Inside the quiet room, Luo Chen squinted at the second-tier alchemical formula in his hand and muttered under his breath, "Dustfall pill? What an unlucky name! Seriously, what kind of decent pill gets called Dustfall? Does the one who invented this know my name means dust? Maybe they do and they just wanted me to fail this thing…."[1]0

Though he voiced his complaints, the gleam in his eyes betrayed the truth: Luo Chen was genuinely thrilled. In all his years of studying alchemy, he had never encountered a pill quite like this. A new formula was one thing; new formulas appeared from time to time. It was the approach that was entirely novel.0

It was a cultivation pill formula. But unlike the usual formulas that extracted the energy of many ingredients into a single small pill so that the cultivator could absorb it directly, this Dustfall pill took an entirely different route.0

The path of qi cultivation began with refining vital essence into qi, and then qi into spirit. The so-called refinement of vital essence into qi referred to cultivating from Qi Refinement to Foundation Establishment and then Golden Core. At its core, the process relied on drawing from one's vital essence to advance through realms until a Golden Core condensed within the body.0

Yet human bodies were fragile, far inferior to many of the myriad races of heaven and earth. Within their tiny mortal body, how much vital essence could they possibly refine? For that reason, humans had devised methods to absorb spirit energy from nature itself. From that point onward, the orthodox cultivation path diverged from the path of the other races. It remained a refinement of vital essence into qi, but the vital essence now came from heaven and...4