Over the next hour, Su Bai successfully manufactured three more of the Transcendent Grade Pills.

He lined them up on his workstation. To Su Bai, these weren’t just pills. They were high-yield corporate assets.

Knowing that the effects of a zero-impurity pill were exponentially higher than the market standard, he knew exactly how these items would disrupt the sect’s economy. A pill that guaranteed zero pill-poison buildup in a cultivator’s meridians was priceless.

Because of this staggering Return on Investment (ROI), Su Bai’s professional guilt completely vanished.

If he produced just one of these flawless assets a week, the sheer market value would completely cover the "acceptable loss margins" of him purposefully blowing up cauldrons for the rest of the month. He was officially a highly profitable employee.

Liu Meng and Ji Ruyue, who were watching him from the side, fully understood the terrifying value of his work as well. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

"Senior Brother," Liu Meng whispered. "I need to show this to Master."

Su Bai nodded in agreement. "Take one as a prototype sample, Junior Sister. But please, ensure this remains highly classified. Show it only to upper management."

He intended to establish a private contract with Verdant Peak too, just like his secret consulting gig with the Heavenly Forge.

"Leave the negotiations to me!" Liu Meng beamed. She took one freezing pill and skipped out of the training hall to find Elder Qin.

Now, it was just Su Bai and Ji Ruyue left in the room.

Su Bai was just beginning to calculate his projected quarterly earnings when a deafening sound shattered his concentration.

BOOM!

A violent explosion of super-heated steam and jagged ice blasted out from workstation number two. The heavy bronze lid of the cauldron shot into the air like a cannonball, embedding itself into the stone ceiling.

Standing directly in front of the blasted cauldron was Ji Ruyue.

She was completely covered from head to toe in black, toxic soot. However, her face remained perfectly, terrifyingly expressionless. Without blinking, she simply waved her hand. A pulse of icy Qi washed over her body. It instantly cleansed the soot and returned her icy-blue robes to their pristine state.

She had failed again. For the nth time since she arrived.

Su Bai immediately grabbed his designated wooden lockbox and scurried over to her workstation like a highly motivated janitor. He peered into the shattered cauldron and began diligently scraping out the toxic black sludge.

He was absolutely thrilled.

To any normal alchemist, pill dregs were just hazardous waste. But Su Bai had already graded the different types of refuse.

When a normal Fire Root alchemist failed, they simply overheated the herbs, turning them into crumbly, burnt charcoal. It was low-quality EXP.

But the dregs Ji Ruyue created? Su Bai considered them "Premium Grade."

He glanced up at the stoic Senior Sister. She possessed a mutated water root. Ice Spirit Root.

For the life of him, Su Bai couldn’t understand why an Ice cultivator was so stubbornly determined to learn an art that fundamentally required Fire. It was a massive hardware incompatibility.

Liu Meng had told him earlier that Ji Ruyue had never successfully manufactured a single pill in her life. Peak Master Shen Youran of the Law Enforcement Hall simply paid Verdant Peak a massive monthly stipend to cover all the expensive herbs her disciple blew up.

Su Bai, with his analytical mind, already knew exactly why she was failing.

Standard alchemy required three distinct Standard Operating Procedures.

1. Extraction: Melting the herbs into a liquid essence.

2. Refinement: Burning away the impurities.

3. Condensation: The alchemist injects their personal Qi into the cauldron to physically bind the boiling liquid into a solid pill.

Ji Ruyue executed the first two steps flawlessly. Her disaster always occurred during Condensation.

The cauldron was filled with boiling, hyper-pressurized liquid medicine heated by the Earth Fire arrays. To condense the pill, Ji Ruyue had to dump a massive wave of her personal Ice Qi directly into the chamber.

It was the exact alchemical equivalent of dropping a frozen turkey into a deep fryer.

The extreme Yang of the boiling Earth Fire and the extreme Yin of her Ice Qi violently repelled each other. The boiling liquid instantly turned into super-heated, freezing steam. The pressure expanded a thousand times faster than the cauldron’s release vents could handle, resulting in a localized bomb going off.

