A stunned silence followed Gin’s heartbreaking admission, broken only by Lulu’s sharp, analytical mind cutting through the emotional fog. “So,” she stated, voicing the collective realization, “the universe’s most ironic punchline. Our resident drunkard wasn’t a failed cultivator at all. He was an untrained, undiscovered master alchemist all along.”

  Zhang Liao, his youthful face still smeared with blue, looked at Gin with a new, starry-eyed awe. “Wow… so Mr. Gin was actually amazing this whole time.”

  The comment, meant as pure admiration, landed on Gin with the subtlety of a hammer. It was a painful reminder of the life he could have had, the respect that could have been his, and it made him shift uncomfortably, taking another long drink as if to drown the feeling.

  Kai, however, refused to let the revelation become just another regret. His mind was already racing, strategizing, seeing a potential lifeline where Gin saw only a dead end.

  “Gin, this changes things. You said you could operate the equipment in there? The cauldron, the arrays, all of it?” Kai pressed.

  Gin shrugged, the motion weary. “Um, yeah, sure. In theory. But there’s not much point. The tools are exquisite—Kuro didn’t skimp. But the ingredients we have access to out here in this spiritual wasteland are weeds and wishful thinking. You can’t craft a masterpiece with mud and sticks. Nothing truly impressive could be made with what’s on hand.”

  “What would you need?” Kai asked, undeterred. “To make something even half-decent, what’s the bare minimum?”

  “Ha!” Gin let out a short, humorless laugh. “A lot. First, you need herbs that haven’t been starved of qi their entire lives. Something that actually contains a significant amount of spiritual energy. Then there’s the bigger problem: heat. That Sunfire Array is a precision instrument, but it’s like a powerful bow with few arrows. The ambient qi in Zan is too thin. The array can’t regenerate its stored energy fast enough. You’d get one, maybe two basic uses out of it before it’s drained, and then you’d be waiting days to weeks for it to passively recharge. For consistent, sufficient heating, you’d need to fuel it directly. With spirit stones. Which, I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a treasury of those to be burning. I’ve got two. Maybe three if I shake out my boot.”

  Kai’s face fell into a complicated grimace. He knew the problem intimately. In the heartlands of the Righteous Alliance, spirit stones were currency, fuel, and cultivation aids, flowing freely through major sects. Here in Zan, they were mythical artifacts. In his entire career as a low-level caretaker for spirit beast, he’d managed to hoard a meager twelve, each one a hard-won treasure he’d been saving for a future emergency for his menagerie, using them for his own advancement, a long-abandoned dream.

  It was then that Lulu, who had been listening quietly, raised a hand as if in a lecture hall. “I have approximately fifty-three mid-grade spirit stones,” she announced with the casual air of someone listing off their stock of paper clips.

  Kai and Gin both turned to stare at her.

  “I had them saved for procuring increasingly potent sleeping draughts from core territory alchemists,” she explained, adjusting her glasses. “Since meeting Kai, however, my chronic insomnia has… abated. I have no intention of ever groveling before those pretentious pill-peddlers again. The stones are therefore redundant. You may have them.”

  Gin let out a low whistle, genuinely impressed. “Fifty-three? With that kind of capital, if I’m conservative and don’t try to boil the ocean, I could reliably fire up the cauldron ten, maybe twelve times. But…” He trailed off, the lifelong scavenger in him balking at the thought. “It still seems like a terrible waste to burn them just to heat a pot.”

  “Let’s table that for now,” Kai agreed. “Unless it’s a true emergency, we preserve them. Is there anything else you’d absolutely need?”

  Gin scratched his stubbled chin. “Not needed, but it’s the same answer: more spirit stones. People think alchemists are obsessed with them to trade for ingredients, but that’s only half of it. Crushed spirit stone powder is a substrate, a catalyst, or a direct ingredient in ninety percent of mid-to-high-tier recipes. It’s pure, stable, concentrated energy. The only reason you’d use a rare herb instead is that sometimes it’s cheaper. But we don’t have the herbs. So yeah, it all comes back to the stones.”

  Kai sighed. “So it’s not just the fuel; it’s the foundation. The entire art of alchemy is built on a mountain of spirit stones.”

