The Bronze Pill Furnace had fourteen durability points remaining.
Alexei had exactly four levels of experience left over from the assimilation, which was not nothing, but also was not enough to repair the furnace directly.
What he needed was the grindstone.
He put the furnace in his inventory and headed back through the underground passage toward his house and down to the mob farm platform below. The grindstone was already set up next to the anvil.
He opened the grindstone interface and placed the furnace in the input slot.
He hesitated slightly before confirming.
In Minecraft, grindstones cannot remove curse enchantments. Spiritual Energy Blockage sounded like it qualified. If the game treated it as a curse rather than a standard negative enchantment, he would be stuck with it permanently, which would make the whole exercise pointless.
He confirmed anyway.
[Bronze Pill Furnace (Enchanted) → Bronze Pill Furnace]
"Huh."
Not a curse, then. The furnace came out of the rear slot clean, and a small scatter of experience orbs drifted from the grindstone into his body.
He set the unenchanted furnace on the platform surface and reached for the anvil.
First priority was the Spiritual Energy Circuit. If the Blockage had been the opposite of the Circuit, removing one and adding the other was the obvious move.
He placed the enchanted book from the coffin deconstruction into the anvil's second slot.
[Level cost: 1]
[Bronze Pill Furnace:
Spiritual Energy Circuit I]
[Level 4 → Level 3]
He had expected more, but the low-tier artifact apparently did not demand much. The faint purple sheen that appeared on the furnace's surface was identical to what he had seen when assimilating other items.
Now for durability maintenance.
He wanted Efficiency on the furnace, but a brief attempt to apply it confirmed it was incompatible. Which left the more conservative options. He spent two levels combining his Mending and Auto-Repair books into a single higher-level enchanted book, then applied the result.
[Level cost: 6]
He put the furnace back in his inventory, pulled out his sword, and went to work on the mob farm.
The grind was routine at this point. The mob farm ran efficiently enough that leveling three times took under fifteen minutes of collection. By the time he was done, the whole detour had consumed less than twenty minutes total.
He placed the furnace back on Yan's jade table.
[Bronze Pill Furnace:
Spiritual Energy Circuit I
Auto-Repair III
Mending I]
Then he sat down at the crafting table and fed the remaining experience from the farm run directly into the furnace through sustained focus. The durability climbed steadily, and by the time he stopped, it sat at a full 115 points.
He looked at the number.
That was the maximum durability of this particular furnace, apparently. Low-tier items were not built to last. Auto-Repair III would restore three durability per minute, and each refinement cycle only consumed one point. As long as he was not doing anything particularly excessive, it would sustain itself indefinitely.
He put the furnace back in his inventory and headed to the alchemy room to return it. But before he set it down, he ran one quick test: he placed a single ingredient in the slot and watched the fuel consumption.
Less than one percent per cycle.
He put a second ingredient in immediately, just to double-check.
Still less than one percent.
He leaned back and nodded once.
"There it is."
Without the Spiritual Energy Blockage enchantment slowing the process, the furnace operated at what he assumed was its intended efficiency. Fuel consumption had dropped from three percent to less than one percent. This meant the single spirit stone he had used earlier would now last for more than a hundred refinement cycles instead of barely thirty.
---
The output slot held the Everlasting Peach Essence after he put in the Everlasting Peach Fruit in the ingredient slot.
The sphere wobbled slightly in his palm, the consistency somewhere between water and firm gelatin. He brought it toward his face and gave it a small lick.
A burst of sweetness hit his tongue immediately, like biting into a very ripe peach distilled to its essence.
"Huh."
He drank the rest of it in one go, then stood for a moment processing the experience.
It was fruit juice, significantly richer than eating the peach raw. The furnace had taken the fruit, extracted and concentrated whatever made it taste good, and delivered it in liquid form.
He pulled a Yellow Dragon Fruit from his inventory and dropped it in the ingredient slot.
Twenty-five seconds later, a golden sphere of liquid rested in the output slot.
He took it out, turned it over in his hand, and then put it back in the ingredient slot.
