The sun was setting when Ye Mo returned to his house.
Inside the courtyard, only stone fragments and broken boulders remained, like a catastrophe sweeped by and destroyed everything.
Ye Mo took short pauses in-between to recover his Qi and only stopped when nothing remained for him to train with.
Workers would come by during the night to clean the place and restore it anew for Ye Mo next visit.
When he stood in front of his house, Ye Mo went beside the door and lifted a stone covering a stash of letters from the Liu clan.
During his months of seclusion he heard someone knock at his door multiple times but he paid it no mind as he was immersed in his cultivation.
It was most probably a guard or a servant from the gate that was tasked to deliver the letters to him but with no response from Ye Mo they were left beside the entrance.
Outsiders weren't allowed inside the institute outside of particular events so the Liu clan would have to go through those to communicate with him.
Ye Mo remarked the letters when he first left in the morning but he decided to not bother with them at the moment.
Now they had his attention so he went inside the house and unsealed them.
The first letter was long and the tone was severe as the Liu clan expressedly ordered Ye Mo under veiled menaces to hand over the Moon Pacifying herb, the sword Soaring Leaf and to come personally ask for forgiveness so they would show mercy.
As for what this mercy implied exactly, it wasn't mentioned.
In the next letter, they gave more room to cooperation as they accepted to reward Ye Mo if he handed the herb and the sword but what they proposed was just some gold and low class pills that could be easily obtained anywhere.
Ye Mo just brushed it off and kept reading.
With each letter, the atmosphere grew milder and the prices given in exchange increased. At the same time they stated they couldn't give more than that and either he accepted or there would be no discussions then they would go past their words in the next letter.
At the last one, sent not long before he left his stone house there was no talks about rewards or what not and they only pried him to answer them, saying they were ready to meet his demands as long as they were reasonable.
"They should have understood their place by the time. Now there is room for negotiation." Ye Mo could feel they were at a point of rupture.
The Moon Pacifying herb was so close yet so far.
At first they acted obstinate and inflexible, unwilling to bargain in any way. They wanted to intimidate Ye Mo, forcing his hand to return their goods.
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But with time passing and understanding it wouldn't yield any result they couldn't help but fall into a passive state.
Ye Mo didn't have any personal use for the Moon Pacifying herb but for the Liu clan, it was vital to secure a future and escape doom.
With this in hand, Ye Mo could easily take the initiative, advancing and backing away at will while the Liu clan could do nothing but try their best to retrieve it.
With their situation growing dire and their patriarch health deteriorating, the Liu clan would have no choice but to bend the knee in front of him.
Ye Mo grabbed some paper and ink and quickly wrote something.
Later, he sat down and used the Black Vortex cultivation technique, spending the whole night in cultivation.
The Liu clan didn't delay and the next day they sent another letter as soon as they received Ye Mo's one, quickly fixing a date and a place as they needed some time to gather everything.
They grew frantic in the last months due to Ye Mo's lack of investment and communication in the trade and were afraid he changed his mind and refused to deal with them anymore.
The next days, Ye Mo put huge emphasis on his training of the Stone Breaking Punch, progressing quickly as he passed most of his time in the rocky courtyard then he would cultivate during the night.
He sent Fang Jishen to a busy street in the center of the city where the exchange would take place.
The Liu clan also had to send a junior of the Qi Gathering realm by himself to the location.
He knew Fang Jishen wouldn't betray him, if he did so the institute wouldn't be able to protect him from Ye Mo and the Fang family wouldn't be able to protect him from the Liu clan.
He would need to escape the city at this point but alone in the wild, his chances at survival wouldn't be raised much.
The Liu clan couldn't jump on him either since he was a member of the Tiger Martial Institute and the Fang family. As long as they retrieved the sword and the Moon Pacifying herb all was good and they didn't need to make ennemies out of any of them.
This way the exchange went smoothly and in less than a week, Ye Mo had a small sphere looking like a ball of compressed water laying on the palm of his hand.
It was dark blue in color and small bubbles could be seen gurgling inside.
Encompassing Washing Pill.
A low-tier Yellow Class pill that could cleanse the body of impurities.
A huge part of Ye Mo's cultivation soaring through the first to the third layer of the Qi gathering realm in only three months was due to his repetitive intake of low-tier Spirit Qi pills.
However, righteous cultivators encouraged a slow and stable cultivation, having a good foundation in each layers before breaking through so this kind of practice wasn't seen in a good light.
None of them would recommand it over a cultivator.
Moreover as you consumed such pills, your body would gain a resistance towards them. The resistance would follow with the amount of pills used until at some point you would barely feel any effect no matter how much you ingurgitated.
Towards the end of his closed door cultivation, Ye Mo could feel the effect of low-tier Spirit Qi pills grew very faint on him.
But the last and most important aspect was that this method didn't come without danger.
These pills that could increase your cultivation speed all had more or less impurities depending on the skills of the alchemist.
Even the best of them couldn't erase the last 1% of impurities but most of them would actually have at least 10 or 20% inside.
If one pill was swallowed once in a while, the small amount of impurities would be naturally expelled by the body over time but if a lot were taken in a short time, the impurities would accumulate, pollute the body, clog the meridians and cause the cultivator aptitude to decrease until just breaking through a layer would become an insurmontable obstacle.
After a few months, the impurities would solidify, becoming a part of the body and hence unremovable. This was the end of a cultivator potential and all his propects would be reduced to nothingness.
All theses were the reasons why very few people dared using such a forceful way to cultivate.
Of course Ye Mo knew about it as well.
Nevertheless in this mystical world, every problem had it's solution and the most common for this one was the Encompassing Washing Pill.
The level of this pill could be easily recognized from it's color.
In the Yellow Class, it started with dark blue for low-tier then light blue in mid-tier, sky blue is high-tier and turquoise for a peak-tier Encompassing Washing Pill.
A dark blue pill would only wash the impurities of low-tier Spirit Qi Pills, in case he used mid-tier ones he would need a light blue Encompassing Washing Pill.
Few alchemists knew the recipe to confectionate it and the ingredients wasted in the repetitive failures would discourage most of them so it has always appeared in scarce numbers in the market.
That's also why most cultivators would avoid being tainted by impurities in the first place.
Even as a member of an institute, Ye Mo would need time and pay a heavy price to obtain one ordinarily and that was just for a low-tier one.
As for a light blue Encompassing Washing Pill, there was none currently that could be bought in Azure Water City.
Yet thanks to Liu Huan's sword 'Soaring Leaf', Ye Mo not only obtained a low-tier but also a mid-tier light blue pill from the Liu clan storage.
"Originally i should have already been able to tackle the 4th layer of the Qi Gathering realm by now but this last week, the circulation of my Qi turned sluggish and my cultivation slowed down..."
"I only consumed low-tier Spirit Qi Pills during my seclusion, so this dark blue Encompassing Washing pill should purify my body and set me back to zero." Ye Mo smiled satisfiedly.
Without any delay, he swallowed the pill and sat down cross-legged.