On the second floor of the pill hall, in the exclusive pill-refining and slack-off room for young masters and mistresses.
Bang!
Black smoke drifted upward.
Lu Bei scraped the black sludge out of the cauldron, washed it clean, took a deep breath, and began his first truly meaningful round of pill-refining.
That last attempt didn't count; he was just testing the cauldron's quality.
The result had been less than satisfactory. The public area's white-grade cauldron had turned a batch of fine Enlightenment Pills into ruined scrap.
Opening his personal status panel, Lu Bei spent 10 skill points, instantly mastering the formula and refining steps for the Enlightenment Pill.
Choosing the Enlightenment Pill instead of the Blood-Replenishing Pill or the Qi-Nurturing Pill wasn't about saving the last 10 skill points for a rainy day—10 skill points were far too few to learn anything substantial anyway.
He chose it for its cost-effectiveness: refining an Enlightenment Pill took the least amount of time and consumed the cheapest materials. Over time, it would yield the most experience.
"Here we go, my first real attempt at pill-refining."
Lu Bei held his breath and skillfully went to work. Soon, a faint, lingering fragrance drifted from the cauldron, signaling that the Enlightenment Pill was about to be completed.
Bang!
The fragrance vanished instantly, and a puff of black smoke announced another failed attempt.
"Damn it, the white-grade quality ruined me again!" Lu Bei made a sour face. He really hated white-grade equipment.
Failure didn't come as a surprise; it was practically expected.
He had only learned to refine the Enlightenment Pill through skill points, without any actual alchemy techniques or skills. For every batch of Enlightenment Pills he refined, the chance of getting a fine grade was 10%, a standard grade was 40%, and a ruined batch was 50%.
And that was only because the Enlightenment Pill was simple to pick up and ranked among the easiest pills to make.
On the second floor of the pill hall, right next to Lu Bei's slack-off room, lay a collection of foundational alchemy knowledge authored by a grandmaster of the Huangji Sect. Mastering it would drastically increase his success rate.
Lu Bei couldn't learn it just yet; the minimum requirement was 50 skill points. For now, he had no choice but to gain experience by churning out Enlightenment Pills until his overall level went up and he had enough skill points to study.
Of course, he could also grind favorability with Lin Bohai, play the role of an assistant, and let his master carry him to success.
Lu Bei had no interest in that approach. For one, it was a waste of time, and for another, he was too proud to keep clinging to someone's coattails.
Clinging to Senior Sister Bai or Senior Sister Zhu was one thing—after all, they smelled nice and were soft—but Lin Bohai's coattails...
A real man ought to stand on his own two feet!
Ten minutes later, his first batch of Enlightenment Pills—the one that had been completely wiped out—was finished. Lu Bei scraped out the white pill paste and placed it on the coffee table to cool down.
Advanced alchemists who had undergone systematic training possessed matching skills, allowing them to shape the pill paste as they scooped it out. Lu Bei had nothing of the sort, so he could only roll them into spheres by hand.
Fortunately, it wasn't a huge problem. The slack-off room was equipped with tools—an appliance similar to an ice cube tray press from a refrigerator, with a usage method that was roughly the same.
Eleven Enlightenment Pills went into the bottle. Due to wastage during the pressing process, he fell one short of the standard dozen.
[You have completed a pill-refining session. Based on the pill's grade and quality, you have gained 100 experience points. For your first truly meaningful alchemy attempt, an additional 2,000 experience points are granted.]
"Fantastic!"
Lu Bei's eyes lit up as he poured all 2,100 experience points into leveling up his overall level.
Level: 4
Experience: 1450/1800
Leveleding up did not grant direct attribute growth. The system prompt indicated: Free Attribute Points +1, Skill Points +50.
"Very nice, a solid start. I'll save these 50 skill points for now and gather 100 before studying the foundational alchemy knowledge." Lu Bei rubbed his hands together excitedly and reached out toward the white-grade cauldron.
An hour later, five bottles of Enlightenment Pills were lined up neatly on the coffee table. Lu Bei paused briefly to admire the fruits of his labor before impatiently starting his upgrades.
Level: 5
Experience: 50/3200
The system prompt indicated a cumulative total of 4 Free Attribute Points and 110 Skill Points.
Lu Bei washed his hands, found Lin Bohai, who was currently sipping tea, and expressed his desire to study advanced alchemy knowledge. Giving it no second thought, the latter fished out a ring of keys and led him to the storage room housing the foundational alchemy texts.
Since it was introductory knowledge, there was no need to speak of confidentiality. Perhaps it was a prized treasure to those destitute wretches on Nine Bamboo Mountain, but to the deep-pocketed and talent-rich Huangji Sect, it was merely popular science material circulated among the lower ranks.
