Alexei and Yan made it back to the surface level of the mob farm, emerging into the bright afternoon sunlight.
Yan kept glancing at where the arrow wound in his head had been.
"So," she said as they walked toward the main courtyard. "The herb garden."
"Right." Alexei was more than happy to change the subject away from his near-death experience. "You wanted to discuss planting locations?"
"I did. I do." She paused, then shook her head. "But first, I think Qingxue needs to know about that." She gestured vaguely at his head.
"Is that really necessary?"
"She is your direct supervisor. And more relevantly, she cares about you. If something like this happens again and she does not know you can heal yourself, she will panic. Or worse, try something desperate that could make the situation worse."
That was a fair point.
---
They found Qingxue in the main courtyard, supervising Mengyao and Changgui. She looked up as they approached, but the moment her gaze fell on Yan's bloodstained robes, her eyes narrowed.
Her attention shifted immediately to Alexei.
"What happened?"
"Training accident," he said quickly. "I am fine now."
"He was shot through the eye with an arrow and the arm," Yan said, completely undermining his attempt at downplaying the situation. "The arrow went through his brain and out the back of his skull."
Qingxue's expression shifted.
"I am fine," Alexei repeated, pulling back his sleeve to show unmarked skin where the arrow wound had been. "See? Not even a scar."
Qingxue crossed the distance between them in two steps, grabbing his face and turning his head to examine where the eye wound should have been.
"How?" she asked quietly.
"That is what we need to discuss," Yan said. "Preferably somewhere private."
Qingxue turned to the two junior disciples. "Mengyao, Changgui. Continue your exercises. We will return shortly."
She did not wait for a response before guiding both Alexei and Yan toward her personal quarters.
---
Once they were inside with the door closed, Qingxue turned to face them with her arms crossed.
"Explain."
Alexei exchanged a glance with Yan, who nodded encouragingly. This was his mess to explain.
"Okay, so, you know how I have that whole food situation? Where I can produce ridiculous amounts of spirit fruits and other supplies?"
Qingxue's expression did not change. "Continue."
"Part of that same ability includes some really potent healing items, like that golden fruit Yan had to retrieve from my storage. As long as I have access to food and my hunger is maintained, I can recover from pretty much any injury."
That was mostly true. The golden apple had healed him in seconds, and in Minecraft, as long as your hunger bar was full, you regenerated health automatically. He was just leaving out certain details.
"Any injury," Qingxue repeated slowly. "You were shot through the brain."
"Yeah, and the golden fruit fixed it. That is what it does." He shrugged. "I know it sounds absurd, but you have seen some of the other things I can do. This is just part of the package."
Yan stepped in to corroborate. "I saw it with my own eyes. The moment he consumed that strange fruit he calls an 'apple,' golden light burst from his body and every wound vanished. His body was completely restored in seconds. I have never witnessed such recovery before, not even from Heaven-tier healing pills."
"Apple..." Qingxue was silent for a long moment, her gaze fixed on Alexei.
"Are there limitations?" she finally asked.
"Yeah, actually." Alexei had thought about this during the walk up. He needed to give them something that sounded like a reasonable weakness without revealing the full extent of his abilities. "The healing is tied to my... let us call it my 'fullness.' As long as I am well-fed, I regenerate quickly. But if I am doing strenuous physical activity, or taking damage, that fullness depletes faster than normal. Getting impaled through the brain probably would have drained my reserves completely if I had tried to heal naturally. That is why I needed the golden apple, it provided instant, complete recovery regardless of my current state."
Qingxue processed this information. "So in a prolonged combat situation, if you sustain continuous injuries while fighting..."
"My ability to heal would diminish as my reserves deplete. Yeah." That was pretty close to how the game worked, if your hunger was low, you did not regenerate health. "It is powerful, but not unlimited."
Qingxue finally uncrossed her arms, though her expression remained serious. "This ability of yours is a blessing and a curse. It means you can survive situations that would kill anyone else. But it also means you might become reckless, trusting too much in your ability to recover."
"I am not that stupid," Alexei protested.
