The sects called Foundation Establishment a gift from Heaven. Pei Jing had seen what the elders did with that claim. They controlled the medicines and the manuals, and when their pills killed a disciple, they blamed the disciple’s lack of affinity.
He sat in the copper circle with the golden pill in his right palm. The cave still smelled of warm charcoal, wax, and old herbs. The pill weighed what the scroll from Ling Feiyu’s expedition said it should. The five colors around it came from wood, fire, earth, metal, and water, balanced around a core of dragon marrow.
There were three stages ahead.
First he had to bring the eighty-one drops and the surrounding mist together into a single pool of liquid Gang Qi. His dantian already held forty times the pressure of the air around him. The marrow and herbs in the pill would give it the heat and force to go further.
If the qi condensed too fast, the sudden drop in pressure could stop his heart. If it took too long, the heat would burn him from inside. The Earth-Stalactite Milk had fortified his vessel walls enough to bear four times the strain an ordinary cultivator’s could.
