Why Does This Even Work?
Time flew by like an arrow over the next ten days or so. Every morning Baek Cheong opened her eyes, she was dragged straight to the pill refining room. The grueling pill refining lessons showed no mercy, giving her not a moment's rest.
If this keeps up, I'll never get my gallery time back! Desperate to reclaim her lost gallery life, Baek Cheong threw herself into frantic efforts. She attempted to multitask—conducting pill refining while splitting her divine sense to access the Moomyeongbang.
Pill refining demanded intense focus to control the furnace flames and blend the herbal essences. It was a feat bordering on madness that no ordinary refiner would even attempt. Early on, she botched the heat control constantly, turning herbs into piles of ash. After several painful trial-and-error sessions, Baek Cheong finally grasped the knack of handling both tasks simultaneously. She divided her divine sense—one part managing the furnace heat, the other scanning the ethereal Moomyeongbang interface in the void.
The tradeoff? Her pill quality plummeted noticeably. Her skill at producing superior-grade pills dropped to barely scraping out medium-grade ones. On the Moomyeongbang, she couldn't post actively anymore, reduced to lurking silently.
I got too greedy, she thought.
Gok Elder didn't suspect a thing about the dip in quality. The prescriptions he'd assigned her were fiendishly complex, beyond even late Refining Qi cultivators. For a child to churn out medium-grade pills was a feat worthy of the title once-in-a-millennium prodigy.
She's naturally weaving the five elements into her refining—truly befitting a heaven-sent genius. With this child, she'll surely reach the path of inscribed pills... Gok Elder gazed warmly at Baek Cheong by the furnace. There was a hidden motive behind handing out supreme-grade pills daily under the guise of lessons.
The imbalance in her five elements has stabilized nicely too.
It was to shore up the fragile cycle of five elements mutual generation churning precariously in her dantian. With supreme-grade pills tailored to each element's nature poured in, the turbulent energies settled like bedrock. It was like lavishing rich fertilizer on a promising sapling.
That should give enough face to his old friend Baek Mu-ae, he figured. Snapping from his reverie, Gok Elder cleared his throat and spoke.
"Cheong-ah, you've solidly built your foundation now."
Baek Cheong paused her focused movements at the furnace and looked up. "Already?"
"Yes. I have an important batch of pills that need meticulous refining ahead. So don't come to the pill refining room—rest up properly."
Stunned by the sudden break announcement, Baek Cheong blinked in confusion. Inside, she was cheering wildly. There was no reason to refuse this rain-like respite.
"It's a shame, but if that's Grandfather Gok Elder's will, I'll obey. I'll rest deeply to avoid any hiccups in my training!"
She bowed deeply and bolted from the pill refining room like a shot.
Back at her residence, Baek Cheong locked the door bolt tight. She flung her weary body onto the soft bed and immediately connected her divine sense to the Moomyeongbang. Her lips curved into a grin at the thought of posting freely and stirring up aggro again.
But as she scrolled the casual chat board, Baek Cheong's expression hardened coldly. The board was flooded with serious discussions on pill refining.
Dozens of Dou users debated herb ratios and clashing energies, creating an atmosphere like an academic conference. It was the result of Baek Cheong's casual five-elements refining method sparking a massive blaze in the refiners' scholarly fervor.
"Ugh, these serious nerds. Gallery's all about the mindless posts." Repulsed, Baek Cheong withdrew her divine sense from the Moomyeongbang.
With nothing but boring debates, boredom crashed over her instantly. The sun was still high in the sky—too early for sleep. Rolling around on the bed, she suddenly turned her awareness to her dantian.
No signs of it filling up, huh.
She'd been too busy refining to properly check her body's state. Closing her eyes, she peered deep into her dantian along her meridians. The dantian at Refining Qi 3-star had doubled in size from before. The five-elements spiritual roots rooted there had plumped up nicely from the supreme-grade pills' effects.
Thanks to the roots' growth, her breathing absorbed ambient spiritual energy at a blistering pace. But compared to the dantian's massive expansion, it was woefully inadequate. Filling that vast sea naturally without devouring whole supreme-grade pills was near impossible.
Baek Cheong pulled a supreme-grade Chwi-ryeong-dan from her storage pouch and swallowed it. The potent medicinal power poured in, but it was a drop in the ocean for her dantian.
"Just a measly 1% fill."
At this rate, she'd need a hundred to fill it. Downing one or more daily would accumulate pill poison in her meridians, risking irreversible qi deviation.
A graver issue loomed. Baek Cheong sharpened her mind and pushed the scant spiritual energy gathered in her dantian toward the barrier to the next realm.
The sensation upon contact was despairing. An impossibly thick, distant, impenetrable wall loomed in her dantian—no gauging its depth. The barriers from 2-star to 3-star had been major hurdles, brutally tough to break. But this one dwarfed them, solid and colossal.
Even dumping rare supreme-grade Barrier-Breaking Pills might not crack it.
"Haa." Baek Cheong sighed deeply, retracting her energy.
Not time to breakthrough to 4-star yet, so she shoved aside the headache-inducing reality.
"Guess I'll just gallery..." Unable to bear the boredom, she reconnected to the Moomyeongbang.
Still swamped with serious refining debates on the casual board, she pouted. "Everyone's way too serious. Should I derail it?"
Mischief sparked. She opened the posting window and mashed together shallow pill knowledge overheard from Gok Elder with plausible-sounding trivia from her past life's xianxia novels.
Combining pretentious phrases to sound like profound insights, she hammered out a post.
Water-extinguishing fire to control heat is basic. True refining forms an artificial microcosm inside the furnace. Rotate the herbs' vital essence along the Taiji orbit, then shove the dregs into the chaos realm for separation. You'll resonate with the Heavenly Dao, and pill inscriptions will form naturally. Disagree? You're all wrong.
It was a mishmash of nonsense without logic. Expecting a torrent of backlash upon posting, Baek Cheong smirked.
"Huh...?"
But things unfolded completely differently. The moment her post went up, unlike usual, overwhelmingly positive and earnest replies exploded in.
Countless refiners treated Baek Cheong's drivel like sacred scripture, debating earnestly and annotating their interpretations. They unearthed "hidden truths" in the gibberish, assigning meanings and going wild.
Baek Cheong blinked in panic. "Wait, no—that's not it. Why isn't anyone flaming me?"
Soon, a new post appeared on the casual board.
Reading it, Baek Cheong's jaw dropped. Absurdity left her speechless.
"Why does this even work?"
Lying on the bed, Baek Cheong stared blankly at the Moomyeongbang, her mind completely blown. Her shallow-knowledge troll post had bizarrely advanced the entire field of pill refining in the refiner world.