"I heard you stuck your head through a hole to look at hostile skeletons at point-blank range."
"...Okay, that was stupid. But I have learned my lesson."
"See that you have." Qingxue's voice softened slightly. "I am glad you can heal from such injuries. But do not make a habit of needing to."
"Trust me, getting shot through the eye hurts like hell even if I heal from it. I am highly motivated to avoid that in the future."
Something in Qingxue's posture relaxed at that. "Good."
Yan cleared her throat. "There is one more thing we should discuss. This healing ability should remain between the three of us. And possibly the sect master, if he needs to know. But beyond that..."
"Agreed," Qingxue said immediately. "Information like this would make you a target. Either from those who would want to exploit such an ability, or from those who would see it as a threat."
Alexei nodded. He had already planned on keeping this quiet. The fewer people who knew about his abilities, the safer he would be.
Though now he was starting to wonder if he should have backup plans in place. What if something happened that the golden apple could not fix? What if he needed emergency healing when he was away from his supplies?
His mind drifted to two items he had been considering crafting: the Totem of Undying and the Respawn Anchor.
In the original game, the totem of undying could only be dropped by an evoker. But with More Crafting, it could be crafted with two gold blocks, two emeralds, and three gold ingots. In the game, it prevented death once when held in your hand, triggering an instant full heal and resurrection effect.
The problem was weight. By his calculations, a fully crafted totem would weigh somewhere around forty-six tons. Slightly difficult to carry around casually.
The respawn anchor was more practical in some ways, it could set a respawn point anywhere, not just at a bed. But it required materials from Nether fortresses, and he had not exactly figured out how to access the Nether in this world yet.
Still, both were worth keeping in mind for the future.
"Alexei?" Qingxue's voice pulled him from his thoughts. "Are you listening?"
"Sorry, what?"
"I asked if you were feeling any lingering effects from the injury. Disorientation, memory issues, anything unusual."
"No, I am fine. The apple healed everything." He tapped the side of his head. "Brain fully functional. Well, as functional as it ever is."
Qingxue did not look amused by the joke. "Nevertheless, I want you to inform me immediately if you experience any delayed symptoms. Brain injuries can be unpredictable."
"Will do."
---
The herb garden discussion had taken most of the afternoon, but by the time they finished, they had a solid plan mapped out. Yan had excused herself to retrieve something before they started planting, and Alexei had gone back to his house to check on a few things.
When Yan returned, she was carrying a jade box.
Alexei glanced at it with interest. Given everything that had come out of boxes lately, his expectations had calibrated upward significantly. "What is in it?"
"Body-tempering medicinal herbs for Mengyao and Changgui," Yan said.
"Ah." He tried not to look disappointed, which apparently he failed at spectacularly.
Yan gave him a flat look. "You thought it was food."
"I did not."
"You did."
"Moving on." He took the jade box and examined the contents. Twenty-something varieties of medicinal herbs, all carefully preserved, all presumably requiring weeks or months of patient cultivation under normal circumstances. "How much do Mengyao and Changgui need?"
"Enough for at least three full treatment cycles each. The body-tempering process is gradual."
Alexei opened his inventory and examined the contents. More than a hundred and eighty bones sat neatly stacked, collected from the mob farm. Once ground into bone meal, they would yield at least five hundred uses of instant growth fertilizer.
That was more than enough.
"Give me an hour."
---
The existing farmland plots were already set up from his spirit fruit operation, and half of them were sitting empty since the last harvest. He planted all twenty-plus herb varieties in sequence, then worked his way back down the rows with bone meal.
Yan had settled herself on a branch of one of the nearby Everlasting Peach trees to watch, which was fine until she started eating.
"These are almost gone," she said, crunching through a peach with satisfaction. "I am going to need at least three more."
Alexei glanced at the tree. Then at the peach in her hand, which she had only bitten once. Finally, he looked back at the row of medicinal herbs waiting to be fertilized.
"You just started that one."
"I eat quickly." She held out her hand expectantly.
