I leave the cultivation room shortly after my conversation with Physician Bing ends. The sun in the sky has traveled quite some distance and is probably only a few hours from setting over the horizon.

Realizing that I haven’t had too much to eat today, I decide to make a quick trip to my new go-to restaurant. Much like earlier, I am quickly seated to a private room where I can spend my time without worrying about looking silly searching through the internet.

The first thing I look up is the cost of vicious beast snake’s blood. I thought that it would likely be a little expensive considering Physician Bing told me any cultivation resources I bought would quickly burn through my money, but it’s actually disgustingly expensive.

For a single gallon of low-quality, vicious beast snake’s blood, I would have to spend close to seven small gold. And that’s only if I could find someone willing to sell such a low quantity to me.

In reality, I would probably be forced to buy each snake’s body freshly killed— if someone was willing to sell it for gold, I would be spending dozens, if not hundreds, of large cold coins for each body. And that would be with the added caveat that the bodies wouldn’t be in perfect condition and that they likely would have lost a great deal of blood along the way.

In short, vicious beasts are considered extremely dangerous to hunt and, therefore, there is always a very large premium to pay for them. Snakes happen to cost far more than even normal vicious beasts because many parts of their bodies can be used for anti-venoms as well as something called ‘yin-attuned spirit talismans’.

Out of curiosity, I look up the spirit talismans and realize that they sell very well inside of Qiang City. They are nothing that I can personally make, despite the fact that I seem to understand the symbols on them, but if the pill refining with Physician Bing doesn’t result with me making a good amount of money to continue cultivating and living comfortably, then at least I might have a decent footing for crafting spirit talismans.

After looking up spirit talismans, I look up the process for making medicinal pills. The good news for me is that there is a great deal of variation when it comes to the difficulty of refining pills. For some pills, it is as simple as throwing a few ingredients together and heating them up until they melt into a ball.

Unfortunately, pills like these have extremely low medicinal efficacy. What this means is that, for each pill you take, not only do you only receive a smaller percentage of the pill’s possible benefits, but it also fills your body with pill toxins that reduce the future efficacy of similar pills by a set percent.

So, if I were to make an easy pill like the one that just melts together, I would end up with a pill that only had around five percent medicinal efficacy— max. That would mean that only five percent of the pill’s benefits would reach the body after someone consumed it. It would also mean that, if anyone ate a second pill similar to it, they would lose an additional ninety-five percent of the pills efficacy.

From five percent one pill to less than one percent for the next, pills with poor efficacy quickly grew less and less useful.

Qiang City was full of pills that had between ten to forty percent pill efficacy with ten percent being considered ‘good’ quality while forty percent was considered the work of a master alchemist.

It explains why Physician Bing was so shocked when I told him about the Foundation Building Pill; for someone like Physician Bing who took pride in only crafting high-quality or perfect pills, something like one hundred percent medicinal efficacy is a miracle pill. Not only would someone receive all of the pill’s benefits the first time they took it, but any subsequent time they consumed it would also have the same effects as the first time.

This is actually pretty important for cultivators because, as Physician Bing’s case shows, people who consume pills with poor medicinal efficacy often find themselves having issues with their cultivations. For people who are approaching their peaks, this is apparently fine because they realize that they are unlikely to make any significant advancements in the future.

They are willing to take a hit to their future potential in order to maximize their immediate gains. Apparently, most cultivators come across situations like this in their lifetime. What’s more, most choose to take the hit in order to make a quick breakthrough.

The reason for this is that people fear their ‘fires of life’ diminishing and not being able to make the jump on their own. Supposedly, if someone’s ‘fire of life’ diminishes, they face a much more difficult time making any significant cultivation advancements.

This is also why Sergeant Lin told me that I might want to consider not cultivating.

For people who start cultivating later, they face a harder time making advancements. If you want to have peak performance, you need to reach the Mortal Core Realm by the time you are sixteen and the Mortal Gathering Realm by the time you are eighteen.

And that information only applies in and around the Shi Empire! Children in areas surrounding the Shi Empire, people not even twelve years of age, have already reached the Mortal Core Realm!

