Chapter 1458 — No Way Forward
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 3
Wei Zhao even wondered whether, if he still could not think of a way, he ought to have Feng Tianlong send a helicopter. But he did not want to make a great show of it — the Fire Spirit Sacred Fruit was plainly a treasure, and if those hidden clans and the like got wind of it, might they not come and seize it?
Weather was nature's own doing, beyond Wei Zhao's power to change; the only thing he could do was wait it out, slowly. Fortunately he was a man of ample patience, and after the brief restlessness of the first day his mind settled into calm.
Wei Zhao took out the alchemist's notebook of insights left behind by Zhang Lifeng and began turning through it slowly.
Originally he had thought compounding pills a simple enough business. Only after reading this alchemist's notebook did he learn what it meant for a petty practitioner to stand before a true master. What he had done before could not even be called pill refinement. In ancient times, a formidable physician of Wei Zhao's sort was known among alchemists as a mere apothecary — the most rudimentary of their kind, not even to be counted as having set foot inside the gate.
Of course, though apothecaries ranked lowest among alchemists, they were more than enough for ordinary people; for healing the sick and rescuing the dying, an apothecary would do. Alchemists, however, directed their art chiefly at cultivators.
The pills an alchemist could refine ran to every variety, but the great majority concerned cultivation — Qi Gathering Pills and Spirit Gathering Pills that increased one's power and helped one break through, or Meridian Unblocking Pills that repaired internal injuries and mended damaged meridians. All of these, to an alchemist's eyes, were quite ordinary pills.
Wei Zhao had not imagined that so common a pill as the Qi Gathering Pill would already be so fiercely sought after. Was it that the ranks of alchemists were too hard to advance, or that his own horizons were still too narrow, confining his notion of cultivators to the hidden clans alone?
Alchemist was merely a general term; within it, too, there were ranks, just as there were among cultivators.
An alchemist's strength was likewise graded by Heaven, Earth, Profound, and Yellow. Wei Zhao had assumed that the four divisions were nothing more than something modern people had devised to tell strong from weak at a glance; it now appeared that such a ranking of strength had existed since ancient times, and was no recent invention.
Yet though the ranks were the same Heaven, Earth, Profound, and Yellow, the subdivisions within each rank differed somewhat from the divisions of strength. Every rank was split into seven grades — Yellow Rank first grade, Yellow Rank second grade, all the way to Yellow Rank seventh grade.
Each rank corresponded to the pills that could be refined at that level; the Qi Gathering Pill, for instance, was a Yellow Rank third-grade pill. This alchemist's notebook of insights, however, covered only as far as some reflections on the Profound Rank first grade; beyond that, higher levels were nowhere to be found in it.
It seemed that Zhang Lifeng, in his day, had reached no farther than the rank of a Profound Rank first-grade alchemist, and had never broken through again.
From this it was plain that an alchemist's strength was indeed hard to improve. Zhang Lifeng had noted as well that the Earth Rank and the Heaven Rank above the Profound Rank were creatures of legend; whether they truly existed, he had never established in all his life.
Had the grades been deliberately set at a height that could never in fact be reached, or did they genuinely exist, with the limit lying in his own ability and strength? Zhang Lifeng had offered only a simple conjecture.