"Right." He took a detour, applied bone meal to the peach tree four times in rapid succession until new fruit appeared, then got back to the herbs. Behind him, he could hear Yan making satisfied sounds as she worked through her supply.
Qingxue, sitting a few meters away with her own peach, had not even gotten halfway through hers yet.
The bone meal work took the better part of an hour. By the end of it, he had a full harvest of body-tempering herbs stacked neatly in one of his storage chests, available whenever Mengyao and Changgui needed them. The chest would keep everything fresh indefinitely.
The jade box preservation method that cultivation sects used was fine, he supposed. But it held maybe ten items if you were lucky and required constant infusion of spiritual energy to maintain. His chest held hundreds of items and required nothing.
Some things in this world were just backwards.
While he was working, Yan had retrieved her small portable furnace from wherever she had been staying and set it up nearby, and was now deep in the process of refining pills. The grey-green furnace was a beautiful piece of work, compact and clearly well-used, and the smell coming from it was pleasant, nothing like the chemical disasters Alexei had imagined alchemy would produce.
He was curious about the process but knew better than to interrupt someone who was working with fire and concentrated magical substances. He had learned that lesson from watching chemistry lab accidents on the internet.
Instead, he went back to expanding the underground cave system and firing stone bricks.
The stone bricks did not need MC-ification, they were just for flooring. Any surface covered in proper blocks prevented mobs from spawning, which was the whole point. Later, when he had a cobblestone generator running properly, he could produce the material in bulk without wasting his precious experience on it.
The repetitive work of cutting and firing stone gave him time to think. The herb problem was solved. The mob farm was running. Cave expansion was on schedule.
What he needed was more experience. And more zombies. And possibly a witch, but that was the universe's problem, not his.
---
A week passed.
Qingxue had quietly stopped pressuring Alexei to sense qi.
This was, from Alexei's perspective, a significant quality-of-life improvement. He had never been able to sense anything, and sitting in meditation for hours while everyone waited for him to achieve something he was incapable of had become uncomfortable.
After the conversation where he had explained his healing ability, Qingxue had drawn her own conclusions. If he could recover from mortal wounds as long as he maintained proper nutrition, then the lifespan concerns that had motivated her insistence on cultivation were largely moot. She had not said this explicitly, but she had started extending her own cultivation sessions instead of monitoring his.
That suited Alexei fine. He had more productive things to do.
Changgui had successfully sensed qi two days ago.
He had come to Alexei's house immediately after, and delivered a detailed account of the breakthrough that involved a lot of hand gestures and what Alexei interpreted as descriptions of colored lights. The content of the experience went somewhat over his head since he had no personal frame of reference for what sensing spiritual energy felt like.
But Changgui was clearly thrilled. So Alexei told him that was good and gave him a dozen Emerald Cloud Fruits for the occasion, which Changgui accepted with the reverence of someone receiving sacred relics.
The fruits were sour enough to make his face do interesting things, but he ate every single one of them and thanked Alexei three times, so apparently the trade was worth it.
Phase one of the cave expansion was complete. The newly excavated section extended the existing mob farm platform by fifty meters in every horizontal direction and eight meters vertically. It formed a vast underground chamber. Support pillars stood at ten-meter intervals, reinforcing the ceiling and preventing the unassimilated stone above from collapsing.
Eventually this area would house a proper village setup, iron golems included. For now, it was just a lot of empty space with good structural integrity.
The zombie villager count had reached five. Besides a butcher, the rest were still unemployed, shuffling around aimlessly in the designated holding area and occasionally bumping into walls. The witch he needed for certain brewing ingredients had not appeared yet, but that was the nature of mob spawning, it worked when it worked.
Alexei was, on the whole, making progress. Just not as fast as he wanted.
---
What he was doing right now, standing on the collection platform of the mob farm with his eyes fixed on his experience bar, was something he had been building toward for three days.
In his off hand, he held a small black coffin.
He recognized it immediately as a magical treasure. It was an artifact from the cultivation world, designed to store and channel spiritual energy to produce various effects.
The question was whether he could assimilate it.
