Chapter 425: Place in the World

Ever since Hsu Henshui had been getting a full four hours of sleep each day, dark circles had begun to form under his eyes. He then noticed that the Mother Nature Monastery disciples who had joined him on this journey were experiencing the same phenomenon. Their mental energies were slowly but surely waning.

When Hsu Henshui inquired about this, he learned that most of the disciples had also entered the immortal’s dream realm. However, they had not been given access to the immortal formula. Instead, they were made to teach the Dao of pill-making within those dreams.

Although the people in the immortal’s dream realm had little to no prior foundation, they learned quickly. When questioned every other night about the materials they had covered the previous day, each one remembered it perfectly.

Moreover, there were many attendees. According to a particular disciple, the number of attendees even exceeded 1,000. As he spoke, his eyes sparkled with a look of deep satisfaction.

If it weren’t for the ancient immortal formula he needed to study, Hsu Henshui would have wanted to give it a try himself.

That said, after arriving at the Realm of Qingming, Hsu Henshui discovered that there was no shortage of teaching opportunities here. For instance, the youths in the new city and those who had once been human sacrifices all required extensive instruction. Moreover, Wei Yuan had already secured the permission to teach them the six fundamental Body-tempering methods. Excluding the Jade Toad Full Moon Painting, tens of thousands of people who were practicing the other five methods.

There were plenty of opportunities for Hsu Henshui to teach, and this man, who loved nothing more than to instruct others, instantly felt he had come to the right place. Back when the centralized learning curriculum was carried out, Ji Liuli had literally flung him away and caused him to miss out on countless teaching opportunities.

One day, Wei Yuan paid Hsu Henshui a visit and handed him a pill formula. It was the Jia Wood Little New Year Pill.

Hsu Henshui was a master of the Dao of pill-making. He realized at a glance that this formula shared the same origins as the Kun Origin Pill of Longevity. It was likely a refinement of the ancient immortal formula by later generations. He immediately treasured it as if it were a priceless treasure.

Hsu Henshui had all the ingredients to create the Jia Wood Little New Year Pill in his medicinal warehouse. He immediately lit the furnace, and three days later, the first batch was produced. This batch yielded nine pills in total, all of them boasting potent medicinal properties. Each pill could extend one’s life by five years, and a single person could take three in their lifetimes. However, the effects of the subsequent two pills would diminish sharply, resulting in a total life extension of eight years only.

After obtaining the Jia Wood Little New Year Pills, Wei Yuan had his men spread the word that a new batch of longevity elixirs had been discovered, and that an auction would be held in the Realm of Qingming. He invited all merchant houses under heaven to attend.

Although the invitation was extended to the entire human realm, in reality, factoring in the travel time, only those from the western commanderies of Ning Province would be able to make the journey. But so long as they came, the auction would be considered a success.

Half a month later, the auction proceeded smoothly. Over 60 merchant houses of various sizes had shown up. Since the Jia Wood Little New Year Pill was an unprecedented elixir of longevity and backed by the Palace of Absolute Beginning itself, it fetched a high price of 200 immortal silver per pill. A total of 50 Jia Wood Little New Year Pills were sold, bringing in 50,000 taels of immortal silver.

It was rare for so many merchant houses to appear in the realm at the same time. Naturally, Wei Yuan didn’t limit himself to just selling the pills. He also auctioned off numerous specialties he had looted from the Shaman realm. Although the items weren’t expensive individually, he had more than enough that he could sell them in large quantities.

After that, Wei Yuan auctioned off a batch of cuirasses.

In his head, the reserve price of these cuirasses was twenty taels a set. However, the merchants drove up the bidding until it settled at a price of thirty taels per set, and the winning merchant had placed an order for 10,000 sets at once.

After the auction, Wei Yuan quietly sought out a merchant he was on good terms with and inquired about the situation. The man spoke openly and candidly, explaining that Western Jin had been at war for an entire year, and all kinds of military supplies were in extremely short supply. This batch of armor, once transported to the front lines, would immediately be worth 50 taels per set. With the right connections, it could fetch as much as 100 taels per set!

Wei Yuan was speechless. To think that a single set of cuirass would command a military procurement price of 100 taels—if this was the Zhao State, such a price would have caused countless heads to roll long ago.

