Although Amrit was mostly practicing culinary techniques, he hadn’t neglected his training. He would spend two to three hours daily fighting in the illusion array. Due to this, his mastery of the halberd technique and footwork had further improved. Although he had muscle memory for those techniques after training for a while he realized the battle prowess and instinct provided by the bloodline was not the peak of what he could achieve. If he trained further there were bound to be improvements. Although he would eventually stumble upon bottlenecks eventually, there would always be progress no matter how small. And even a small amount of progress was enough to decide life and death on the battlefield.
After training in the illusion for a while, he realized he still had a long way to reach the peak. As for cultivation, he had reached the thirteenth peak previously and he couldn’t improve even a little from there. It felt like pushing against the wall, he couldn’t get past it no matter what. He didn’t even know how thick the wall was but he had a feeling the wall would crumble with time. This was the first bottleneck he had faced in his life. With everything going so smoothly this small hiccup was enough to make anyone feel restless. It was also one of the reasons he took upon the spirit chef profession and started training in the illusion.
It wasn’t just Amrit who was improving rapidly, the frenzy of cultivating hadn’t subsided on the clan and with the news about the incoming war, everyone was cultivating as hard as they could. The clan had also decreased the contribution points required in the Skill pavilion by almost half. The price of pills, weapons, and talismans had decreased and the auxiliary professionals were compensated by the clan only restriction was they couldn’t sell outside the clan. Since the clan had loosened the rules and made it easier for the members to cultivate, there was no idle cultivator in the clan. Forget about idle, many clan members ignored their position on the management of daily affairs to cultivate so the clan head had to make their job compulsory but increased their salary and gave them some pills as compensation.
Although the raw materials were in shortage, many members went to the Bareback mountains so lower level raw materials were once again in abundance. The talisman department had produced their first second grade talisman master and he was on the verge of advancing to the middle tier. Apart from him, the other three were also on the verge of advancing to the second grade. Everyone in the clan was improving at a rapid pace but this was for now. For small clans like the Rijal clan even with the knowledge provided, they will eventually face a bottleneck. Unless they can advance their clan’s overall power and top power, the bottleneck will remain for generations just like their present state. Because there is no golden core formation realm cultivator, they are ultimately small clans and could only become the top dogs in third tier cities.
If they could produce a golden core formation realm cultivator, their development would be even more rapid. So until they hit the limit of a small clan, the Rijal clan was going to develop rapidly. Aside from the clan members, Kumari was the one who was progressing faster. She was holed up in her alchemy chamber for weeks refining pills without rest. Because of her expertise and her cultivation level, she could refine the low tier pills quickly and even refine a few sets in a single batch. During this time her proficiency had increased wildly. She had refined pills with 90% purity. This was the very peak of top quality pills. In the whole of the Emerald kingdom, there were only a few alchemists who could refine top quality pills and among them, those who could refine pills with 90% purity could be counted in a hand.
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As for perfect quality pills, they could only be bought from empires. There was no one who could refine perfect quality pills in the neighboring countries. For the rune pills, even empires may not be able to refine them. In the Emerald kingdom, there were probably no rune pills making an appearance throughout history. Even if one or two had appeared it would have caused a commotion. Moreover, the alchemists capable of refining perfect quality pills were only one or two in the span of thousands of years and among them, one of them died mysteriously and as for the other he moved to the empire. There was no news about the one who moved to the empire and since it was a few hundred years ago no one knew if he was still alive.
For Kumari top quality pills were already the limit and with normal means she wouldn’t be able to refine perfect quality pills in her lifetime the inheritance contained techniques to be used while refining but she was still quite far away from refining perfect quality pills. Now that she had seen the path towards refinement of perfect quality pills she would one day surely refine them, it may take a year or decade but she was confident. This bottleneck had stumped most of the alchemists even in empires, it wasn’t just due to inheritance but natural talent and the limits imposed by the heavens. But when Kumari refines perfect quality pills, the heavens will also reward her accordingly, mainly with enlightenment and sometimes with additional buffs like physiques, luck, innate abilities, elevation of talent, and bloodlines of their ancestors.
Enlightenment was the most common reward and the additional buffs were only for lucky individuals with a probability of one in a hundred. We have to understand that those rewarded by heavens were already rare, there were one or two present in the empire once a generation. For small kingdoms like the Emerald kingdom, having such individuals once in five hundred years was a great luck. For any kingdom or empire, luck plays a crucial role, the more content the citizens are, the more devoted they are to their kingdoms, and the more luck increases thus increasing the overall prosperity that follows the appearance of talents and resources. After all every talent and resource were the blessing of the Heavens.
But for small kingdoms, they could barely utilize this luck so there were always skirmishes and citizens couldn’t live happily. They were always under threat and feared for their safety just like now. Due to the weakening royal family power, the families and sects were eyeing them and the citizens had already started to suffer. The weaker ones were always collateral damage.