Ordinary materials and even biological matter from this world could be converted into Minecraft blocks and items through the infusion of experience. Magical treasures, however, were fundamentally different. They possessed their own internal structures, their own enchantments, and their own distinct energy signatures.
[Level 28 → Level 29]
He focused on the pulling sensation he associated with successful assimilation attempts.
"Not yet."
[Level 29 → Level 30]
He tried again. Still nothing, but something felt different. The edge of something, like a frequency he could almost tune into.
[Level 30 → Level 31]
A faint pulling sensation came from the coffin. He did not wait. He pushed experience into it immediately.
Experience orbs surged from his palm in a dense swirl, yellow-green light wrapping around the coffin so completely that he could barely see the object itself. The sensation was strange.
Three minutes passed.
When the light faded, the coffin in his hand looked identical to how it had before. But there was the familiar subtle glow of Minecraft enchantments on its surface.
And simultaneously, as if a file had been uploaded directly into his brain, he knew exactly how to use it.
"Okay," he said aloud. "That is new."
He had been hoping to extract enchanted books from the assimilation. Instead, he had gotten something considerably more interesting.
He could actually use a cultivation-world magical artifact.
If assimilation worked on this coffin, it might work on other magical treasures too. Which meant his access to this world's power systems was not as limited as he had assumed.
He was going to need to test more carefully. But first, he looked at the coffin in his hand.
There were two documented functions.
[Black Spirit Coffin:
Suppression II
Spirit Sealing II
Spiritual Energy Circuit I
Capture: throw the coffin to contain a target.
Combat: throw the coffin as a high-impact projectile.]
There was a half-dead zombie on the collection platform about four meters away, shuffling back and forth.
Capture test first.
He flicked his wrist and threw the coffin.
It sailed through the air, tumbling end over end, and then it expanded mid-flight, growing from palm-sized to roughly three meters tall in the span of a second, and landed on the stone floor of the collection platform.
The coffin stood upright.
The zombie looked at it.
The coffin did not move.
The zombie lost interest and shuffled away.
Alexei stared at the coffin.
"So that is a failure, then."
He walked over to retrieve it.
Which was when he discovered the second problem.
There were instructions in his head for deploying the coffin. Zero instructions, however, for calling it back.
He stood in front of the three-meter coffin and thought at it very hard.
Nothing happened.
He tried pushing experience toward it.
Nothing.
He grabbed the side of the coffin and pulled. It was like trying to move a building.
He stepped back and crossed his arms. "So it does not come back. That is fantastic information to have discovered after deploying it."
He tried his pickaxe. The tool's interaction registered, he could feel the usual feedback of mining, and then nothing happened. The coffin was completely immune to being dug.
Axe. Same result.
Shovel. Same result, and frankly he had known it would be.
He stood there for a moment, looking at the sinister coffin that was now installed in the middle of his mob farm collection area, and accepted that he needed outside help.
---
Qingxue arrived four minutes after he sent word. She assessed the situation.
"It will not retract?"
"I do not appear to have that function," Alexei said.
She studied the coffin for a moment, then made a gesture with two fingers. The coffin shrank instantly, compressing from three meters to palm-sized in under a second, and floated back to Alexei's hand.
He caught it and immediately checked the durability.
57 out of 60.
"How are you using that without spiritual energy?" Qingxue asked, examining him.
"I assimilated it," Alexei said simply. "The same process I use on the materials. It seems to work on magical artifacts too."
Qingxue was quiet for a long moment. "And it gave you full control over the treasure's functions?"
"Most of them, apparently." He glanced at the coffin. "Still working out some of the details."
She looked like she wanted to press further, but decided to table that conversation. "Let me see you use it properly."
"The combat function?"
"If you have tested the capture function already, yes."
He selected a section of unassimilated stone wall about ten meters away and threw the coffin.
The throw itself was unremarkable. It was just a simple overhand motion.
But what happened next was not unremarkable.
The coffin hit the stone wall with a sound like a cannon discharge. The shockwave from the impact rolled back across the platform, strong enough that Alexei took an involuntary step backward. A crack spread from the impact point in three directions. And most dramatically, one-third of the coffin had simply tore straight into solid rock.