The sphere refined again. Its color deepened, the gold growing richer. The texture thickened, and its volume diminished slightly.
He ran the refinement a second time. The liquid grew heavier, now closer to syrup.
A third refinement transformed it further. The substance became gelatinous and semi-solid, the color shifting toward a warm amber.
He refined it once more.
This time it emerged fully solid, a translucent orange lozenge no larger than a small grape.
He lifted it toward the light spilling through the alchemy room door.
"Hard candy," he said.
Then he popped it in his mouth.
The sweetness was intense, several times richer than eating the Yellow Dragon Fruit directly. His first instinct was that it might be too sweet. His second instinct, about three seconds later, was that it was fine.
He chewed through it.
The furnace could refine fruit step by step, transforming juice into syrup, syrup into jelly, jelly into soft candy, and finally into hard candy. The number of refinement cycles determined the form, while the grade and type of ingredient dictated the flavor.
This was not truly a pill furnace.
It was a culinary instrument disguised as one.
On a practical level, that meant nearly every fruit and herb in his garden that was not suited for medicine could be turned into something edible. The Bloodweb Berries that had killed him in the early days were an exception. He still remembered the taste. He had no intention of experimenting with those.
But the cultivatable fruits he had been growing were different.
Those were fair game.
He spent the next half hour working through the remaining fruit varieties in Yan's chest, one of each, testing the full refinement cycle on each type. He produced soft and hard candy versions of Brightglow Fruit, Everlasting Peach, Yellow Dragon Fruit, and Emerald Cloud Fruit, lining them up on the edge of the preparation table to compare colors and textures.
The Emerald Cloud one tasted like something between a grape and a plum, which was not unpleasant.
Three of Yan's Everlasting Peaches had gone into the testing process. He made a mental note to replace them from the garden within the next day or two before she noticed.
He packed the remaining candy samples into his inventory, put the furnace back precisely where it had been, tidied the table back to the state he had found it in, and returned Yan's ingredient chest to its proper organization before leaving.
The alchemy room looked untouched when he closed the door behind him.
----------
[POV: Yan]
The following morning, while Alexei was still asleep and the underground farm was running on automatic, Yan arrived at the small courtyard as she did every day.
She left Mengyao in the courtyard to practice and continued through to the underground passage.
The mob farm tower had been sealed off. No spider cleanup needed, and after an incident Yan preferred not to think about in detail, the trapdoors had been firmly locked. The passage was quiet, with no sounds or smells coming from that direction.
There was, however, a faint medicinal fragrance in the air.
That was new.
She followed it to the alchemy room and opened the door. Everything looked exactly as she had left it.
She sat down on the meditation cushion in front of the preparation table and began going through her usual pre-session inventory.
Today was the last batch of body-tempering medicine. According to her schedule, Mengyao would be ready to begin formal cultivation within the week. The early stages relied primarily on medicated baths, but the supplementary pills would become essential in the second phase, and she wanted everything prepared well in advance.
She reached into the ingredient chest and started laying out what she needed.
Her hand came up short on the Everlasting Peaches.
There had been five. Now there were only two.
She sat back and studied the chest in silence.
The peaches were not part of any current prescription. She had set them aside for herself because she liked them, and because they were difficult to obtain outside a properly maintained spirit garden. They were a small personal indulgence, something she kept separate from her usual refining materials.
She looked toward the door, then at the clearly slightly-too-organized state of her preparation table, and arrived at the obvious conclusion.
Of course.
She shook her head, replaced the missing peaches on her mental shopping list, and continued setting out her actual ingredients.
It was when she finished arranging everything and reached for the furnace to begin preparation that she stopped.
She picked it up.
Her furnace had a normal amount of wear and small surface scratches from regular use. She had owned it long enough to know exactly what it looked like.
This was her furnace. But it looked completely new.
The surface was smooth and clean in a way it had not been for years, and across it there was a faint purple sheen. She turned it over in her hands, looking for any indication of what had been changed. The basic structure was the same. The material was the same. Whatever had been altered was either internal or too subtle for physical inspection.
She placed it back on the table.
