After leaving Ye Qingxuan’s place, Liu Tai’an hurried straight toward Xuantian Peak.
Once he met with Cen Zhe, Liu Tai’an bowed respectfully and said softly:
“Master, I’ve brought back the pill formula for the Nuclear Explosion Pill. Senior Brother Ye is willing to hand the formula over to the sect for full handling.”
Hearing this, Cen Zhe didn’t call out his disciple’s little omissions. He took the formula and asked, though he already knew the answer:
“And what does Ye Qingxuan want in return?”
At his master’s question, Liu Tai’an relayed the message calmly:
“Senior Brother Ye would like a Town-Boundary Stone and Spirit Crystals, or else a high-grade Source of Spirit Veins.”
Cen Zhe cast a glance at his disciple, gave a slight nod, and waved his hand:
“Very well. Go into seclusion now and prepare to break through to the Void Convergence stage.”
“Yes, Master!”
With that, Liu Tai’an breathed a quiet sigh of relief, turned, and left.
After Liu Tai’an was gone, Cen Zhe examined Ye Qingxuan’s Nuclear Explosion Pill formula and let out a soft chuckle:
“The refining process isn’t difficult, but the thinking behind it is rather… unorthodox.”
The standard Nuclear Explosion Pill was one thing.
But the Spirit-Cleansing · Nuclear Explosion Pill? Who in their right mind would think to take the energy of an internally taken Spirit-Cleansing Pill and use it as an external offensive method?
“Time to go get this kid his due.”
With a slight shake of his head and those parting words, Cen Zhe’s figure vanished into thin air.
——–
Back in the Qingxuan Blessed Land.
After seeing Liu Tai’an off, Ye Qingxuan felt no particular stir in his heart over the Nuclear Explosion Pill affair.
Returning to his blessed land, he threw himself back into refining the city components.
Three months passed.
Before Ye Qingxuan could finish refining the city components, Liu Tai’an visited once again.
In those three months, Liu Tai’an had successfully broken through and was now at the Void Convergence stage.
Upon learning of his junior brother’s new cultivation level, Ye Qingxuan couldn’t help but click his tongue in amazement.
He always felt like he was being thoroughly outclassed in talent.
This time, Liu Tai’an had come to deliver something to Ye Qingxuan, so he didn’t linger long.
After Liu Tai’an left, Ye Qingxuan returned to the Qingxuan Blessed Land with a joyful expression, clutching a storage ring.
The ring in his hand contained the payment from the Earth Mysterious Realm Alliance for buying out his Nuclear Explosion Pill formula.
Over the past three months, the alliance’s higher-ups had already reached an agreement with Cen Zhe regarding the formula.
After all, to the alliance’s top brass, the formula itself wasn’t particularly valuable.
Cen Zhe had practically settled the matter on the very day he arrived at the alliance headquarters.
But since Liu Tai’an was in seclusion breaking through at the time, Cen Zhe hadn’t rushed to deliver the goods.
Since the initial handoff had been handled through Liu Tai’an, it was only fitting that he personally deliver the payment to Ye Qingxuan.
Inside the storage ring were 1 seventh-grade Town-Boundary Stone and 30,000 low-grade Spirit Crystals.
Setting aside the seventh-grade Town-Boundary Stone, even the 30,000 low-grade Spirit Crystals alone could buy a top-tier low-grade spirit treasure.
In the outside market, low-grade spirit treasures ranged in price from 3,000 to 30,000 low-grade Spirit Crystals, depending on quality, the types of rule-based insights they contained, and the depth of those insights.
For spirit-treasure-level magic tools, sellers generally only accepted Spirit Crystals as payment.
So the seventh-grade Town-Boundary Stone plus 30,000 low-grade Spirit Crystals was already far more than the formula itself was actually worth.
If it weren’t for the ongoing invasion of the Green Demon Realm, and the fact that the Spirit-Cleansing · Nuclear Explosion Pill was genuinely effective at cleansing demonic qi, Ye Qingxuan’s formula would never have sold for such a price.
After buying out the formula, the Earth Mysterious Realm Alliance didn’t hoard it—they made it public immediately.
