As they passed through the corridor in the courtyard, the white crane was dozing off on one leg by the stone trough. Hearing their footsteps, it merely lifted its eyelids lazily.

Ruan Se pushed open a heavy stone door at the end of the corridor and stepped aside. Lai Li’an stepped through the door, and the moment he went inside, he was completely stunned.

The space before his eyes was far larger than it appeared from the outside. In the center stood a half-person-tall Alchemy Cauldron, its body engraved with dense Formation Patterns, each line polished to exquisite detail.

On the wooden shelves to the left, jade pestles, medicine bowls, and Medicinal Scales of various sizes were displayed, each one absolutely spotless. On the right were rows of medicine cabinets; just a glance was enough to tell that there were at least a hundred types of medicinal herbs stored here.

Ruan Se had been standing to the side, observing his reaction. Seeing Lai Li’an standing frozen in place without saying a word after entering, his gaze sweeping over the tools she had carefully selected, her face flushed slightly beneath her veil, and a hint of nervousness crept into her tone.

“Senior, please excuse the sight. These are just temporary tools I threw together to make do. Their grade isn’t high, and they can only barely suffice. If we were in the Sect, the grade would be much higher, but for now, I can only ask Senior to bear with this grievance.”

Lai Li’an snapped back to his senses, swallowing back the “holy shit” that had reached the tip of his tongue.

This was called “making do”? He calmly withdrew his gaze and gave a slight nod. “Acceptable. Since the conditions are as such, we will just have to make do.”

When he uttered the words “make do”, his conscience twinged slightly.

Ruan Se, however, did not feel anything was amiss. In her eyes, the Senior before her was a grandmaster capable of refining Eighth-Grade Pills who was accustomed to divine furnaces of unknown grades. This small Alchemy Room of hers was probably no different from a thatched hut in his eyes.

The fact that the Senior hadn’t just turned around and left was already giving her a tremendous amount of face.

“Senior,” Ruan Se hesitated for a moment, but still spoke up. “This junior has a presumptuous request. During this session of Alchemy, may this junior observe from the side? Please rest assured, Senior, this junior will absolutely not disturb you. I will just watch quietly from the side and will definitely not speak a word.”

She kept her posture very humble, but her eyes harbored a trace of unconcealable longing.

After seeing Lai Li’an take action earlier, she had gained a certain understanding of him, and this longing had taken root in her heart. Now that she saw he was about to perform Alchemy, she couldn’t hold it back any longer.

Having cultivated the Alchemy Dao for so many years, she had witnessed the techniques of many alchemists. If this pill could truly be refined today, just taking a single glance might be better than ten years of fumbling around on her own.

Lai Li’an’s heart skipped a beat. She wanted to watch? But he didn’t know the first thing about Alchemy! Right now, he was panicking like crazy.

But Ruan Se had just saved his disciple, lent him medicinal ingredients, and offered her Alchemy Room. Could he really refuse such a single request?

Ruan Se keenly noticed the slight change in Lai Li’an’s expression. Thinking she had offended him, she quickly took a step back. “This junior was presumptuous. I know that the art of alchemy has strict lineages, and the secrets of many techniques are not meant to be shared. I was asking too much just now…”

“You may.”

Ruan Se looked up, a trace of surprise flashing in her eyes. She had already mentally prepared herself for rejection and didn’t expect him to actually agree.

Lai Li’an threw caution to the wind. After all, his Scripture of the Eternal Alchemy God was fully automated by the system. He couldn’t explain the specific pill-forming process himself anyway, and all onlookers would see were superficial phenomena like surging Spiritual Fire and flowing medicinal liquids. Surely she wouldn’t be able to tell at a glance that this “Senior” actually didn’t know the first thing about alchemy… right?

Besides, Ruan Se had a cold personality and was of few words. Even if she noticed something fishy, she probably wouldn’t expose him to his face. If it genuinely made her feel that he had unfathomable secrets, it might even make him look more like an enigmatic expert.

Ruan Se took a few steps back, concealing her figure in the shadows of the Alchemy Room’s corner. Her hands rested properly in front of her. She deliberately concealed all of her Spiritual Power Fluctuations, watching quietly.

Lai Li’an took a deep breath and walked over to the Alchemy Cauldron. The materials on the tray were neatly arranged, each one clear at a glance.