  Gin nodded, taking another long, contemplative swig from his gourd. The liquor seemed to help him think, smoothing the rough edges of his frustration. “Eh, pretty much. You can muddle through the cheap, mundane stuff without a fortune in stones. But for the things that actually matter? The elixirs that clear bottlenecks, the pills that forge golden cores, the things cultivators would kill for? Yeah. That’s a pricey hobby for the rich and righteous.”

  “But that ‘mundane and cheap stuff’ is exactly what I’m looking for. I’m not trying to create miracles here,” Kai said, a new energy lighting his features. He turned his gaze toward the still-despondent Chen Gong before shifting it back to Gin. “While Chen Gong’s ambition was… catastrophically misplaced, he did stumble onto a kernel of a good idea. He tried to substitute alchemical ingredients with what we have locally, and he attempted to use his own qi to compensate for the spiritual lack in those ingredients. It was a disaster, but the core concept—adapting to our environment—is sound. So, my question is this: could you do it right? Could you make something genuinely useful, even if it’s the lowest-tier medicine, by substituting with mundane resources and possibly… our own qi?”

  Gin uncrossed his arms, the question actually giving him pause. He stared into the middle distance, his eyes losing their usual bleary quality and taking on a calculating focus.

  Kai could almost see the mental calculations scrolling behind his eyes—lists of local flora, ratios of heat, potential alchemical reactions.

  “Hmm,” Gin grunted, rubbing his chin. “If we forgo the array entirely and just heat the cauldron the old-fashioned way—with a damn good wood fire—and if I can find the right local substitutes… yeah. I think I could consistently whip up a passable Tier Two poultice or stamina tonic. Something to knit bone-deep fatigue or close a nasty cut faster than nature intended. Maybe, if the conditions are perfect and the local herbs are having a good season, I might even luck into a Tier Three analgesic every once in a blue moon.” He finally looked at Kai, his expression serious. “But I don’t know for sure. I’ll have to experiment. There’s a big difference between theory and practice, especially when you’re working with garbage materials.”

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  Kai’s eyes lit up as if Gin had just promised him a treasure vault. “You can get to Tier Three?” The hope in his voice was palpable. Tier Three was still incredibly low by the standards of great sects, but in the spiritual wasteland of Zan, it was revolutionary. It was a potency that could genuinely change lives. “That’s… that’s perfect! I was expecting you to say Tier One was our ceiling, or that it was outright impossible. This is incredible news!”

  Gin looked baffled by Kai’s enthusiasm. “Um, why? It’s not like there’s anything here in Zan that can hurt us bad enough to require cultivation medicine. The worst we’ve got are angry giant boars and your beastkin take care of that. A good bandage and some rest should suffice.”

  “That kind of thinking is how you get complacent, and complacency gets you killed,” Kai countered, his tone turning earnest. “But more importantly,” he said, a shrewd, strategic glint in his eye, “if we can make medicine, even low-tier medicine, we can trade it with the locals.”

  Gin frowned, his simple mind immediately latching onto what he saw as a simpler solution. “Why go through all the hassle? Don’t you have a ridiculous amount of leather from your Beastkin? Couldn’t you just trade that?”

  Kai nodded, acknowledging the point. “It’s true, the menagerie provides more hides and leather than we could ever use. And yes, we trade it. But people only need so much leather. A man needs one good coat, maybe two. A family needs a waterskin, a satchel. There’s a ceiling. I can only trade so much in a given year.”

  He leaned forward, his voice dropping into a more earnest, strategic tone. “But medicine? That’s different. People are always getting sick. They’re always getting hurt. Their need is constant, and their current remedies—poultices of boiled weeds and prayers to forgotten spirits—are often little more than hope. There is no ceiling on that need.”

  He gestured eastwards toward the Cloud Coast. “And there’s a longer game here. Right now, we’re strangers. But if we are the ones who supplied the medicine that saved an elder from a wasting cough… if we provided the tonic that gave a dying child the strength to fight… then we become healers. Benefactors.”

  Kai’s eyes held a vision that went far beyond simple trade. “When we eventually can no longer hide what we are, and we reveal ourselves to the locals as cultivators, that foundation of trust will be everything. Their fear will be tempered by gratitude. They won’t see a terrifying display of power; they’ll remember the hands that helped them recover. Cultivator medicine, even our lowest-tier efforts, would be a miracle to them.”

  Gin let out a long, weary sigh that smelled strongly of cheap liquor, but his expression was one of resigned acceptance. “Alright, fine. I guess I see your point there. I can start poking around, see what I can whip up while I’m distilling my next batch of booze.”