The entire mob farm platform rang like a bell for several seconds.
Alexei stared at the hole in the wall.
He had expected a dent, maybe a crack. The stone was unassimilated, which meant it was regular solid rock by any reasonable standard.
"That is not what I expected."
"That is at the limit of a lower-grade Profound tier treasure's output," Qingxue murmured.
And yet, she had sensed no spiritual power from him at all.
She retrieved the coffin again with the same casual two-finger gesture, and it flew back to his hand.
Alexei checked the durability.
47 out of 60.
One combat throw had cost ten points.
At ten points per throw and 47 durability remaining, he had four more throws before it needed repair. Six from full durability if he had not wasted the three on the failed capture attempt.
With Qingxue still present, he decided to run one final test on the coffin before writing it off entirely.
He released a zombie from the holding area, and directed it toward an open section of the mob farm floor.
Then he threw the coffin at it.
The coffin expanded mid-flight, and hit the zombie with that same cannon-like impact he had witnessed earlier. The zombie got knocked back, one arm bent at a wrong angle, green-grey skin torn open across its shoulder.
And then it got back up.
He threw the coffin again. The zombie went down, came back up, now missing part of its ear and leaking dark fluid from a gash across its forehead.
Third throw.
Still not dead.
He retrieved the coffin, via Qingxue, since he still did not have the recall function, walked over to the zombie, and finished it with two swings of his sword.
He stood back and assessed.
"It is completely useless."
Qingxue looked at him and pointed out, "It has suppression capability."
"Which a wooden boat also has." He turned the coffin over in his hand. "The suppression works, I will grant that. You throw it, it pins something down. But a boat does the same thing and weighs considerably less and does not require a cultivator to recall it when I forget how."
Qingxue's expression shifted slightly. "You compared a Profound tier magical artifact to a wooden boat."
"That's right," he confirmed with a smile. "And the boat is winning."
She was quiet for a moment, deciding whether this was worth addressing. It was not. She let it go.
"The ranged application showed clear destructive force," she said instead.
"The bow does the same thing at range, from farther away, and does not embed itself in the wall after every shot." He looked at the coffin one more time. "It is impressive for what it is. It is just not useful for what I need."
What he needed was crowd control, sustained damage output, and range. What the coffin offered was six throws per combat encounter before it needed repair, plus a suppression ability he could replicate with basic wooden tools.
He held the coffin in his palm and thought the word clearly.
Deconstruct.
The familiar sensation traveled up his arm as the ability activated. The coffin began to unravel. Its enchantments dissolved into streams of data that flowed back into his system, while its physical form broke apart into components and settled neatly into his inventory.
[Black Spirit Wood Stick ×3]
[Enchanted Book ×1]
The Black Spirit Wood sticks had no description beyond their name, same as before when he had tried to analyze the coffin's material. Whatever it was, it did not exist in any Minecraft material database he could access. He set them aside in his inventory for later experimentation.
The enchanted book was a different matter entirely. He almost said something embarrassing out loud when he read the contents.
[Enchanted Book:
Suppression II
Spirit Sealing II
Spiritual Energy Circuit I]
All three enchantments were from the cultivation world. None of them existed in vanilla Minecraft. He had known that the assimilation process could extract enchantment properties from magical artifacts. He had not actually tested whether those extracted enchantments could be applied to other items.
Apparently they could.
He was already moving toward the anvil before he had consciously decided to.
The anvil was on the mob farm platform, where he had relocated it weeks ago for convenience. He set the enchanted book in one slot and the Mystic-Etched Rose-Gold Sword in the other and opened the preview.
[Level cost: 18]
[Mystic-Etched Rose-Gold Sword:
Spiritual Energy Circuit I → II
Sharpness IV
Disarm III
Auto-Repair I
+6 (1+5) Attack Damage]
The Suppression II and Spirit Sealing II could not be transferred to a sword, which made sense, they were containment abilities, not combat ones. But the Spiritual Energy Circuit upgrade from I to II would apply cleanly at eighteen levels.