Lu Bei ran his fingers over the books on the storage room shelves one by one, choosing a manual that required 80 skill points to learn: [Huangji Pill-Nurturing Essentials].
How does one evaluate the quality of a technique?
A common method used by players was to check how many skill points were required to learn it at the beginner stage; the higher the consumption, the higher its potential ceiling.
But there were exceptions. After all, immortals-in-training came in all sorts of varieties, and authors who dug pitfalls for readers were far from rare—starting out profound and ending up a mess was a common occurrence.
Some players misjudged based on experience, fell into the trap, and stomped their feet in rage while cursing the author's ancestors down to the eighth generation. Others played a high-stakes game of gamble and won big, celebrating joyfully and blessing the author's forebears.
On the whole, techniques that required a large investment of skill points and experience in the early stages generally turned out quite decent.
[Huangji Pill-Nurturing Essentials Lv1 (0/100)]
Lu Bei consumed 80 skill points, mastering the [Huangji Pill-Nurturing Essentials] in a single second. But in the eyes of Lin Bohai, who was walking alongside him, he had merely flipped through two pages and finished.
Typical rich young master behavior—the habit of arrogance was always the exact same.
Lin Bohai shook his head inwardly, locked the storage room door, and went back to drinking his tea.
Having learned the pill-nurturing essentials, fueled by the excitement of gaining experience, Lu Bei became thoroughly engrossed in alchemy. He hurriedly bid farewell to Lin Bohai and returned to his slack-off room to embark on his experience-grinding journey.
In the late game, the experience gained from refining Enlightenment Pills was merely a drop in the bucket for players. But in the early game, especially during the novice period before stepping into the cultivation ranks, every single point of experience hard-won.
Lu Bei vaguely remembered his LSP superior mentioning that when the servers first opened, players realized the pill hall was essentially an experience room. They had swarmed into Huangji Sect's various outposts, willing to work for free without even asking for room and board.
As a result, they were treated as unruly rabble—half of them ended up in solitary confinement, while the other half were beaten black and blue as they fled in panic.
[Huangji Pill-Nurturing Essentials Lv2 (500/500)]
[Huangji Pill-Nurturing Essentials Lv3 (2000/2000)]
[Huangji Pill-Nurturing Essentials Lv4 (0/8000)]
Spirit +1, Stamina +1, Spirit +1, Stam...
Aside from a brief interruption at noon when Zhu Yan dragged him off to lunch, Lu Bei spent the entire day refining Enlightenment Pills to grind experience, successfully pushing the [Huangji Pill-Nurturing Essentials] skill to Level 4 and unlocking a new sub-occupation.
Alchemist Lv1 (0/100)
Much like farmers, alchemists belonged to foundational sub-occupations, which could be leveled up or transitioned into other paths.
Unlike farmers, who could transition into branching sub-occupations such as animal husbandry, fishery, or mining, alchemists were more closely tied to the cultivation system. Upon reaching max level, they would progress to Senior Alchemist, Grandmaster, and Great Grandmaster.
The same applied to Artifact-Refining and Array-Setting.
These three were sub-occupations that both NPCs and players regarded with extreme importance, accompanying almost everyone throughout their entire lives.
Because these three sub-occupations held immense potential and exerted the greatest influence on a character's main class—virtually determining roles like healers, crowd controllers, attackers, and tanks—they were listed separately. When completing quests, players could form temporary teams based on each member's primary offensive direction and characteristics, enhancing the game's diversity.
By the way, thanks to teammates, colorful profanity had also become a profound academic discipline.
Speaking of sub-occupations, one could not ignore the three most fundamental traditional classes—scholars, farmers, artisans, and merchants.
The merchant sub-occupation was just thrown in to fill the numbers; only major guilds could actually play it effectively, while ordinary players could only dream. The remaining three sub-occupations had countless branches, which could also influence the main class and even provide bonuses to alchemy, artifact-crafting, array-setting, and special techniques.
For example, the farmer's apothecary branch, the artisan's blacksmith and painter branches, or the scholar's spy and military strategist branches could all unlock hidden sub-occupations once they reached max level.
When it came to choosing sub-occupations, a group of players—though not large in number—had once pulled off an event that shook the entire server, flooding the forums with posts.
Among the scholar branches, they had excavated an extremely secretive and ancient profession—eunuchs.
Although the method of job advancement was extremely simple—entering the palace and undergoing castration—it...
Well, it just showed that they truly lived up to their name as the Fourth Calamity; no matter how deeply hidden a hidden class was, it was no match for their wild imaginations.