Right now, I am a few months older than seventeen and a long distance away from reaching the Mortal Core Realm— let alone the Mortal Gathering Realm.

If a normal person in my shoes wanted to make that leap, they would need a lot of high-efficacy medicinal pills.

But for other people, people who are talented, younger, and capable of making further progress, pills with low medicinal efficacy are effectively cultivation suicide. Removing pill toxins is a very difficult process, so once you’ve taken bad medicine it will probably stick with you for a very long time— if not forever.

The next major thing I learn about pill refining is that, if I didn’t care about the people consuming them, I actually have the soul energy and, most likely, the control to make some of the worst quality pills out there. I definitely wouldn’t make any money out of them— or if I did it would only be from people who couldn’t possibly know any better— but I could, theoretically, make them.

The types of pills Physician Bing would want me to make are the kinds of pills that take a lot of dedication and effort in order to learn and master. Just looking at the things available on the market in Qiang City, the recipes for them require a great deal of effort and know-how.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

For one of the pills, the Heartbalm Pill, which is supposed to slow your heart so you can cultivate more smoothly, I’d need to have enough mastery over my soul to pluck out the impurities of over twenty different valuable spirit herbs before I even begin melting them down into their more beneficial essence.

Then, I’d need to purify the essences of all the different ingredients while keeping them in liquid form. What’s more, they would have to combine at certain stages of the refining process, divide in other stages in order to mix with the other ingredients at the times most ‘suitable for mixing’, and finally condense them into what’s known as a ‘dan’ after I’d purified everything to an appropriate degree.

From what I’d read, condensing the ingredients into the dan is the hard part! Even when dividing your attention between the two dozen or so ingredients during the purification process, this is considered the easy part!

I let out a groan when I think of my potential earnings plummeting before I’ve even started working. The only thing that makes me ‘better’ than anyone else is that I control qi. I don’t rely on my cultivation method to control it for me. As a matter of fact, I don’t even know how to do that.

If controlling my qi was enough to be good at refining pills, that would be wonderful. But I also need to know how to manipulate my soul in order to protect certain ingredients during certain stages of the refining process. If I don’t, then they will be burnt by the flames or solidify before the appropriate time.

The more I look into the complexity inherent in pill refining, the less I want to do it. I still plan on doing it, largely because I am going to need a whole lot of money, but that doesn’t mean that I am going to enjoy the steps leading up to actually doing it one bit.

I groan again just as the door to my private room opens up and the server looks at me with a shocked expression on his face. He’s a different man that I had earlier, but I guess I shouldn’t expect to be getting the same person every time I come here.

Unlike the man from earlier, he is wearing brown robes, has a completely unremarkable face, and seems to move as though he’d be punished for making the smallest of sounds.

He’s practically shaking when he finally delivers my food to me so I ask, “Are you alright, my guy?”

He blinks at me and gives me his best impression of a deer in front of a moving vehicle before he gulps.

“I’m p-perfectly fine,” he stutters. “Ah— I hope you enjoy your food, p-please let me know i-if you need anyth-thing.”

“Bull!” I reply. “You’re shaking! Sit down and relax for a minute. If anyone sees you like this you’re going to give everyone a bad impression of this restaurant. Is everything alright?”

“N-no, no! Everything is fine!” He claims nervously.

I remember that the guy from earlier was also behaving weirdly until we finally started talking about something mundane, so I realize that maybe this has more to do with me than anything else.

I also notice that this guy doesn’t seem to be a cultivator. In fact, very few people in the Outer City seem to cultivate. They might have some qi surrounding them, but it is almost negligible.

This makes me ask him a simple question that I probably should have considered earlier, “Are you afraid of me?”

His face pales at my question and he quickly shakes his head.

Of course, I know the answer even if he won’t admit it so I say, “Go grab yourself a cup. I want to ask you a few things.”

If anything, that might have been the wrong choice because he goes from pale to ghost in a second. Even though he nods his head, I can tell from the way he stumbles out of the room that he really, really doesn’t want to have anything to do with the conversation I have in mind.

He comes back a few seconds later with a simple black cup in hand. I’m sure he has to fight himself every step of the way as he slowly makes his way to me, but I honestly don’t know why he’s freaking me out and it’s starting to get under my skin.