Testing would tell her more than looking at it. She arranged her ingredients in the correct order, confirmed the proportions, and opened the furnace lid.
"Chrysanthemum Leaf: nine grams. Ironridge Vine: three grams. Bloodroot: sixty-five grams. Blood Qi Fruit: seventy-five grams. Morning Dew Moss: fifty grams."
She poured the prepared ingredients into the furnace chamber. Then she began gathering her spiritual fire to inject into the furnace, as she had done thousands of times before.
Whooomph.
Golden flames erupted inside the furnace chamber.
The spiritual fire she had been pulling together in her palm had not moved. She had not injected anything.
The furnace had started refining on its own.
The golden flames lasted five, maybe six seconds before extinguishing on their own.
It happened so fast that she barely had time to register what she was seeing, let alone adjust her spiritual energy to control the fire that should not have existed yet.
White smoke drifted from the furnace chamber, carrying with it a faint medicinal fragrance that she recognized immediately. That was the scent of properly refined base essence, exactly what should result from processing the ingredients she had added.
Under normal circumstances, this step took at minimum ten to fifteen minutes of constant attention. She would need to monitor the materials inside the furnace with her spiritual sense throughout the entire process, continuously adjusting the temperature and distribution of her spiritual fire to account for the shifting properties of the herbs as they broke down and recombined.
No two refinement sessions were ever truly identical, even when working with the same prescription. The slightest variation in ingredient quality, ambient temperature, or spiritual energy flow could alter the process. A moment's inattention could ruin the batch. Improper fire control could cause a furnace explosion.
She had destroyed twenty-eight furnaces during her early training. Twenty-eight catastrophic failures before she developed the fine control necessary to consistently produce usable results.
Precise manipulation of spiritual fire and intimate knowledge of herb properties were the foundation of competent alchemy. The more complex the prescription, the more exacting the requirements.
And yet.
She had done nothing.
The furnace had simply worked.
She lifted the lid and looked inside.
Instead of the thick paste she normally produced at this stage, the chamber contained a clear reddish-brown liquid with no visible impurities. The consistency was closer to refined oil than medicinal paste.
She had never seen this before.
And she had no idea what to do next.
According to standard procedure, she should transfer the paste to a ceramic dish for temporary storage before continuing with the next phase. But looking at the shallow dish beside her preparation table, it was immediately obvious the vessel was completely inadequate for holding liquid.
She rummaged through the storage chest and retrieved an empty white ceramic bottle. Using a thread of spiritual energy to guide it, she transferred the essence into the bottle and sealed it.
Then, more out of momentum than plan, she added the next batch of ingredients to the furnace.
The same thing happened.
Golden flames rose and vanished within six seconds, leaving behind refined essence.
She transferred it into a bottle and added another batch of ingredients.
Once again, the flames appeared and vanished just as quickly, leaving behind refined essence.
She stood there holding three identical bottles.
Wait.
She looked at the third bottle.
Why did I bottle this one?
The standard procedure required mixing the first essence with spirit spring water and combining it with the third essence at a specific ratio. But looking at the clear, concentrated liquid in the bottles, adding water seemed unnecessary. The whole point of the water was to thin and blend paste. This was already liquid.
She stared at the bottles for a long moment.
Then she made a decision.
Better to follow established procedure than risk ruining the batch with improvisation. She poured the first essence back into the furnace, added a small amount of spirit spring water, stirred the mixture with a small jade spoon, and closed the lid.
The golden flames appeared again.
This time they lasted ten seconds.
She opened the lid and checked the result. The liquid had reduced in volume but remained in liquid form, perhaps slightly thicker than before.
She paused briefly, then poured in the contents of the second bottle. After adding more water, she stirred to ensure even distribution.
She closed the lid.
Golden flame burned for fifteen seconds.
When she opened the furnace again, the mixture had changed.
The liquid had thickened significantly. It was no longer thin like water, yet it had not fully solidified. Its color had deepened into a rich amber.
Not enough heat, she thought.
She closed the lid again.
Fifteen seconds later, she opened it again. The substance had grown denser, its consistency now closer to honey. It was progress, but still far from the paste stage she required.
