It only took a moment for Steward Bai’s reply to come through.
He began by congratulating Ye Qingxuan on the advancement of his blessed land to the second tier and his breakthrough in cultivation to the Purple Mansion realm, officially making him an inner disciple of the Xuantian Sect.
At the same time, Steward Bai also informed Ye Qingxuan that his identity information had been updated, and told him to check his disciple token himself.
As for Steward Bai himself—just as Ye Qingxuan had expected—he didn’t come to Qingxuan Blessed Land to investigate in person.
After reading Steward Bai’s message, Ye Qingxuan took out his disciple token and examined it.
First was his status: he had changed from an outer disciple at the Foundation Establishment stage to an inner disciple at the Purple Mansion stage.
His monthly contribution points salary had also increased from 60 points per month to 300 points per month.
But this amount of contribution points was barely enough to cover Ye Qingxuan’s expenses.
Take the Azure Dragon he was raising, for example. After it had broken through to the fourth tier, it needed fourth-tier Bloodline Fruits to make fourth-tier Bloodline Pills—and each fruit cost 10,000 contribution points.
If it weren’t for the fact that his Tianfu Shop had been buying Bloodline Fruits with spirit stones all along, the Azure Dragon’s Bloodline Pills would have run out long ago.
So this change in salary didn’t really faze Ye Qingxuan.
Finally, there was the change to Ye Qingxuan’s planting duties. It had gone from a first-tier task required once a year to a second-tier task required once every three years.
Three years was the normal time it took for a standard second-tier blessed land to cultivate second-tier spiritual plants.
The second-tier planting task wasn’t just about upgrading the spiritual plants from first to second tier—the quantity had also been increased fivefold.
But after a normal blessed land advanced, its area would generally expand to about ten times its original size. So with only a fivefold increase in planting quantity, there was still plenty of profit left for the blessed land cultivator.
Apart from this basic task that had to be completed every three years, each additional second-tier planting task a blessed land cultivator finished would earn them a reward of anywhere from 5,000 to 50,000 contribution points.
The exact reward depended on the value of the second-tier spiritual plants they chose to grow.
However, Ye Qingxuan didn’t need contribution points for now, so he wasn’t planning to take on any extra planting tasks.
His Qingxuan Cave Heaven Blessed Land could grow fifth-tier spiritual plants. Keeping the land for those was clearly more profitable.
Besides the changes to his tasks, his allowance for attendants had also increased.
To help blessed land cultivators manage their land better after advancement, the quota for attendants at Ye Qingxuan’s second-tier blessed land had been raised to four.
That meant, in addition to the Ye Zhaobeng and Ye Zhaoyu brothers, he could hire two more attendants.
But Ye Qingxuan wasn’t planning to take on any new attendants for now. The two brothers were more than enough to handle things.
Hiring more attendants would only disturb his peace and quiet.
Now that he had officially raised his blessed land’s level to second tier and his cultivation to the early stage of the Purple Mansion realm, he wouldn’t be reporting any further advancements or breakthroughs for a while.
With a second-tier blessed land and early-stage Purple Mansion cultivation, he could keep a low profile for a thousand years without anyone noticing anything unusual.
Now that his outward cultivation was elevated,
Ye Qingxuan could publicly raise his alchemy mastery to the fourth tier.
That way, his Tianfu Shop could legitimately start selling fourth-tier Nuclear Explosion Pills.
Even though ordinary disciples didn’t know that he was the one behind the Tianfu Shop,
Ye Qingxuan wasn’t naive enough to think that the higher-ups of the Xuantian Sect wouldn’t figure out who the real owner was.
So he didn’t intend to completely hide it from them either—as long as there was a somewhat plausible reason on the surface, that was enough.
Over the course of more than a month, Ye Qingxuan refined over a dozen production lines for fourth-tier Nuclear Explosion Pills.
He began processing the fourth-tier demon cores sent over earlier by the Tianfu Shop, turning them into fourth-tier Nuclear Explosion Pills, along with a small batch of fourth-tier Spirit-Cleansing Nuclear Explosion Pills.
