Legend of the Great Sage (Chapter 301-Chapter 400)

This time, it was not a mission from the academy, but Ru Xin’s work.

During a boring pause, the two of them could not even be bothered with bantering with each other. Li Qingshan listened to the sound of snow falling onto the ceiling quietly. He was not looking at Ru Xin either, staring at the wall as if he was in thought.

“What’re you asking that for all of a sudden?” Ru Xin turned around.

Li Qingshan looked into Ru Xin’s eyes. “Answer me.”

Ru Xin’s eyes with contrasting irises swiveled around, as if she was considering why Li Qingshan had asked this question. She stared at the ceiling. “I’m not sure myself.”

“We’ve known each other for so long already, but there seems to be a mysterious veil over you, such that I can’t grasp you,” Li Qingshan said. Having known each other for so long, they bantered about anything and everything, but he had never heard her mention her origins. Even if it was mentioned, she would immediately change the topic.

“What a coincidence.” Ru Xin stared straight at Li Qingshan. To her, wasn’t Li Qingshan no different?

Their eyes met. After a moment of silence, Li Qingshan smiled, and afterwards, he saw his smile appear on her face like a reflection.

Indeed. They both had secrets that they could not tell anyone about. However, even if they were friends, there was no need for them to share all their secrets.

“Have you refined True Spirit pills before?”

“I haven’t, though I’d like to try if the opportunity arises,” Ru Xin said calmly. The most important spiritual herb for refining True Spirit pills, the Blue Butterfly flower, was almost extinct, so there really had not been a lot of people who had refined it before.

Li Qingshan opened his hand, and a blue butterfly that flickered with soft light fluttered gently, brushing past Ru Xin’s face.

“Then give it a try!”

Ru Xin extended her hand, allowing the blue butterfly to perch on the tip of her finger. She sighed in amazement. “It really is a Blue Butterfly flower. I’ve only seen them in books. I never thought you’d actually possess one. No wonder you’ve been working so hard to learn alchemy. So it was for refining a single True Spirit pill.”

Li Qingshan shook his head with a smile. “No, not just a single pill.”

Ru Xin’s mouth widened slightly as blue butterflies of light fluttered through the alchemy room. Dozens, hundreds, and even more dyed the room with a beautiful colour. However, what she wondered was whether she could fill this alchemy room if she exchanged them all for spiritual pills.

Only after a very long time did Ru Xin return to her senses. She stared at Li Qingshan deeply as her eyes flickered with a different emotion. “Thank you for your trust in me!”

Li Qingshan said, “It’s not like I have another choice. Once you refine them, I can let you take thirty percent.”

This figure managed to make even Ru Xin’s heart skip a beat. Let alone anything else, if she possessed so many True Spirit pills, she could immediately begin her push towards Foundation Establishment.

Li Qingshan’s next words made Ru Xin calm down. “You’ll be responsible for gathering the other materials, you’ll be responsible for refining the pills, and finally, you’ll be responsible for exchanging them for cultivation pills on my behalf, best if they’re Virtue Accumulation pills. The most important part of all of this is you’ll be responsible for keeping it a secret. I think you understand this even without me telling you!”



“Of course I do.” Ru Xin smiled. “If any news of this gets leaked, it might even end up costing us our lives.”

“Really?” Li Qingshan did not think it would be as severe as she imagined it to be. After all, this was still an orderly age of peace. He just did not want other people connecting this with the underground.

Ru Xin said, “The academy isn’t as safe as you imagine it to be. The school leaders might not be able to do anything to us, but what about pressure from even higher up? The reason why you decided against working with the Han family was not because they’re too powerful, but because I’m a loner, right?”

Li Qingshan could not help but admit to that. He could trust Han Qiongzhi, but he could not trust the entire Han family. As for Ru Xin, she did not come from a clan, and her background was blank too. Apparently, she did not even come from the Clear River prefecture. Even her current master, the leader of the school of Medicine, Hua Ci, was a strange, eccentric old man. This also meant that once this matter became exposed, even Ru Xin would not be able to keep the True Spirit pills.

“Sorry. As it’s very important, I can’t place complete trust in anybody.” If it were not for the few months they had spent together, Li Qingshan would have never vested this much trust in her.

“I can understand. If you really were a person who trusted others so easily, then I’d only look down on you. I’ll tell you a secret too then!” Ru Xin took out an alchemy cauldron from her hundred treasures pouch.

“A supreme grade spiritual artifact cauldron!” Li Qingshan blurted out. This was not a regular supreme grade spiritual artifact, but a rare alchemy cauldron. And, the design of the cauldron was extremely strange. At first glance, it seemed more like a furnace, and from the complicated patterns on it, he could immediately tell from everything he had learnt about alchemy recently that it was not a product of the Green province. Instead, it came from the Mist province further south.

However, Li Qingshan did not mention that. The people of the Mist province had always been denounced as savages by the people of the Green province. Although they were both under the rule of Great Xia, the skirmishes between the two vassal states had never stopped throughout history. The borders were stationed heavily with soldiers, and the Hawkwolf Guard always sustained its greatest losses there.

The vassal kings of the two provinces had feuded throughout history. If it were not for the empire’s restraint, they would have declared war against each other long ago. Was Ru Xin a spy from the Mist province?

As for Ru Xin, how was it possible for her to not guess that the Blue Butterfly flowers originated from underground? There were only a handful of organisations in possession of Blue Butterfly fields, which were protected by layers upon layers of formations. Even Foundation Establishment cultivators would not be able to pluck a single flower. However, how did a mere Qi Practitioner like him manage to venture so deep underground?

Before they knew it, both of them had revealed a fraction of their secrets to one another. However, neither of them planned to probe any deeper, but they seemed to grow slightly closer to one another.

Then, Ru Xin said, “I’ve accumulated quite a lot of spiritual herbs. Some of them can be used for refining True Spirit pills, so there’s no need to specially gather them.”

Li Qingshan smiled. “What a coincidence.”

In the end, the two of them managed to produce seven types of spiritual herbs for refining True Spirit pills, two from Li Qingshan and five from Ru Xin, all amounting to extremely large quantities. It went without saying that they were obviously specialties of the underground and the Mist province respectively.

And, most of the spiritual herbs that originated from these two places were relatively more precious. As for the remaining spiritual herbs, Ru Xin was responsible for collecting them. As the primary disciple of the school of Medicine, she was in charge of the medicinal material store rooms, so she could easily fetch a few spiritual herbs under the name of refining other pills without much difficulty at all.

In the afternoon of the next day, Li Qingshan arrived in the alchemy room again. Ru Xin took out a formation scroll and set up the formation, ensuring that no one could peer into this place.

Li Qingshan asked, “How’s it?”