She initiated another refinement cycle
This time when she opened the lid, proper paste filled the bottom of the chamber.
She refined it again. The paste compressed further, condensing into distinct shapes. Two pills began to take form, larger than her usual output. Normally, this formula yielded four pills. Now there were only two.
She reached out and pressed one with her fingertip.
It yielded slightly. The surface was soft, faintly adhesive.
One more cycle.
She closed the lid, waited for the flames to finish, and opened it again.
Then she froze.
Ten lines marked the surface of the pill.
They were perfectly formed, evenly spaced across its yellowish-brown surface. The pill itself appeared faintly translucent. It emitted a subtle glow.
She picked it up, holding it between thumb and forefinger.
No spiritual energy leaked from it. Despite being freshly refined, it was perfectly sealed, retaining all of its medicinal potency without any external assistance.
The transparency was secondary.
The patterns were everything.
A pill's effectiveness depended on two factors: grade and pattern count.
In the cultivation world, medicinal pills were divided into nine grades. Grade One represented the highest quality, while Grade Nine marked the lowest among cultivator medicines. Beneath those lay Mortal tier remedies, intended for ordinary people without spiritual cultivation. Above Grade One existed the Immortal tier, though such elixirs were recorded only in ancient texts and had never been verified in the present age.
Every cultivator pill from Grade One to Grade Nine bore visible patterns on its surface. These markings indicated the degree of purity achieved during refinement. The greater the number of patterns, the purer the medicinal essence. Pills with more patterns were absorbed more easily by the body and left behind fewer residual toxins.
Nine patterns had always been considered the limit.
Yan had reached seven patterns only once in her entire career. It had been a Grade Nine Qi-Nourishing Pill, and she still preserved it as evidence of her highest achievement. Under normal conditions, she could reliably produce five or six patterns on lower-grade pills. For Grade Five and above, even three patterns were considered an accomplishment worthy of respect.
Ten patterns were theoretical.
A flawless pill represented perfect balance between all ingredients. Every stage of refinement would need to proceed without error. No medicinal essence could be lost. And no impurity could remain. The result would be absolute purity, a pill that produced no toxins within the body.
No one had ever produced a ten-pattern pill. And no one believed it was actually possible.
She counted the lines again.
Then she counted them a third time.
There was no mistake.
"How?"
She wrapped it in a preservation cloth and secured it inside her inner robe, directly against her skin where it would stay at optimal temperature.
Then she picked up the furnace, turned it over in her hands, and examined every surface for some indication of how it had been modified.
The purple sheen was there. But beyond that, nothing obvious had changed.
She tried channeling her spiritual fire into it directly. The fire consumed her spiritual energy but did not ignite inside the chamber.
She spent the next hour testing other pill formulas. Every batch produced exceptional results. Eight or nine patterns appeared consistently, and occasionally ten when she used ingredients from Alexei's spirit garden. The ten-pattern perfection seemed to require ingredients of equivalent quality.
The other significant change: regardless of how many base ingredients she added to the furnace, the final output was always a single pill.
However, its medicinal potency far surpassed normal standards. One pill contained the combined effect of four or five ordinary pills.
By the time she finished testing, her hands were shaking slightly.
She left the alchemy room without bothering to clean up her work space, moving quickly through the underground passage and up into Alexei's house.
She knocked once and stepped inside.
He was still in bed, clearly having been woken by the sound. His expression showed irritation, as if she had pulled him from the middle of a dream.
"The furnace," she said.
He blinked at her, struggling to follow.
"What the hell?"
"What did you do to the furnace?"
"Oh, you're talking about that. I gave it some love. You are welcome."
----------
[POV: Alexei]
After Yan's early-morning excitement about the furnace modifications, Alexei found himself completely awake with no possibility of going back to sleep.
She had stayed for maybe five minutes, then hurried back to the alchemy room to continue her testing.
The day began, as most days did, with feeding Changgui and Mengyao. He left bread and fruit within reach, and headed for the mob farm entrance.
Standard routine: jump through the painting, walk down the passage, leap off the platform edge, fall forty-some meters, and land in the water pool at the bottom.