Since the spirit-cleansing energy for the fourth-tier Spirit-Cleansing Nuclear Explosion Pills had to be refined by Ye Qingxuan himself, he didn’t plan to sell them in large quantities to the public.
From now on, the Tianfu Shop’s main offering would be the regular Nuclear Explosion Pills.
As for the Nuclear Explosion Pill series, Ye Qingxuan didn’t intend to do any further in-depth research until his cultivation advanced.
Trying to develop a Nuclear Explosion Pill that could effectively harm a realm he hadn’t even reached yet was a bit too much of a stretch.
His fourth-tier Nuclear Explosion Pills could unleash the power of a fifth-tier low-grade talisman, but in reality, if a cultivator was on guard, they posed little threat to Nascent Soul cultivators.
In fact, whether it was Nuclear Explosion Pills or talismans below the sixth tier, they weren’t all that dangerous when used by lower-cultivation cultivators.
Because when it came to both spiritual sense sensitivity and reaction speed, higher-cultivation cultivators always had the edge.
So means like talismans were only truly threatening against opponents of the same tier, when used by a cultivator of that same tier.
That said, there was no rule that such tools—talismans or Nuclear Explosion Pills—had to be used against higher-cultivation cultivators.
The higher the tier of a talisman below the sixth tier, the faster it could be activated.
And for talismans at the sixth tier or above, the higher the tier, the stronger their suppression and lockdown effects on the target.
These effects could, to some extent, make up for a cultivator’s own shortcomings.
So if a same-tier talisman couldn’t take you out, one could simply use a tier-higher talisman to do the job.
And when facing a powerful enemy or a dangerous situation, using something like a Nuclear Explosion Pill to buy a few seconds might give you just enough time to activate a displacement-type technique and escape instantly.
Whether a tool was useful or not really came down to how the cultivator used it.
That was exactly why the Nuclear Explosion Pills at Ye Qingxuan’s Tianfu Shop—and talismans on the market in general—had always been so popular.
For fourth-tier Nuclear Explosion Pills, Ye Qingxuan planned to set the price at 100 high-grade spirit stones per pill, which was five times the price of third-tier Nuclear Explosion Pills.
For fourth-tier Spirit-Cleansing Nuclear Explosion Pills, he planned to price them at 210 high-grade spirit stones per pill, seven times the price of the third-tier version.
And not just the fourth-tier Spirit-Cleansing Nuclear Explosion Pills—Ye Qingxuan also intended to raise the prices of Spirit-Cleansing Nuclear Explosion Pills at all other tiers by 50%.
The refinement process for Spirit-Cleansing Nuclear Explosion Pills was far too tedious. All the energy required had to be refined and extracted by Ye Qingxuan himself.
In his daily cultivation routine before, most of his free time had been spent refining Spirit-Cleansing Nuclear Explosion Pills of various tiers.
But now that he wasn’t short on spirit stones, there was no need to keep refining them so often.
So Ye Qingxuan decided to raise the prices of Spirit-Cleansing Nuclear Explosion Pills to discourage some cultivators from buying them—
thereby easing his own supply pressure.
If that didn’t work, he could always limit sales.
That said, the extraterritorial battlefield had now become a domain for high-tier cultivators, and the lower-realm battlefields where Spirit-Cleansing Nuclear Explosion Pills were needed were too dangerous—mostly serving as the main stage for Spirit Transformation cultivators.
So the low-tier disciples within the Xuantian Sect didn’t have many opportunities to use Spirit-Cleansing Nuclear Explosion Pills right now, and sales probably wouldn’t need to be restricted.
As for what the future situation would look like, Ye Qingxuan had no way of knowing.
Although, based on the current state of affairs, the entanglement and clashes between the Dizxuan Realm and the Qingmo Realm in the lower realms could easily last another few thousand years,
the battlefield was ever-changing, and no one could predict what turns might come next.