When he arrives at my table, I say, “Sit down. Pour yourself a drink.”

He gives me an expression of absolute misery disguised as compliance as he lowers himself to the ground. Part of me worries that he’s going to break the tea pot with how nervous he is, but he does remarkably better at pouring tea than I do even when nothing is wrong with me.

Part of me is jealous that none of the red-brown liquid hits the table.

When he is as ‘settled’ as I think he will get, I ask, “So what do people do for fun around here? I’m guessing there probably aren’t movies or anything, but are there clubs? Can I go out and listen to music anywhere? What’s fun?”

My idea is that I’ll drag him out of whatever discomfort he’s in by talking about simple and stupid things. It… doesn’t completely fail. I think.

“Ah—“ he begins. “There are, ah— you can— the Jade Fairy has music.”

So much effort goes into the statement that I’m slightly surprised smoke isn’t coming out of his ears.

“What type of music?” I ask. I’ve always loved music, but something tells me that they don’t have rock, pop, or jazz here.

I know there were several bands and groups back on Earth that I absolutely loved with those three categories being my favorite genres of music. Jazz was more situational, as was blues when I had reason to listen to it, but pop and rock were some of my favorites. Early rock, of course, and post-2000’s pop, naturally.

“Ah—“ he begins again, “Fairy Qin plays the zither. I heard her once. Her music was as graceful as she is.”

“Zither?” I ask. I think I’ve heard of them, which is surprising because there has been very little here that I actually have heard of outside of food.

“Yes,” he nods his head as his eyes appear to be going blank. “She is like a fairy descended from the heavens! She his big, beautiful eyes, a slim waist, and pale skin. Someone told me she is like a goddess incarnate!”

My curiosity gets a hold of me for a second so I look her up online to see if I can find her. The search ‘Qiang City, Jade Fairy, Fairy Qin’ does bring me an image of her, but it looks to be a well-done sketch rather than a portrait.

She is… certainly a looker. I wouldn’t call her my type of girl, but she’s definitely attractive. Of course, one of the main reasons I think that she isn’t my type of girl is that the Jade Fairy is a brothel.

I want to laugh at the guy for telling me about a brothel’s music, but I don’t want to send him right back into his shell.

Our conversation carries on for a little while longer. I ask about some other fairly benign things such as how the weather has been lately, whether he knows of any other good places to eat nearby, and also where I can buy some basic necessities.

I don’t ask him anything I can’t figure out with the Omega Browser, but it’s nice to have a fairly simple conversation where I’m not so lost.

Finally, when I think he’s relaxed a bit, I ask, “So why is it that so many people are acting so strangely around me? I haven’t done anything to offend anyone, have I?”

He looks at me with a dumb expression on his face before his eyes brighten up and a little bit of fear returns.

“N-no! No!” he says. “It’s just… The restaurant’s owner said there was a possibility we’d be getting cultivators coming in from time to time. He didn’t think it was likely, but he warned us anyways.”

“Why does it matter whether or not cultivators come here?” I ask. “Money is money, isn’t it?”

“This is—“ he pauses while considering his words. “Most cultivators aren’t like the esteemed gentleman. They see any failure on our part as an insult to their face. Everyone knows that— er— some, uh—“

“Just say it, man! I’m not going to hold anything against you.” I want to shake my head but hold back my reaction as he finally speaks.

“Many cultivators will kill someone before they allow themselves to lose face. The owner of the restaurant ordered us to demonstrate nothing other than perfect servility should a cultivator come in if we did not wish to lose our lives.”

His words come streaming out as I learn why he had been so nervous around me, and I can’t help but feel stunned. What kind of fucking moron would kill a guy for face? If he’s right, then I’m just glad that this restaurant is in the Outer City rather than the Inner City. At least here I shouldn’t have to worry about my life being at risk for offending someone…

‘Oh fuck.’ I think to myself. ‘Didn’t I offend that, uh… Gang? Feng? Dung? What was his name? And Qiang… Yu? And her red friend.’

It didn’t really matter at the time, but all three of them were cultivators that I likely had no chance in dealing with.