He climbed out, shook water from his sleeves, and glanced across the mob collection platform out of habit.
Then he stopped.
There was still a mob standing on the platform.
In Minecraft, only two mob types could survive a twenty-four-block fall without taking fatal damage: endermen and witches.
Given that this one was wearing boots, it was definitely a witch.
He circled the collection area, approaching from an angle that kept him outside the aggro range. The witch stood still. He pulled a wooden boat from his inventory and deployed it directly beneath the witch. The witch, standing in the boat's hitbox, was pulled into the sitting position as if she had voluntarily decided to take a seat.
"Got you."
Now that she was contained and stationary, he finally got a proper look at her face.
She was not ugly.
He had been half-expecting the exaggerated hooked nose from the Minecraft texture files. But her features were normal. She looked like a person wearing witch's clothing. He had noticed similar things with the zombies and zombie villagers. They had normal human proportions. Male and female variants existed. The game's simplified models did not translate directly to this world's reality.
Which made sense. If cultivators could look like normal attractive people despite having the personalities of murderous sociopaths, then mobs could look like normal humans despite being, well, mobs.
He started to circle around her for a better angle, keeping a safe three meters of distance.
"Why is she not attacking?"
The witch threw a potion at his head.
Crash.
Green liquid exploded across his face and hair, soaking into his clothing. A spiral of brownish-green particles rose from his body, and the smell hit him a second later.
[Poison: 0:00:33]
"Oh, come on. And I don't have milk..."
A second potion hit him before he finished the sentence. This one was grey, and it smelled like rust and old metal.
[Poison: 0:00:29]
[Slowness: 0:01:07]
His legs immediately grew heavy, as if he were wading through thick mud. Every step took effort, and his health bar began to fall, dropping one point every 1.25 seconds. Poison counted as magic damage, which meant his armor offered no protection. Even in a full set of iron, it made no difference at all.
The poison alone would not kill him. It would stop when he reached half a heart. But witches also carried potions of instant damage, and those would finish him easily if he remained within range.
He turned and made for the ladder. Each rung of the ladder took twice as long to climb as it should have. By the time he was halfway up, his health was sitting at two and a half hearts.
By the time he reached the top and climbed through the entrance into his house, it was down to half a heart and holding.
He burst into the living room.
Changgui and Mengyao were still sitting in meditation poses, eyes closed, presumably doing their spiritual energy perception exercises. His dramatic entrance broke their concentration.
They stared at him.
He ignored them and walked straight to the storage chest. He opened it, took out a bucket of milk, and drank it immediately.
Once the debuffs were gone, he pulled three loaves of bread from his inventory.
The first loaf disappeared in less than two minutes. His health rose from half a heart to three hearts.
He finished the second loaf more slowly, feeling strength return to his body as his health climbed from three hearts to six.
By the time he finished the third, he was fully restored.
He leaned back against the chest and wiped the faint residue of potion from his face with his sleeve.
Changgui and Mengyao were still staring at him.
"What?"
"No." Mengyao hesitated. "You just..."
"I was hungry," he said simply. "I skipped breakfast. Do you want some?"
They did not respond. They only continued staring.
He pushed himself to his feet and returned to the chest. One by one, he began pulling out supplies. He crafted three additional iron buckets using the materials he carried, then walked to Bessie's pen and filled each bucket with milk. He placed them into his hotbar.
Next, he transferred every golden apple from storage into his inventory.
If the witch used instant damage potions again, he would need healing that worked faster than bread.
With his preparations complete, he walked to the painting without acknowledging them and jumped through.
Behind him, Changgui remained seated in silence.
Even after witnessing the wall-passing technique so many times, it still felt magical.
He closed his eyes and returned to his meditation exercises, but his mind was no longer as calm as it had been just minutes earlier.
---
Alexei climbed back down the passage, jumped down to the mob farm platform, and landed in the water.
Then he used an empty bucket to collect the water block he had just landed in.