The alliance had purchased the formula primarily to fight against the Green Demon Realm.
Making the formula available to all cultivators in the Earth Mysterious Realm, so that anyone capable could refine it themselves, was naturally the best course of action.
Not only that, but within the alliance itself, they began drafting cultivators from the four paths of alchemy, artifact refining, formations, and talismans to mass-produce and even improve the Spirit-Cleansing · Nuclear Explosion Pill.
As for the standard Nuclear Explosion Pill, the alliance’s higher-ups paid it little attention.
That kind of purely explosive energy release wasn’t particularly effective against high-level cultivators.
On the other hand, minor powers and rogue cultivators across the Earth Mysterious Realm took a great interest in the ordinary Nuclear Explosion Pill, quickly teaming up with friends to try refining it.
This caused the price of demon cores—already scarce across the five domains—to keep skyrocketing.
This forced some cultivators to look for substitutes.
After all, demon cores only served as containers.
The violent energy inside them could be manually infused instead—but that would make the refining process far more complicated.
After all their tinkering, these cultivators ultimately found that demon cores were still the best raw material for the Nuclear Explosion Pill.
Ye Qingxuan was currently unaware of all this.
After obtaining the Town-Boundary Stone, he paused his refinement of the city components.
He was now using that seventh-grade Town-Boundary Stone to set up a sixth-grade Town-Boundary Grand Formation within the Qingxuan Cave Heaven.
The Town-Boundary Grand Formation could amplify the stone’s effects.
Although a sixth-grade formation couldn’t fully unlock the stone’s potential, it was still better than nothing.
With the Town-Boundary Stone and the grand formation in place, the Qingxuan Cave Heaven would become far more stable.
This would allow the cave heaven to unleash more of its own power, accelerating both the analysis of rule-based principles and the absorption and conversion of chaotic energy.
Once the formation was successfully set up, the Qingxuan Cave Heaven trembled slightly, and the spatial binding force increased dramatically.
In Ye Qingxuan’s perception, the cave heaven’s speed in analyzing rule-based principles and absorbing and converting energy had increased by about sixty percent.
Since the cave heaven and the blessed land complemented each other, with interlinked rules and mutually circulating foundational energies, the combined effect meant that the Qingxuan Cave Heaven Blessed Land’s rule-analysis speed increased by sixty percent, while its foundational energy accumulation rate rose by thirty percent.
With his previous investments, Ye Qingxuan estimated that it would take about a hundred years for the Qingxuan Cave Heaven Blessed Land to advance to the mid-third-grade stage.
After setting up the Town-Boundary Grand Formation, Ye Qingxuan resumed refining the city components.
He estimated that the remaining components would take about two more months to complete.
Two months passed in the blink of an eye. After more than a year of work, all the city components were finally finished.
Ye Qingxuan waved his hand and stored all the city components and formation plates into a single storage ring.
After a moment’s thought, he added twenty sixth-grade low-grade talismans and three sixth-grade top-grade talismans to the ring.
Then, through the boundary gate of the Qingxuan Cave Heaven Blessed Land, he sent the ring to his avatar, the Mysterious Merchant.
Now that he couldn’t make a move at the Divine Transformation stage, sixth-grade low-grade talismans were more than enough to deal with Nascent Soul cultivators.
As for the three sixth-grade top-grade talismans—those were for emergencies, just in case.
——–
Meanwhile.
At the mysterious shop outside Star Battle City.
A shimmering gate of light, half-real and half-illusory, appeared. From within, a storage ring dropped down.
Ye Qingxuan reached out and caught it.
This was his first time heading to the Xuanmu Realm to build a city, so he was naturally quite eager.
For this operation, his main consciousness had also descended upon his mysterious avatar.
After pocketing the storage ring, Ye Qingxuan was about to pack up his spirit-treasure-level shop.
But he paused, his expression shifting slightly.
The next moment, a young man dressed in black—looking very youthful—stepped through the shop’s entrance.
After entering, the young man instinctively glanced around the shop’s interior, then looked at Ye Qingxuan and asked:
“Boss, do you sell Foundation Establishment Pills here?”