He currently had, after the assimilation process, exactly enough experience to do it.
And he had no idea what Spiritual Energy Circuit actually did.
It appeared on his sword's stat block as a passive enchantment. For all he knew it could be doing nothing at all, or it could be doing something critical that he simply had not been able to measure.
Spending eighteen levels on a mystery upgrade felt like poor resource management.
He retrieved the sword and put the enchanted book back in storage. Then he headed back toward the mob spawn area.
---
Alexei still had eleven magical artifacts sitting in his storage chest that he could not assimilate. Nine had come from the old man, and the remaining two from the sickly-looking man, who had likely been suffering from liver deficiency.
By the time the light from the ceiling vents dimmed toward evening, his experience bar had climbed to Level 25.
He stopped and stared at it.
Still not enough. Or at least, he suspected not enough, because every attempt he made to assimilate one of the remaining magical artifacts returned nothing.
He reviewed what he knew. The coffin had been a Profound tier artifact. The others were clearly weaker. They should not require Level 30, right?
He opened the trapdoors on the mob spawn floor, set the platform to automatic collection mode, and started walking back toward the exit passage.
He got about three quarters of the way there before he stopped.
Standing in the corridor with twenty-five levels of accumulated experience sitting on him felt deeply uncomfortable. He had no logical reason for the feeling, which made it more annoying. It was the same impulse that made him back up saves before major in-game decisions.
He turned around.
Something in Yan's alchemy room had been bothering him ever since she took it out: a small pill furnace.
If the higher-tier artifacts needed thirty levels to assimilate, maybe the lowest-tier one had a lower threshold.
He walked back through the underground passage, passed through his house, and made his way to the herb garden. The alchemy room was a smaller chamber Yan had begun using after moving her work from her old residence. She had mentioned the ventilation was better here, though he preferred not to dwell on what kind of alchemy required such precautions.
He opened the door carefully.
The room was brightly lit and filled entirely with Yan's equipment. Drying racks lined the walls, and sorting trays rested on nearby tables. Reference materials were stacked in neat, careful piles. In the corner sat the small portable furnace she used for field work, now cold and silent.
Yan herself was not there.
Alexei looked at the room for a moment.
Then he located the small blue-grey furnace on the jade preparation table, picked it up, and sat down on Yan's meditation cushion.
[Bronze Pill Furnace:
Spiritual Energy Blockage II]
He stared at the single enchantment entry for a few seconds.
"Spiritual Energy Blockage?" he said to the empty room. "Why does this sound like a debuff?"
Its durability was down to somewhere in the low thirties, which meant it had been used extensively and was approaching the end of its functional life. By cultivation standards, this item was disposable.
He focused on the pull test.
And there it was, faint, but present. The low-grade furnace was in an assimilable state.
He did not waste time deliberating.
Experience orbs spiraled out from his palm, wrapping around the furnace in a slow vortex of yellow-green light. The assimilation process for the coffin had taken three minutes. This one took a little over two, the lower grade requiring less work to integrate.
When the light faded, the furnace looked identical. Except for a faint purple sheen across its surface, and the sense that he understood exactly how to use it.
[Bronze Pill Furnace:
Spiritual Energy Blockage II]
The name and enchantment were the same as before. Yet when he placed the furnace on the table and focused on it, an interface materialized in the air above it.
It had three slots.
The fuel slot sat on the far left, beside a long horizontal bar that showed the remaining fuel. In the center was the ingredient slot, paired with a flame indicator that displayed refining progress. The output slot rested on the right.
He studied the fuel slot carefully. The icon was unfamiliar. It was not coal, and it was not charcoal. The shape was different.
After a moment, he took out a spirit stone and placed it inside.
It vanished instantly.
The fuel bar filled to maximum.
At the same time, the flame indicator lit from the bottom and began rising upward, opposite to the behavior of a normal furnace. Beneath the physical furnace, golden fire appeared and burned with a steady, controlled intensity.
He nodded slightly.
"Spirit stones for fuel. Of course."
