime on my hands, but this time wasn’t wasted. I used it to research ways to improve these Attunement Pills.

The Palace couldn’t supply me with hundreds of copies of all known herbs, but the nearby Halls were already in the business of producing vast quantities of low-quality herbs for basic attunement pills. So, buying a few thousand of these Rank 3 training herbs was simple enough.

After tossing one of these sets into a pot of boiling water, I was disappointed but not surprised.

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Primary Effect: Amplifies the body’s ability to draw in moon spade qi from the surrounding environment. Increases the range that a body can pull from. Effective on cultivators below Martial Grandmaster Peak.

Secondary Effect: Makes one more aggressive and easily agitated.

Potency: 12%. Toxicity 59%.

Without any of the toxins having been burned away, and without any supplemental herbs to counteract these toxins' effects, the standard herbs for an Attunement Pill had formed a nearly worthless tea. By adding in the extra herbs used to concoct a six-patterned pill, I was able to improve the tea’s potency, but its toxicity was still far beyond anything that was reasonable.

So, since I had a fair bit of time on my hands, I got to work designing a new tea. With the limited number of herbs that were available to me, I couldn’t conduct as many simultaneous experiments as I would have liked, but this just meant that I needed to use what I did have as efficiently as possible.

After a couple of weeks of brewing dozens of pots of tea every single day, I had yet to make anything that was even decent. I did find a few herbs that could dramatically boost the tea’s potency, but they also introduced several new toxins. I tried focusing on reducing the tea’s toxicity, but this always ended up either destroying the tea’s potency or changing its effects entirely.

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With this data, along with what I learned from carefully studying the herbs’ medicinal energy, I was able to more or less verify my original hypothesis: the standard recipe for Rank 3 Moon Spade Attunement Pills was wrong.

To be fair, this may have been a bit of an oversimplification, but the reason sets of herbs capable of making Perfect Rank 3 Attunement Pills were so rare was because one of the five herbs wasn’t a good fit for the structure formed by the other four. With enough effort, the most talented of the Palace’s herbalists could still grow herbs that would work, but even the best couldn’t ensure a 100% success rate.

I tried to look for substitutes for that uncooperative herb, but sadly, even after several more weeks of research, I wasn’t able to find anything that was a better fit. If such an herb existed, the Palace didn’t have it.

This meant that making a usable Moon Spade Attunement Tea wasn’t going to happen, which was disappointing but not the end of the world.

Once I accepted this fact, I shifted my focus. I didn’t need a usable tea. All I really needed was a usable pill. So, instead of trying to make a tea with 100% potency and 0% toxicity, I ignored the toxins completely and just worked to push the tea’s potency as high as possible. And, after nearly five months of work, I had a product that I was somewhat proud of.

Toxic Moon Spade Attunement Tea

Primary Effect: Amplifies the body’s ability to draw in moon spade qi from the surrounding environment. Increases the range that a body can pull from. Effective on cultivators below Martial Grandmaster Peak.

Potency: 100%. Toxicity 145%.

As far as I could tell, if someone drank a tea with 100% toxicity, they would fully absorb all the toxins from every herb. With 145% toxicity, anyone who drank this tea would absorb the full brunt of all the toxins it contained, and those toxins would resonate with each other, amplifying their effects.

If I had still been a Martial Master, this tea could have been extremely useful in helping me to simultaneously construct both moon spade meridians and toxic meridians. But now that I was a Grandmaster, it was next to worthless.

This wasn’t important, though. All that mattered was that I had been able to brew a tea with 100% potency when none of the herbs that I had used were connected by a sympathetic bond. The core of this tea was still the Hall’s training herbs, but these basic herbs had been supplemented with more than a dozen ancillary herbs.

I suspected that, given even the slightest bit of effort, an herbalist would be able to create a bond between a smaller subset of these herbs that would eliminate the need for several of the ancillary ingredients while retaining the tea’s full potency. However, I could worry about such efficiencies in the future.

Once this recipe was complete, I returned to my cultivation chamber, sat down, and consumed the last of my Perfect Rank 3 Moon Spade Attunement Pills.

With two patterns, this pill should have been strong enough to power the cultivation of a low-level Lord. However, because of the scant moon spade qi in the local environment, it was barely enough to push me over the threshold to Martial Grandmaster 3. This made it clear that, if I wanted to continue to advance, I would either need to find a better source of moon spade qi or concoct a better pill.

Even without using my own spirit fire, finding a better source of moon spade qi wasn’t entirely out of the question. There were plenty of sects that cultivated moon spade qi, and each of them had to have a spirit fire tucked away somewhere. I was confident that, if necessary, Emperor Chan would be able to help me contact one of them.

However, while using a few pills to purchase some time next to a sect’s fire shouldn’t be too difficult, they might have more of a problem when I told them that I wanted to set up a formation to gather pill qi next to it. Minor details like this could, of course, be smoothed over with a few extra pills, but if I were going to have to make dozens of pills to pay for time in a sect’s cultivation chamber anyway, it only made sense to first focus on making the best pills possible.

So, I began working to transform my recipe for Toxic Moon Spade Attunement Tea into a proper pill recipe.

When I did this with my Beauty Reviving Tea, I had chosen to add several extra herbs to fix up all of the small flaws introduced by the concoction process. I considered doing something similar with this Attunement Pill, but it would still be several more months before I had a steady supply of Rank 3 herbs, and even then, this supply might not include the necessary herbs.

In any case, by simply using the same herbs that I had in the tea, I was still able to concoct a pill that I was happy with.

After completely burning away all of the toxic energy, the set of 5 basic training herbs didn’t fit together at all. However, by carefully extracting structural elements from the ancillary herbs, I was not only able to patch up all of these missing pieces, but I was also able to expand upon the base structure until it was nearly ideal.

When I analyzed my final pill, a smile spread across my face.

Perfect Rank 3 Moon Spade Attunement Pill, 191% Medicinal Efficacy, 9 Patterns, Effective Rank: Peak Sovereign. Value: 250 mid-grade spirit stones.

The way it had been explained to me, even though this pill was powerful enough for a Sovereign to use, it was still supposed to contain the gentle energy of a Rank 3 pill. So, I should be able to use it as a Grandmaster.

That said, I had no desire to risk either my cultivation base or my life by taking such a gamble. So, I made a second copy of the pill with a more subdued four patterns.

Even with this—a pill that was “only suitable for a low King”—I was able to draw in moon spade qi at a rate that my Rank 5 Pill Qi Gathering Formation could barely keep up with. After less than an hour of cultivating, I broke through to Martial Grandmaster 4.

Moon Spade Qi was still pouring into me, but if I continued to advance immediately, I would risk having my meridians become clogged with impure qi. So, I hurried to one of the Palace’s practice fields and began using every moon spade technique in my repertoire to burn off excess qi the moment it entered my body.

Six hours later, when the pill’s effects finally wore off, I collapsed in exhaustion, glad that I had decided to forgo consuming that nine-patterned pill.