34 Refining without a Flame (II)

Huan Meirong was following the method that was in the jade which was a method where she was unfamiliar with most of the parts. Though she might get hurt, a thing she didn't want, she had decided to try that system of refining right now, at the last moment. After all, sooner or later she will have to try it as reaching the Martial Master level will take her some time and she needed to refine pills and liquids to make her cultivation quicker and stable with the plus of having to teach some lessons here and there.

She directed her soul force to the feet of the dark pill furnace. As it was a two rank pill furnace it had two wide feet as the base; each foot had a circular slit which was where the flame, in this case, only the soul entered to heat the pill furnace to make the refinements.

The slits had a thin formation that usually forbade anyone to use it unless it was the owner of it but she had already checked it in the fourth layer of the pagoda and there was no way for her to bind it. However as she was getting headaches because of it, she discovered it was because there was no need of binding it; it was a Noble pill furnace which was a kind of pill furnace that could be used by multiple people as it will never have an owner. Hence, she didn't have to take the effort on binding it and her soul could go through the formation without any hinder.

Once her soul was inside both feet, she redirected it to a compartment that was on the concave part of the pill furnace and divided her soul into three fine strands to then make the three rotate in a circular manner; the soul rings were lined one above the other with the one in the middle rotating to the left while the other two rotated to the right. According to the jade, this was a way to heat faster the pill furnace and that made sense to her as the widespread method she knew was heating it with only one ring so adding more rings to generate more heat had its logic but it was also more difficult.

Time passed and her pretty white face became paler.

"Ugh," she uttered a small whine. It was really complicated; it was no wonder that this form of heating a pill furnace wasn't known in the outside as it was not only about the number of rings of soul force that were revolving. The three rings' velocity of spinning was different from each other and just now, with the temperature she had reached, she had to expand and compress the rings; her head felt troubled with all the concentration she had to put.

At length, after ten eternal or so minutes, the pill furnace had the adequate temperature for her to begin the refinement of the Warm Skin Flower Tree's leaves.

The spinning rings were now one; she had dissipated two as she only needed to maintain the pill furnace's temperature so with some to spare, she waved one of her hands to open the lid of the pill furnace and put inside one of the yellowish leaves.

After having closed the lid she quickly created another strand of soul force and made it trespass the compartment where the spinning ring was to stop the leave from falling, letting it float.

'It won't do,' she thought with furrowed brows as she had her sense set on the leave, 'Anyway, it's not like you will succeed in your first attempt even if you weren't this tired…' By this time it wasn't only about her soul force but also about her mind. The leaves rank was above one but they were mentioned in the first jade as the powder was listed as rank one in it; she couldn't make sense of why though, when she had read the method her head had been messed up real quick that she had thought it deserved a higher rank. Even so, with her mind set on giving it a go to not back away from her early words, she did as the jade said with increased concentration and alertness.

The process of refining in the jade was with circulating rings of soul force too; they had to be of different sizes and maintained at different distances from the herb depending on what you were extracting. The way she had learnt in the past was much simpler as it was by scrapping the material with soul force, though it still had its trick and grade of difficulty as extracting the correct product with the adequate purity was needed.

As time passed the only sounds that could be heard in the pavilion were that of her breath and the spinning of the rings of soul force.

She didn't know how much time had passed when she felt something was not right, 'Bad…'