  “There is one condition, though,” Kai said, his tone turning serious. “When you make that healing medicine… can you aim for Tier One? Maybe even the lower end of it?”

  Gin’s brow furrowed in genuine confusion. “Why in the hell would you want a worse medicine? The whole point is to make something effective.”

  “It’s just…” Kai began, a shadow of a painful memory crossing his features. “I’ve seen what even low-tier cultivation-grade medicine does to mortals. Their bodies aren’t made for it. The qi accelerates the healing, yes, but it’s too much. It gets the job done, but it’s a violent, traumatic process. It’s not going to leave a positive impression on people if their grandmother is left screaming, begging for death as her bones knit themselves back together in a matter of hours.”

  “Oh,” Gin said, the light of understanding dawning. “You don’t want to reduce the tier; you want to reduce the pain. You want a gentler medicine, even if it’s slower.”

  “Exactly,” Kai said, relieved he didn’t have to explain further.

  Gin looked at him as if he’d just asked for a slower horse. “Why don’t I just increase the efficiency for you instead of trying to make a worse medicine?”

  Now it was Kai’s turn to be confused. “Huh? What do you mean?” The term ‘efficiency’ in this context felt as though it had more meaning.

  For a moment, Gin stared at Kai like he was the biggest simpleton he’d ever met, his mouth slightly agape. Then, the realization hit him: the fundamental principles he took for granted were, in fact, esoteric knowledge.

  The dynamic had utterly flipped.

  Kai felt a strange, surreal vertigo. For a while, he had been the one patiently explaining the basics of the world to Gin. Now, on this single, specific subject, he was the ignorant one being patiently regarded by the master.

  “Look,” Gin began, adopting the tone of a man explaining something very simple to a very bright child. “Standard cultivation medicine is all about speed at the total sacrifice of efficiency. It’s a brute-force method. It floods the body with raw energy to force the healing process, like using a sledgehammer to drive a nail. It works instantly, but it’s messy, wasteful, and yeah, it bloody well hurts.”

  He held up a stained finger. “But I can refine the process. I can tweak the formula, control the reaction temperature, and use catalysts to make the energy smarter. Instead of a sledgehammer, it’s a precision tap. It’ll take longer—a broken bone might mend in a days instead of an hour—but it will use less energy, cause virtually no pain, and can actually heal more complex, systemic issues because it’s not just bulldozing through the body. It’s efficient.”

  Lulu, who had been listening with her usual analytical detachment, looked genuinely startled. Her eternal memory physique was failing her. “Is that… is that really how it works?” she interjected, her voice laced with intellectual curiosity. “I’ve never heard of such a concept. I’ve memorized thousands of alchemical texts, from the foundational to the forbidden, and not a single one makes a distinction between ‘speed’ and ‘efficiency’ in healing elixirs.”

  Gin turned his patient, slightly condescending gaze on her. For the first time, Lulu Hong, the Living Archive of Silver Quill University, experienced the unique and unsettling sensation of being the uninformed one. It was a novel and mildly irritating feeling.

  “Well, it’s never spelled out in writing,” Gin explained, as if it were obvious. “It’s implied in the methodology. Think about it: if you’re a high enough realm cultivator, you can recover from most injuries through meditation alone. So why would you ever use medicine? To save time. Thus, every manual, every recipe, is optimized for the fastest possible result. Speed is the default, the only metric that matters to them. Efficiency? Gentleness? That’s for people who have time to care about comfort.” He shrugged. “You just have to read between the lines.”

  A long, slow breath escaped Kai. He shook his head, a complex mix of awe, frustration, and dawning respect on his face. “You know,” he began, his voice a mixture of exasperation and genuine admiration, “you might be a complete and utter idiot in nearly every other aspect of your life, and your understanding of basic cultivation is a tragedy of errors… but your innate skill for alchemy? That is undeniably, terrifyingly impressive.”

  Gin blinked, processing the verbal whirlwind. He opened his mouth, closed it, then raised the flask to his lips only to find it empty. He looked from Kai’s earnest face to Lulu’s stunned expression. A slow, lopsided grin spread across his features, the irony of the situation not lost on him.

  “Thank… you?” he said, the words dragging out into a question. He wasn’t entirely sure if he’d just been insulted, complimented, or both, but he decided, for once, to accept the part that sounded positive. “I think. I’ll… yeah. I’ll take that.”

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