Awakened: The Spirit King!

"As promised, I've come to help you."

Who was it if not Leader Ye?

Xie Yang had told this stepbrother of his that he had to do him a favor and he couldn't refuse!

"What do you need me to do?"

Leader Ye didn't know why his young master was acting suspiciously, but he did want to find out.

"Two matters. I will be refining pills. The last step, which is about using spiritual energy to consolidate medicinal essence into a pill, is something I can't do. I do not lack the skills, but I lack spiritual energy. My cultivation base is too lacking to refine pills. Thus, please help me at the last step. The breakthrough pill that I will be making is extraordinary, so I hope you can help me keep everything about it a secret. Walls might have ears. Help me cut them."

"What Pills?"

Xie Ye had never heard about such a pill even though he had gone everywhere in and out of the empire.

"Never heard of them?"

Xie Yang knew that the people of the Glorious Sun Empire were ignorant about the existence of such a pill, and so it didn't come as much of a surprise to him that his stepbrother failed to identify it.

"En." Leader Ye nodded his head in confirmation.

"Well, I am certain you will be shocked to know about its effect and level of effectiveness."

Xie Yang had a mysterious smile on his face.

He was preserving the element of surprise of the pills for the very last moment.

Xie Ye anticipated such an answer.

His young master was too playful.

He was a patient man, so he could endure not knowing what he wanted to know.

Xie Yang pulled out all the necessary things he needed to refine the pills from his inter-spatial ring. He placed the ingredients on the jade tray which was on the table. As for the cauldron, he put it on the floor.

The first basic of alchemy that every alchemist needed to learn was purifying ingredients. Everything that soaks in the spiritual energy present in nature for a long time develops impurities. One might wonder the reason behind it. Not many know the answer to it. Xie Yang, though, had researched about this subject in his past life. The activities of humans and beasts lead to pollution, which corrupts the pure nature of spiritual energy. The foreign black particles that seep into the mortal realm when spirit invades it also corrupts its purity level. The lesser its purity, the higher the impurities in it. Impurities were harmful to humans. An excess of impurity in the body leads to many problems. A cultivator could become ill or face one wall after another because of it. For that to not happen, alchemists needed to purify ingredients.

The impurities enter beasts and spiritual herbs that grow in the wild as they use spiritual energy to nourish themselves.

Unlike humans, they don't follow a cultivation technique, which makes them gain impurities.

Many cultivators also don't have good enough techniques to make it impossible for impurities to enter them as they absorb spiritual energy.

However, some cultivation techniques made it possible for a person to cultivate without worrying about impurities.

But these techniques were worth Mountains of gold.

Xie Yang, for example, has a technique that allows him to pull spiritual energy into his elixir field. He can see whether a particle has impurities or not. Impurities appear as a yellowish dot or black dot in the blue of a spiritual energy particle.

From the beginning of his cultivation, he had only absorbed pure spiritual energy that nothing had tainted.

His spiritual energy was 100% pure, a task many cultivators fail to achieve.

Xie Yang focused his attention on the ingredients.

What he needed to do first was purify them!

He performed a few complex hand signs before bringing his hands above the tray. Tides of spiritual energy swirled out of his palm and rushed into a herb.

Pure Spiritual Energy had the effect of damaging and killing off impurities. Putting too much of it could damage the core of ingredients, which was its medicinal essence.

Thus, after using several units of his spiritual energy to kill impurities and push them out of the herb, Xie Yang moved on to the next ingredient.

It took a couple of minutes before Xie Yang pushed out a good amount of impurities from the ingredients.

Xie Ye had been witnessing his performance with a scrutinizing gaze.

When he saw what he did, Xie Ye felt so shocked that he became tongue-tied, speechless, and silly.

There were multiple reasons behind his mental response to Xie Yang's performance.

The main reason was that he had never seen an alchemist rooting out impurities from a herb by using spiritual energy.

It was something unheard of!

Alchemists of the past learned to do that before anything else.

Alchemists of the present, however, never bothered themselves with starting from this step as not only was it too taxing to control spiritual energy to kill impurities in an ingredient without damaging it for some and impossible for others but many times, an alchemist, own spiritual energy wasn't pure enough as to not induce impurities into a herb!

Thus, the people behind the scene had cut this step out of the alchemy world as a whole.

Alchemy was too hard to learn, and that step made it ten times harder.

Since it was exceedingly hard to step on the path of an alchemist, most people didn't bother themselves with it.

Thus, the powerhouses made the complex version of alchemy easier.

As a result, many cultivators became alchemists over the years.

Of course, they were very lacking compared to ancient alchemists ten thousand years ago.

Nowadays, people started putting ingredients into a cauldron and burning the fire.

In ancient times, the true alchemist had strictly forbidden their disciples from doing such a stupid thing!

There was a reason behind it.