He would use that water to flush the witch into her new containment room once it was built. Trying to row the boat like in the game seemed inadvisable. In the real world, the witch would probably not just sit behind him politely throwing potions at the air. She would throw them at him, from point-blank range, which would be bad for his health.
First priority: temporary containment.
He moved quickly, using his Efficiency IV pickaxe to carve out a 2x3x2 space in the stone wall adjacent to the zombie villager holding cells. The work took under three minutes.
He lined the new room with cobblestone, leaving only a two-block-wide corridor connecting directly to the main platform. That would serve as the water channel. When he was ready, he could place the water source at the platform end, let it flow down the corridor, and carry the boat-witch combination straight into the containment room.
He placed the water, and the current did exactly what he expected. The boat slid smoothly down the corridor and came to rest in the center of the new room.
The witch sat in the boat, completely motionless.
"Welcome to your luxury accommodations."
She did not respond.
He sealed the entrance with cobblestone blocks, leaving a single one-block gap near the ceiling for observation. Through that gap, he could see her clearly, and more importantly, he could throw items through it.
He won't release that witch.
Now for the main event.
The zombie villagers were still shuffling aimlessly in their own containment cells. Curing them required two steps: apply weakness, then feed a golden apple.
In standard Minecraft, weakness could be applied via potion or tipped arrow. He had neither. What he did have was a witch who threw weakness potions as part of her standard attack pattern.
He opened the one-block gap, reached through with a golden apple in hand, and waited.
The witch threw a potion.
Grey liquid splashed across the zombie villager closest to the gap.
[Weakness applied]
The zombie's movements became even more sluggish, its arms hanging loose at its sides.
Alexei tossed the golden apple through the gap. It landed at the zombie's feet, and after a moment's confused shuffling, the zombie bent down and consumed it.
Golden spiral particles began rising from the zombie villager's body immediately.
He repeated the whole process with the other four zombie villagers. Then he sealed the observation gap completely and stepped back.
In the game, curing took five minutes.
In this world, based on how long it took zombies to convert into drowned when submerged, he estimated the process would take significantly longer.
He just had not expected it to take this long.
---
Three days passed.
The zombie villagers still showed no signs of completing their transformation.
They shuffled. They groaned. Golden particles continued rising from their bodies in steady spirals, confirming the process was active. But they remained zombies.
Alexei checked on them twice per day, hoping to see some visible progress.
Nothing changed.
"This is absurd," he muttered, staring through the observation gap at the zombie villagers.
---
The courtyard felt quieter than usual.
Changgui and Mengyao had not returned since the poison incident three days ago. According to Yan, they had begun formal body tempering. It involved medicated baths, controlled exercises, and constant supervision to prevent accidental injury.
Once they finished that phase, they would officially be cultivators.
After that, their schedules would no longer align with his. They would be training with other disciples, attending sect classes, doing whatever it was that cultivators did when they were not scheming against each other or face-slapping young masters.
He would see them occasionally, maybe.
Yan still came by every afternoon. She spent exactly one hour in the alchemy room, refining pills with the modified furnace.
She had thanked him four more times over the past three days. He had told her to stop thanking him. She had agreed, then thanked him again the next day anyway.
There had been other developments as well.
He crafted another beehive using honeycomb, increasing his total bee population to eight. Combined with the natural bee nests in the trees, the courtyard now maintained a stable pollination cycle. The spirit fruit trees produced more reliably, and honey collection had become consistent.
He had not built a villager crop farm yet.
The growth cycles in this world were far slower than in the game. Crops required two to three days to mature instead of hours or minutes. For now, manual farming remained the more efficient choice.
Automated farming would come later, once he had the proper infrastructure in place.
He had also not built a villager trading hall yet.
That had been the original plan. Cure zombie villagers, assign them professions, lock in good trades, and create a sustainable economy loop.
The problem was the curing process.
It was taking days. Possibly a week or more per villager. And the golden apples.
Those were the real bottleneck.
Each golden apple required eight gold ingots. He had five zombie villagers curing right now, which meant he had already spent forty gold ingots.
His current gold production, which came entirely from zombie drops in the mob farm, was nowhere near sufficient to sustain that rate of consumption.