Chapter 28: A Cook Who Can't Refine Pills Is Not a Good Blacksmith!
Huff huff...
Exhausted, Jiang Lin sat on the ground in his courtyard, gazing at his work without any lingering thoughts.
Now at Dou Qi Stage Seven, compared to the previous Stage Six, under the explosive power of the Flameburst Cleave Armor Sword, even a Da Dou Shi could be cut down if they weren't careful. The lower one's cultivation, the easier it was for battle equipment to blur the lines of power between different realms.
If you fight with your fists, even with Dou Techniques, a Dou Zhe might not be able to break through a Dou Shi's Dou Qi silk armor.
But if you use battle equipment of the same tier, unless your opponent's body is harder than your weapon, you can absolutely take them down in a single slash without a sound.
After a short rest to recover some stamina, Jiang Lin sat cross-legged and began cultivating the Tempering Fire Art. Soon, his entire body turned red like a boiled prawn.
'Tempering Fire Art isn't a technique for ordinary people. After a year of cultivating it, I feel that both my constitution and meridian resilience have improved. The realm of Dou Qi is a process of marrow cleansing and meridian refinement. And this technique… it's the best introductory Dou Qi method. But I wonder if I can keep cultivating it further... or rather, does it even have higher levels?'
'If it starts from Yellow Rank, then Xuan, Earth... even Heaven Rank—that would be a complete cultivation method. Probably only a legendary Dou Emperor would possess such a technique.'
'If Dou Qi can't be cultivated by standard techniques, maybe a Dou Emperor could create their own ultimate foundational Qi method... It's not impossible.'
Jiang Lin shook his head, burying those currently unreachable thoughts deep inside, and resumed his daily training.
The Tempering Fire Art was unlike ordinary methods—it couldn't be practiced all day long. Jiang Lin could only run it through a full major circulation once per session, taking about an hour. Any more, and his brain might fry from overload like a CPU pushed too far.
Jiang Lin usually only trained it twice a day, spending the rest of his time recuperating his body, which also granted him plenty of free time.
Once in the morning, once in the evening. Noon was off-limits—because death comes to all eventually.
Well… truthfully, because he was usually busy during the day, and had enough time to recover in the mornings and nights.
After completing his daily routine, Jiang Lin pulled out paper and pen, writing down the fragmented battle equipment inheritance knowledge in his mind as small individual concepts. The information was too scattered for direct recall and made his thoughts wander. Only by writing each idea down and brainstorming over them could he efficiently gain new insights.
His way of thinking was like turning his memory into a company—he was the big boss. He couldn't manage every low-level employee, but once those employees were grouped into project teams and presented before him, he could grasp the full picture of the company.
It took Jiang Lin three full days to sort through all that fragmented and chaotic information.
"Whew... what a headache. No wonder modern alchemists and blacksmiths don't use this kind of inheritance anymore—it's mentally exhausting. And over time, the 'handwriting' becomes worn down, most of it turning into junk data. After going through so much effort to download this inheritance knowledge, if most of it ends up garbled, it feels just like my high school roommate who used precious data at night to download porn, only to wait forever and finally open the file… and find two dudes. Tsk tsk tsk."
"Luckily, I wasn't as unlucky as him. Amidst all these scattered fragments, I still found some truly inspiring forging concepts."
Three days later, Jiang Lin sat in his room and placed a pale blue, head-sized stone onto his desk, which was covered in paper.
"This Demon Core Crystallization Armor must be an ancient relic thousands of years old. Its soul imprint has mostly faded—there's barely a complete section left. Thankfully, I don't need to forge it exactly as described. The ideas it gave me are the greatest gain from this inherited iron piece."
"So ancient blacksmiths were obsessed with magic cores... well, makes sense. Alchemists have long mastered extracting energy from them for pill refinement. It's logical that early blacksmiths pursued similar paths. Maybe both professions developed together... only blacksmiths eventually declined?"
Jiang Lin carefully sanded the dirty exterior of the magic core fossil. If it had been complete, he wouldn't dare grind it—it might explode.
"That person said magic cores are incredibly potent Dou Qi carriers… Hmm, according to Mr. Yao, Dou Zhe form a vortex in their dantian, Dou Shi's Qi becomes liquid, and Dou Ling's Dou Qi begins to spike up like a thorny lump. Not sure about Dou Wang… so humans have something like magic cores too, just less extreme than magical beasts."
Magic cores—top-tier biological materials with growth potential.
"My biggest use for magic cores is explosions. Even with wires to guide the energy, I've only ever used them in battle equipment. But that person believed the chaotic Dou Qi inside a magic core could be refined. The reason humans can't absorb it is due to our insufficiently tough meridians. It's true—at the same level, magical beasts always dominate with sheer physique. Humans need tactics and teamwork just to wear them down, and only rarely can one overpower a magical beast directly."
"The notes say Dou Wang-level experts can temporarily absorb magic core Dou Qi in emergencies. So that person's theory was to make it safe for the human body to absorb magic core Dou Qi."
"If the human body's meridians are too weak, then use materials harder than flesh as an intermediary—forge battle equipment to weaken the wild properties of magic core energy, tease apart the chaos. If magic core Dou Qi is like a tangled mess of threads, then as long as you use the right tools to straighten and organize them… it should become usable by humans. Observe the phenomenon, summarize the rules, test and refine the results. This kind of research mindset… is just brilliant."
"But..." Jiang Lin murmured as he polished the magic core fossil to a shine:
"I wonder if this senior ever made a name for himself. His thought process… taken further, would be to refine the magic core into a magic pill. Then further—make a massive pill furnace and refine the entire magical beast... and then... uh… okay, that's getting a bit too dangerous. I better stop there."
Jiang Lin immediately halted that risky line of thought.
"Wait... the phrases 'pill refinement' and 'equipment forging'—could that memory fragment be part of a single sentence?"
While polishing his beloved magic core fossil, a sudden flash of inspiration struck Jiang Lin as he connected a previously fragmented piece of inherited knowledge.
"This... is a conclusion?"
At that moment, deep within Jiang Lin's memory, the fragments pieced together into a complete sentence:
"Dan Qi Zi: A cook who can't refine pills is not a good blacksmith!"
(END CHAPTER)
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