More time passed.
The silver continued stacking up. I started slowly converting it to gold, saving toward the tier 6 manual. One hundred silver to one gold — that was the conversion, but watching the number climb felt rewarding.
Forty gold. Fifty. Sixty.
Years passed.
I reached tier 2 peak but couldn't advance further without a better manual. At that point I stopped dedicating much time to cultivation and shifted almost everything into refining. Cultivating without being able to progress was a waste of time. The priority was saving gold for the manual.
Around this time I noticed something with the herb supply. The crimson moss — the main ingredient for healing pills — together with the main materials for the other two pills was becoming harder to get, and it wasn't just one supplier. All of them were running low. The growth rate had slowed a lot for reasons nobody seemed to understand or particularly care about. I started spreading my orders across multiple suppliers instead of relying on one, using the herbs more carefully during each session to avoid waste.
The price of the main materials had jumped from 20 copper to 50 copper across the market. I raised my pill price from eight silver to ten. Other refiners raised their prices even more steeply — some of them were now charging the same as me for noticeably worse results. I kept my increase minimal and let the quality difference speak for itself.
Seventy gold. Eighty.
Nothing new happened beyond a second small decrease in herb supply. If it continued like this I might eventually have to consider leaving the province entirely — riding a caravan to somewhere the shortage hadn't reached yet. But that meant bandits, wild beasts, and an unknown market. The risk wasn't worth it yet.
I kept refining. The gold kept accumulating.
Something worth noting about tier 2 — the body's efficiency improved significantly beyond just strength. Sleep requirements dropped to roughly an hour. The time I had previously spent resting could now go entirely into refining or cultivation. It was a small thing but it added up across months.
Ninety gold.
One hundred and one.
I went to the market and bought the manual immediately, leaving one gold behind for food, rent, and refining materials. Everything else went into that single purchase.
My next goal was mid grade mortal pills. The base materials were largely the same as low grade, but mid grade required either a significant amount of your own blood — only viable at tier 4 or above without serious cost — or a tier 3 beast organ. Those organs were priced in gold. A single one ranged from five to twenty-five gold depending on the beast, though better beasts produced better pills. Worth planning for eventually.
I shelved that and went home to read the manual.
It explained the process carefully. A tier 2 peak cultivator attempting tier 3 wasn't simply strengthening existing meridians — it was something different. First, pathways had to be carved between meridians before they could be connected. The carving alone could take months to years depending on talent. Each session was painful.
The full picture of mid body refining was:
Tier 3 — connect the 12 main meridians. The hardest wall in the entire stage, the transition from low to mid body refining. Tier 4 — connect the 24 primary meridians. Tier 5 — connect the 36 secondary meridians. Tier 6 — connect the 36 tertiary meridians.
In theory tier 3 was the worst of it. The main meridians were the most resistant, the pain the most intense, and the progress the slowest. After that wall the rest of mid body refining should move faster by comparison.
I started immediately.
The first session made the difficulty clear. A full day of work produced almost no measurable progress. The pain was constant and sharp. I had no prior experience with this kind of work and it showed.
I halved my refining time and gave the other half to cultivation. Progress was slow. Every day only fractionally different from the one before.
I kept going anyway.
Time continued passing.
A year later I had refined the first main meridian — considered the hardest of the twelve for two reasons. It was the most resistant to carving, and it was the first, meaning I had no prior experience to draw from when I started. Both factors combined to make it the slowest progress I had ever made in cultivation.
Alongside that I had managed to save another fifty gold. The herb situation had continued worsening — the main materials for all three pills had climbed from 50 copper to a full silver each. I raised my pill prices to fifteen silver to compensate. I also had to scale back my daily refining volume because of the reduced stock available across all suppliers. Even at the higher price buyers didn't go elsewhere — my quality still held above what anyone else was producing, and fifteen silver was still within the normal range for the market.
Time continued passing.
I decided it was finally time to attempt a mid grade mortal pill. I bought the refining manual for twenty gold first — I wasn't going to risk the materials without understanding the process properly. The manual made clear that the process had changed considerably. The amount of main ingredients tripled. But the real complication was the beast organ itself — unlike herbs, no two organs were identical. The qi density and purity varied between beasts of the same species, between individual animals, even between organs from the same creature. Every refining session would be different. The manual provided a baseline ratio to work from if you didn't want to measure carefully, but relying on a baseline wasn't something I was willing to do with materials this expensive.
I went to the market and bought two hearts. A snow leopard heart — a decently rare tier 3 beast, but the heart was still only fifteen gold. And an ironhide boar heart as a test — common, seven gold. I also picked up a detection array manual. Like the purification formation it didn't require spiritual stones to activate. Just blood to start.
Back home I studied the array first. The structure was similar to the purification formation — a main rune surrounded by rune language I couldn't read, only copy. The main rune was an eye, more complex than the inverted triangle I was used to. It had to be drawn carefully or it wouldn't hold.
First attempt at drawing it failed. The lines weren't precise enough.
Second attempt held. It wasn't difficult — just more demanding than the triangle, requiring steadier hands and more attention to proportion. After that I copied the rune language from the manual as closely as I could and activated it with a drop of blood from my wrist, swallowing a healing pill immediately after to close the wound.
I placed the ironhide boar heart inside the array's range and tried to use the qi it emitted to sense the organ's density.
The reading was rough. I couldn't feel it precisely — more like a general impression than a measurement. But it was enough to make a judgment. The density felt like it sat somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the whole heart. I had to choose one.
I chose sixty.
I ground the heart to powder, set up the furnace, activated the purification formation, and began. The process was identical to low grade refining except for the tripled herb quantities and the addition of the powdered heart. I added it slowly, maintaining temperature, keeping everything as stable as I could. Emotionless focus had its uses — there was no anxiety about the gold I had spent, no pressure behind the eyes. Just the process.
Ten hours passed.
Everything had seemed to be going smoothly until the final step.
It failed.
Too much. Sixty percent had been too high.
I took an hour's break. Ten hours of sustained concentration left a residue of mental fatigue even without emotional interference — not lost focus, just a limit the mind reached regardless of emotional state. After resting I grounded the remaining 40% of the boar heart to powder and started again. Forty percent this time.
The process was the same. Slower at the organ addition stage with the reduced amount. Temperature stable throughout. I reached the final step and waited, maintaining the heat steady.
By the time the pill fragrance rose from the furnace it was well past midnight. I had spent most of the day on a single pill.
I had succeeded.