The sun was setting when Ye Mo returned to his house.
Inside the courtyard, only stone fragments and broken boulders remained, like a catastrophe swept 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's 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 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 except for particular events, so the Liu clan had to go through those to communicate with him.
Ye Mo noticed the letters first when he left in the morning but decided not to bother with them at the moment.
Now that they had his attention, he went inside the house and unsealed them.
The first letter was long, and the tone severe as the Liu clan expressly ordered Ye Mo under veiled menaces to hand over the moon pacifying herb and 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 over the herb and the sword, but what they proposed was just some gold and low-class pills that could easily be obtained anywhere.
Ye Mo simply 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 regularly ended their letters stating they couldn't give more than that and either he accepted or there would be no more 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 were no talks about rewards or what not. They only asked him to answer them, saying they were ready to meet his demands as long as they were reasonable.
"The Liu clan must have been restless, seeing all their letters going without response. They must have understood their place by the time I left seclusion. 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.
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 retreating at will while the Liu clan could do nothing but try their best to retrieve it.
With their situation growing dire and their patriarch's 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. Soon, the letter was in Fang Jishen's hands who reluctantly delivered it at its destination.
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.
In the last months, they grew frantic due to Ye Mo's lack of investment and communication in the trade, fearing he had changed his mind and would refuse 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 spent most of his time in the rocky courtyard. He would only stop after exhausting all his qi several times or when all the boulders were shattered. Once he was done with his practice, he would return home and cultivate during the night, sleeping only a few hours a day, sometimes not sleeping at all.
It was a very harsh and relentless routine, all his days looked the same, alternating between the practice of his battle skills or spent in cultivation in a constant effort. Yet, he was contented, seeing his battle strength slowly growing and the number of wisps in his dantian increasing, he didn't wish for anything more.
Less than a week after his last exchange with the Liu clan, Ye Mo sent Fang Jishen to a busy street in the center of the city where the trade would take place.
The Liu clan also had to send a junior of the Qi Gathering Realm by himself to the location.
Although he handed precious goods to Fang Jishen, Ye Mo was not worried.
He knew Fang Jishen wouldn't betray him. If he tried to slight Ye Mo by handing the goods to the Liu clan member for free, he would soon find Ye Mo at the rim of his door, and if he tried to take them for himself, he would have both Ye Mo and the Liu clan on his tail. In any case, 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 much higher.
As long as he had half a brain, Fang Jishen would do as he was told.
The Liu clan couldn't jump 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 there was no need to make enemies out of any of them.
This way, the exchange went smoothly and in only a few days, Ye Mo had a small sphere looking like a ball of compressed water lying 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 large 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 advocated for a slow and steady cultivation process, emphasizing the importance of establishing a solid foundation in each layer before breaking through, which cast a negative light on this practice.
None of them would recommend it to a cultivator.
Moreover, as you consume such pills, the body will gain a resistance towards them. The resistance would build up with the amount of pills used until, at some point, one would barely feel any effect, no matter how much he ingested.
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 one percent of impurities, but most of them would actually have at least ten or twenty percent inside.
If a 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's aptitude to decrease until just breaking through one layer would become an insurmountable 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's potential, and all his prospects would be reduced to nothingness.
All these were reasons why very few people dared to use such a forceful way to cultivate.
Of course Ye Mo knew about it as well.
Nevertheless, in this mystical world, every problem had its solution. The most common for this one was the Encompassing Washing Pill.
The level of this pill could be easily recognized based on its 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, Ye Mo 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 the reason why most cultivators steer clear of 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 pill.
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's 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.