The prescription for the Eternal Spring Life-Prolonging Pill from the Scripture of the Eternal Alchemy God automatically surfaced in his mind. He “knew” every single step.

But knowing it was one thing; actually doing it was another matter entirely.

He picked up the medicinal ingredients one by one to look at them, as if examining their quality. Then, before Ruan Se even had time to think about what he would do next, he dumped all the materials into the Alchemy Cauldron all at once.

All the herbs were emptied in one go, rustling as they slid into the cauldron and piled up into a colorful little mountain.

The cauldron lid snapped shut, the sound exceptionally crisp in the quiet Alchemy Room.

Ruan Se froze completely before speaking up to question him directly, “Senior, what are you doing? This is my first time seeing alchemy done like this. Forgive me for being blunt, but this doesn’t look like alchemy; it looks more like… making a big pot of stew.”

She felt as though everything she had learned in her life had been overturned. In normal alchemy, even for the lowest First-Grade Pill, one had to adhere to the principles of “sovereign, minister, assistant, and envoy,”1 as well as a strict sequential order. Every herb had its precise timing and heat requirement for entering the cauldron; a hair’s breadth of deviation would ruin all previous efforts.

And the refinement of a Sixth-Grade Pill was even more complex, requiring repeated deliberation over the timing of adding each medicinal herb. Some herbs needed to be refined in advance, some added midway; there was no logic in dumping them all in at once.

It was like telling her that to cook a Manchu-Han Imperial Feast, there was no need to differentiate between pan-frying, stir-frying, boiling, and deep-frying, just dump all the ingredients into the same pot and cook them together.

Lai Li’an’s heart pounded in fright at her sudden exclamation, but his facial expression remained completely unchanged. He turned around to glance at Ruan Se, his mind rapidly spinning a lie.

“Fellow Daoist Ruan,” he explained unhurriedly, “what do you think is the foundation of the Alchemy Dao?”

Ruan Se was taken aback by his question for a moment before answering, “Controlling the heat, the sovereign-minister pairing of ingredients, and the harmony of yin and yang.”

These were the most basic answers of the Alchemy Dao. Would saying them in front of this Senior seem too shallow? She fell silent, nervously waiting for the Senior’s guidance.

Lai Li’an placed his hands behind his back and tilted his head up slightly to look at the circulating Spiritual Lamp on the dome. “In the Primordial era, heaven and earth were undivided, and all things coexisted in chaos. At that time, there was no distinction between sovereign and minister, no sequence of first and last, and no barrier between herbs; they were originally one entity. Alchemists of later generations separated sovereign and minister, established sequences, and defined heat control. While this certainly pushed the Alchemy Dao to a height where it could be inherited, it also invisibly severed the most original resonance between the medicinal herbs.”

He paused, gently pressing a hand against the wall of the Alchemy Cauldron. “Putting them into the cauldron one by one in sequence, refining their medicinal properties sequentially before forcibly fusing them together, this is ‘Technique.’ Throwing all the medicinal herbs in at the same time, letting them vie for the heat, collide, and fuse on their own within the cauldron, this is the ‘Dao.’ Practitioners of Technique use human effort to control the herbs; practitioners of the Dao use herbs to control the herbs.”

Ruan Se stood in the corner, at a loss for words for a moment. She considered herself to have read quite a few ancient texts on the Alchemy Dao, yet she had never heard of this concept of “Using Herbs to Control Herbs.”

This theory was far too unorthodox and rebellious. If his words were wrong, they could only have been fabricated by someone completely devoid of common sense regarding the Alchemy Dao.

If anyone else had said this, she would have certainly scoffed at it, dismissing it as the senseless babble of a swindler who knew nothing of the Alchemy Dao. But the one who spoke these words was the Senior who had slain a Late Golden Core cultivator with a single sword strike. Would someone with such strength joke about the Alchemy Dao?

She was repeatedly chewing over these words in her mind, but Lai Li’an did not give her time to continue thinking.

He had the pill recipe in his head, but he had absolutely no idea what to do next. The Alchemy Cauldron was closed, but the Spiritual Fire hadn’t been lit yet.

His gaze swept around the Alchemy Room and finally landed on Ruan Se. Suddenly, he had an idea.