After learning the inside story, Wei Yuan immediately decided to lower the price to 25 and supply an additional 10,000 sets. As a result, another 550,000 taels of immortal silver was brought in. Combined with the proceeds from other sold goods, this auction round had brought in a total of over 800,000 taels. This was mainly because the goods from the Shamans had no production costs.

As the merchant house representatives departed, Wei Yuan agreed with them to hold a second auction in six months, and to hold a similar auction once every first season going forward.

According to the standard price set by Mother Nature Monastery, the ingredients used to create a single Jia Wood Little New Year Pill cost about 30 taels each. The pills crafted by Hsu Henshui were rich in potency. Once mass production began, the standard price could reach up to 500 taels, but for now, they were selling for 1,000 taels a pop.

The elixirs crafted by an ordinary disciple of Mother Nature Monastery could extend one’s lifespan by anywhere from three to five years. At market price, they were worth at least 300 taels of immortal silver per pop. In other words, even the poorest-quality elixir refined by the most ordinary disciple of the monastery could still yield a tear-jerking profit of about ten times its cost.

This was the moment Wei Yuan finally gained a firsthand understanding of the earning potential of the disciples of Mother Nature Monastery.

After the auction ended, Wei Yuan began seeking guidance from Hsu Henshui on the Dao of pill-making. If not for Ji Liuli’s intervention, the beautiful man would have become Wei Yuan’s instructor, so naturally he held nothing back and taught him everything he knew.

After several days of instruction, Hsu Henshui was surprised to discover that although Wei Yuan had no foundation in pill-making, he learned extremely quickly and made rapid progress by leaps and bounds. Moreover, he frequently offered insights of great depth, ones that did not match his actual level at all.

Some of these insights were ones Hsu Henshui himself had only grasped a day or two earlier while studying the ancient immortal formula, yet Wei Yuan had already arrived at them as well!

Time passed in this manner, and before they knew it, autumn had arrived.

Wei Yuan had made great strides in the Dao of pill-making during this period and was preparing to set aside some time to refine a furnace of pills in the near future. Aside from delving deeply into the Dao of pill-making, he hadn’t been idle in other matters either.

The top priority, of course, was cultivation.

Wei Yuan was currently in the spirit-cultivating stage, but he had absolutely no clue as to what constituted spiritual perfection for his Avatar, the Fire of Humanity.

Tens of thousands of ordinary mortals were advancing at regular intervals. At the moment, five mortals had ascended the path to immortality and become Dao Foundation stage cultivators, and more than ten others had reached the peak of the Body-tempering stage and could ascend at any moment.

When an ordinary mortal had forged their Dao Foundation, their spirituality naturally increased significantly, not to mention that they were going to keep cultivating. There seemed to be no end to this either. Could it be that every ordinary mortal had to cultivate a Dao Foundation or even an Avatar for the spirituality of his Avatar to reach perfection?

However, the ordinary mortals were merely one part of the Fire of Humanity. The bulk of it actually lay with Yin Yang. At the moment, she had only just begun to awaken her spirituality and was still a world away from reaching perfection. It was impossible to say how long it would take to fully nurture her.

Then there were the three Dragon Guards. Wei Yuan sensed that they still held vast untapped potential. He could be used as information processing nodes just like the immortal plants, not to mention that they could also act independently in the outside world. They were practically indistinguishable from true cultivators as well.

This single characteristic alone made the Dragon Guards infinitely versatile. It was why the True Dragon Avatar’s proposal that day—to grant him three more True Dragon descendants—was actually a generous offer. Not only would it propel Wei Yuan directly into the mid-stage of the Avatar-stage, the myriad manifestation stage, it would also provide him with three additional Avatar-stage helpers.

Fortunately, in the Fire of Humanity, every sentient being was a node capable of absorbing and releasing worldly origin qi. While he was in the Realm of Qingming, the Great Realm was also absorbing and releasing worldly origin qi constantly. Thus, Wei Yuan wasn’t worried about his mystic energy reserves. Even without meditating, it would naturally increase over time.

After a cultivator had attained their Avatar, their mystic energy was no longer the top priority—their spirituality was.

However, the mortals within his Avatar world had already established a preliminary self-sustaining cycle and were operating autonomously. To borrow the terminology from Xu Wenwu’s world, all Wei Yuan could do now was to maintain and upgrade the “hardware”. He was essentially acting as a maintenance engineer.