The pill tribulation departed as quickly as it abruptly appeared. Clear skies returned to Mount Buzhou after roughly three hundred breaths.
“Principal Seventh Rank Pill greets the master! Please eat me, master!”
“Eat me, eat me first master!”
“You must eat me first, I’m sweeter than the other six!”
“No, I’m sweeter! Have a taste, master!”
Amid the Alchemist Sovereign’s awestruck gaze, the seven pills were now seven fat white dolls the size of a palm. They surrounded Lu Yun and argued loudly to be the first to be eaten.
“What kind of monster is this kid…” The elder couldn’t believe his eyes. With his level of cultivation, he could naturally tell that these dolls weren’t living beings. They lacked souls, but there was spirituality present in their bodies.
“Alright, alright, pipe down, the seven of you,” Lu Yun lectured. “You are the first Principal Seventh Rank Pills to appear in the Boundless Planes, making you the ancestors of your kind. You should behave in a way that befits your station.”
The seven fat dolls blinked and stopped jumping up and down. They stood meekly in front of Lu Yun, listening to his instructions.
“Understood!” they responded respectfully.
“Feng Feifan… Fellow daoist, have you become a grandmaster?” The Alchemist Sovereign walked up and addressed Lu Yun by a new title.
“I’ve broken through and am a real grandmaster now,” Lu Yun answered happily. He couldn’t wait to claim a soul weapon!
His breakthrough had been as gentle and mild as the spring rains, raising no disturbance after the Principal Seventh Rank Pills formed. There was a massive soul force vortex in the center of his consciousness—a sign of a grandmaster.
Since his mindset was already that of a grandmaster, he’d been able to instantly suppress the vortex when it formed. Thus, it hadn’t given rise to any disruptions. That he’d been able to refine a pill out of the Principal Seventh Rank Lotus meant that he was worthy of being the Alchemist Sovereign’s “fellow daoist”, even if he was only in the true void realm.
All the same, the sovereign still tread ahead of Lu Yun when it came to pill dao.
“This is the pill recipe.” Lu Yun tucked the recipe into the elder’s hand. “But there are probably only six lotuses left in all of the Boundless Planes…”
“That is of no matter.” A merry Alchemist Sovereign quickly waved the concern away. “Since we have the recipe, we can simply use the Principal Seventh Rank Lotus’ properties and theory to create more pills. At most, we’ll fail to refine these seven dolls again since we’ll lack spirituality in our ingredients.”
“Then I give these seven pills and recipe over to the senior. Ah, Xing Wuliang is my good friend and his soul force has reached grandmaster level. He’s lacking a bit in mentality, so I would request that senior look after him a little bit,” Lu Yun remarked.
“Xing Shenzuo’s disciple?” The elder blinked, then nodded. “As these seven pills already possess spirit, they only need a bit more nurturing before they’ll be able to coalesce souls and become true living beings. It would be a pity if he ate them. …but if that old lad Formation Sovereign is willing to lend a hand, we can have these seven fellows manifest their effects in a pill formation. Hmm hmm…”
“Then I entrust everything to the senior. Um… this junior takes his leave.” Lu Yun’s mind was completely refocused on soul weapons. He’d be able to truly peek into the supplemental dao of the fourth realm once he wielded one.
For some reason, he had a feeling that the true dao of the fourth realm should be supplemental dao—or rather, the path of cultivating soul force. If one trained in nothing and became a Nihil World Sovereign, then fail to activate sequence, the one might truly become nothing and vanish without a trace.
The Alchemist Sovereign didn’t keep Lu Yun since he knew what the young man was preoccupied with.
“Soul weapons are no trifling matter, they are most important to the Star Sect. All of them are kept on the ninth floor. If fellow daoist is able to access it, you can go select one for yourself.”
“Alright!” Lu Yun nodded and disappeared with a turn.
“He should be a Nihil World Sovereign too, but why does he appear to only be a true void cultivator?” The elder rubbed his nose with bafflement after the young man left.
“Attend to me, all of you are now my disciples! I will teach you some combat arts so you are able to protect yourselves!” Happiness quickly chased the confusion out of his mind when his thoughts returned to the seven pills in front of him.
“We know combat arts!” replied the biggest of the pills. A ripple furiously oscillated over its body and sent an unprepared Alchemist Sovereign flying backward.
Shocked, the old man quickly recalled that these seven little fellows could release combat arts and defeat a pill tribulation when they were still pills.
“This combat art… seems to be the strength of some spirit herbs conflicting with spirit roots. Did Feng Feifan choose the thirty-two plants not to be supplemental ingredients, but to craft combat arts for these seven little guys?” Another immense shift rocked the sovereign’s worldview.
……
There were only soul weapons on the treasury’s ninth floor, nothing else. For a sect like the Star Sect, soul weapons were the most important treasure they possessed.
Soul weapons enabled supplemental grandmasters to command combat strength. They could deploy enormous force in fights even if they didn’t use their supplemental arts, thereby shoring up a major weakness of supplemental cultivators.
There were eight major soul weapons in the fourth realm—Profound Pagoda, Divine Evince, Serene Annex, Domain of Mountain and Rivers, Lunar Pivot, Aureate Wind, Argent Snow, and Azure Fog.
They were the eight peaks of supplemental dao and constantly illustrated the truth of everything in this part of existence. It was said that a supplemental grandmaster would be able to access sequence if they could completely comprehend the truth and dao in any of the soul weapons.
Multiple copies existed of the eight soul weapons, and soul weapons as a whole were incredibly rare in the fourth realm. Even the Star Sect placed them on the highest floor of their treasury. Only geniuses who were grandmaster in both soul force and mind had the right to choose a weapon from this floor. It required personal strength, not fortuitous opportunity, to obtain the recognition of a soul weapon.
Their makers were long lost to history and impossible to determine. There didn’t seem to be anyone in the Boundless Planes who could refine them anymore. They were all legacies from an extremely ancient era.
While there were eight types of soul weapons, the Star Sect only possessed four—Profound Pagoda, Serene Annex, Lunar Pivot, and Argent Snow.
Lu Yun ignored the other three when he arrived at the ninth floor and made straight for Argent Snow. It looked like a silver stick roughly one meter long and was as thick as a thumb. Strange patterns were carved over it and one of the sticks landed in his hand when he reached forward.
“I see!” Lu Yun attempted to discern its refinement method with formula dao, only to discover that it wasn’t man made at all.
A major powerhouse had opened the door to sequence and formed the weapon with its rules. Hence, this soul weapon was nigh indestructible.
There were nine million sticks of Argent Snow in the Boundless Planes. Although that seemed to be a large number, there were more than hundreds of millions of Nihil World Sovereigns in the fourth realm. Thus, there were fewer instances of the weapon than even the most elite cultivators of the realm.