He turned his attention to Yan's ingredient chest and opened it.
Inside, everything was meticulously organized. Each herb rested in its proper place, sorted and preserved with care.
He hesitated briefly, then took a small amount from several varieties. He could always replace what he used from the garden later.
He selected his first ingredient.
A mushroom-like plant with a red stem and a pale, cloud-shaped cap.
[Crimson Cloud Cap]
He held it over the fuel slot, then shifted it to the ingredient slot and dropped it in.
The flame indicator began to rise. The mushroom dissolved, and a shimmering sphere appeared in the output slot. It resembled a bubble of water.
[Crimson Cloud Essence]
He picked it up. It was warm to the touch, like a cup that had been used recently, but not hot enough to burn. After a brief inspection, he returned it to the slot.
"Interesting." He picked up the next herb.
[Pine Needle Blossom]
He placed it into the ingredient slot.
This time, the refining process was faster. Within seconds, the essence began to change. The red deepened toward orange, and thin green strands spread through the liquid. The volume shrank as the texture thickened, becoming more like syrup than fluid.
He continued without pause.
[Seven-Leaf Water Chestnut]
Silver-grey traces formed within the sphere. The thickened liquid had become gelatinous, shifting slowly when he tilted the output slot to observe it.
Next came the final ingredient.
[Crimson Gold Plum]
The gelatin compressed further. He took it out and pressed it gently between two fingers. It held its shape for a moment, then slowly rebounded.
He set it on the floor.
It bounced.
"Bouncy pill," he said.
He picked it up, dropped it again to confirm, then returned it to the output slot.
[Achievement Unlocked: Rubber Ball (Sort Of)]
He began adding more ingredients. The sphere accepted each one without resistance. After the fifth herb, it solidified completely, yet it continued to absorb further additions. With each new ingredient, the color and texture shifted slightly.
[Golden Bone Vine] added.
[Cherry Honey Flower] added.
[Bramble Fruit] added.
[Brightglow Fruit] added.
[Everlasting Peach] added.
He added several more whose names he barely remembered.
By the time he exhausted the reasonable options, the pill had stabilized at roughly five millimeters in diameter. The fuel bar had dropped to just below half. Each refinement cycle consumed approximately three percent, and higher-grade ingredients required more time to process.
The interface updated.
[Unknown Compound Pill #1]
He took it out and held it to the light.
The pill was brownish gold and faintly translucent. A soft golden glow pulsed deep within it. Ten thin lines ran evenly across its surface, dividing it like a miniature ornamental globe.
Curious, he brought it closer and took a sniff.
He immediately pulled it away.
"That is unpleasant."
The smell was difficult to define. It was not rotten, but it was unmistakably wrong in a way that made his body instinctively reject the idea of consuming it. There was a medicinal sharpness to it, mixed with something that might have been tolerable in small amounts, but not when more than ten different ingredients had been compressed into a sphere barely five millimeters wide.
He was not eating a random experimental pill he had assembled by throwing whatever looked interesting into a borrowed furnace.
But he was also not throwing it away.
He found a small display frame in his inventory. He had been meaning to set up item displays in his house for some time. He mounted it carefully on the wall beside the workbench.
It held the first pill he had ever refined.
It deserved recognition. Even if that recognition was best given from a safe distance.
He stepped back, then turned his attention to the furnace once more.
The Spiritual Energy Blockage II enchantment was a problem. He did not know precisely what it did to the refining process. Whether it slowed the output, degraded the results, or introduced impurities he could not detect. It was possible it had already affected the Unknown Compound Pill #1 in ways he could not measure.
He had a grindstone. He had the Spiritual Energy Circuit enchantment sitting in his inventory as an enchanted book.
The question was whether it was worth doing now, or whether he should spend more time understanding what the furnace's current enchantment did before replacing it.
---
---
So, some of you were right about why his aptitude was 1. One reader even got really close to how the distribution works. A few of you have also been asking when he'll become a cultivator. The system message I teased will appear in Chapter 50, and by Chapter 51, he'll officially be a cultivator.