It coated the walls in a thick layer of black, toxic frost... which Su Bai happily scraped into his lunchbox.

Ji Ruyue wasn’t dumb. She understood the thermal dynamics causing the explosions perfectly well. She meticulously recorded her failures in a jade slip, constantly trying to adjust the micro-variables to force a success.

And seeing Su Bai execute the "Cold-Forging" method earlier had awakened something in her stoic heart. If he could forge a pill using extreme cold, perhaps she could bypass her limitations too.

She turned to him with her perfectly flat face.

"Junior Brother, could you teach me your method?" she asked smoothly.

To any other cultivator, blatantly asking for a peer’s secret, heaven-defying legacy technique was incredibly shameless. It was a massive taboo. But Ji Ruyue didn’t care about social norms, she just wanted the source code.

Su Bai scratched his cheek awkwardly.

This was the fifth time she had asked him in the last hour. And it was the fifth time she had blown up a cauldron right after.

"It isn’t that I am unwilling to share the method, Senior Sister," Su Bai explained politely. "It is simply a matter of conflicting foundations. Your spiritual root cannot support this specific method."

Ji Ruyue tilted her head a fraction of an inch.

"The problem is your Ice Spirit Root," Su Bai continued. "Ice is a mutation of Water. It relies on moisture and physical freezing. My technique utilizes a Yin Fire. It is not water-based, it is still a flame. It does not freeze through moisture; it simply consumes the ambient heat until absolute zero is reached. Because it is fundamentally a ’fire,’ it still possesses the alchemical property of refinement. Your Ice Qi does not."

He gave her a sympathetic corporate smile.

Ji Ruyue stared at him in silence for three long seconds.

Actually, she already knew that. But she thought that by understanding the core principles of his method, she might gain the enlightenment needed to create a technique of her own.

Then, she turned around, grabbed a fresh batch of herbs, and activated the Earth Fire array.

Ten minutes later...

BOOM!

Another violent explosion of super-heated steam rattled the hall.

Ji Ruyue stood in front of the ruined workstation, completely covered in black soot. She waved her hand, cleansed her robes, then turned her perfectly expressionless face back to Su Bai.

"Junior Brother, could you teach me your method?"

Su Bai let out a long, defeated sigh as he walked over with his lockbox to harvest the fresh batch of Premium Dregs.

Her flat, unyielding insistence was wearing down his corporate boundaries. Furthermore, looking at the massive pile of high-grade toxic waste she had generated for him over the last hour, he felt a twinge of professional obligation. She had essentially paid him a massive, upfront consultation fee in the form of pure EXP.

It would be terrible customer service not to render some kind of service in return.

"Very well, Senior Sister," Su Bai relented. "I know for a fact that your body cannot physically execute the technique. However... I am willing to teach you the theoretical framework of Cold-Forging. Perhaps you can extrapolate the data for your own projects."

A microscopic glimmer of light flashed in Ji Ruyue’s emotionless eyes. She immediately stood at attention. She pulled out a blank jade slip to record his lecture.

For the next half hour, Su Bai leaned against the workstation. He translated the ancient method into terms she could understand. He broke down the precise timing required to snap-freeze cellular decay, and the exact pressure vectors needed to condense a pill without heat.

Ji Ruyue listened with terrifying intensity. She absorbed every single word like a supercomputer downloading a new operating system.

Just as Su Bai finished his explanation on molecular stasis, the heavy stone doors of the training hall were violently thrown open.

"MARTIAL NEPHEW SU!"

A booming, frantic voice echoed through the chamber.

Elder Qin practically sprinted into the room. His hair was completely disheveled and his chest heaved as if he had just run a marathon.

He was clutching the Transcendent Grade Frost-Vein Pill in his trembling hands, then stared at Su Bai with eyes so wide they looked like they were about to fall out of his skull.

Right behind him, Liu Meng trotted into the room. She shot Su Bai a triumphant, "I secured the funding" smile.