With his qi flow back to it's natural state, his cultivation and martial art training were back on track. A month after breaking through to sixth level, he achieved grand completion in Eagle Claw Art. Obliteration Fist was also showing signs of growth. It won't be long before it too reaches grand completion.
He was quite formidable right now, even able to fight eight level body refinement cultivators if he is careful of the burst. Unfortunately he was still not in high stage and couldn't participate in the opening of the secret realm. Two months after achieving grand completion, he stared helplessly at the tail of the humongous rank three Purple Feather Eagle as his friends left to the secret realm on it. Being a bird it was faster than core formation realm cultivators, one glimpse and it was gone.
Even Li Xiaomei was forced by her father to enter the secret realm. She wasn't too happy about it. She already had all the resources she needed and she didn't like fighting. Despite her protests she ended up on the bird, taken away to the secret realm to gain experience.
With their departure he had more time on his hands, all of which he put in learning formations and martial arts. His mentor was relieved with him reaching sixth level. It might take one to two years for him to reach the seventh after which he would have the minimum qualifications to refine pills. If he fails to do so within two years, he will be kicked out the sect.
Zou Shi made a comprehensive plan to make him familiar with the complete procedure of qi recovery pill refining. He also included all the variations that could occur. But one has to practice refining with qi multiple times before one could refine even one furnace of pills every ten tries. Even if he reaches seventh level before he is kicked out, without enough time to practice pill refining he will not be able to become an alchemist in time.
Today he asked Zhang Wuji to come early. He had come up with a solution to the lack of qi problem. He took Zhang Wuji to the interior of the Pill House. After many turns they entered the room at the end of a corridor. The room was like the interior of a tower five storeys high with a glass roof and bluish white circular walls. The walls had spiraling staircases leading to closed rooms. There were twenty five doors in total including the door they entered from. The floor had a huge formation. There were formation lines visible on the walls too.
There were two people seated on the floor. One was a middle aged man wearing purple robes and the other was a young man wearing white robes with eight trigrams embroidered on the left chest. Zhang Wuji recognized the white robes to be standard robes of formation masters of the sect. But the purple robes had nothing to with the sect. So either the middle aged man was an outsider or an Elder. Although Elders have a black robe to identify them but unlike the others they were not obligated to wear them.
Zhang Wuji instantly turned his sight away. He didn't want to mess with a possible Elder character. When the two saw Zou Shi enter, they got up to greet him.
"Old Zou you are late."
"Greetings uncle master Zou." The young man bowed.
"Hm? Already ready to establish a foundation! Good. Brother Xu you got yourself a good disciple." Zou Shi stroked his beard and smiled.
The middle aged man laughed loudly "You overpraise Li'er. He got lucky and found a spirit fruit in his adventures otherwise it would have been difficult for him to open the heart gate at his young age."
Zou Shi smiled and made introductions "This is Zhang Wuji. Wuji, this is Elder Xu Wei and his disciple Shen Li. They are here today to help you experience pill refining."
"Junior Zhang Wuji greets Elder Xu and senior brother Shen." He clasped his hands and bowed a little towards Xu Wei.
Xu Wei accepted the greetings and led the three to the room opposite the entrance. Soon all of them entered the room. The moment the door was closed, all went dark. The darkness didn't last long. Zhang Wuji looked at the source of the light. It was a small glowing orb floating above Shen Li's hand. It gave off gentle white light.
The room was small and felt a little crowded with all four of them in it. It had the same bluish white walls with similar formation lines as the outside. The lines met to form a circular formation at the center of the floor. There seemed to be another formation over it.
Shen Li pointed at the formation and said "This is what I came up with to help junior brother Zhang. This formation will help him use the main formation. It will construct a template high stage body refinement realm cultivator's body for junior brother Zhang to use in the illusion space"
Looking at Zhang Wuji's confused expression Zou Shi introduced "This place is a grand formation made for alchemists to practice alchemy in an illusion space without wasting any resources. Though there are some shortcomings, this is very helpful in the path of alchemy. This formation is usually open only to alchemists. Elder Xu made an exception for you to use it and tasked little Shen to make appropriate changes to make up for your lack of qi."
Zhang Wuji was stunned for a moment before offering a deep bow to his mentor. They had no relation and he was not even an in name disciple, just a lowly apprentice. To actually help him to this extent knowing that he would get absolutely nothing in return, he could not put his gratitude in words and bowed in silence.
"Get up get up, it is a small thing. Brother Xu here is a good friend of mine and also the man in charge of all formations in the Pill House. All it took was a word. I didn't do much." Zou Shi helped him up and patted his back "If mentors don't do what they can to help, the sect would fall. Besides, you helped me alleviate an age old debt I had to little Zheng's grandfather. With his current position, there is no way I could repay him. Small things like this help me feel a bit less burdened. In fact I should be thanking you."
"Brother Xu is the formation ready to use?"
"I don't know. I'm seeing the formation for the first time too. Li'er, let's see what you did."
"Yes master."
Zhang Wuji looked at the formation on the ground. It was plain and simple. It was drawn out of white ink. It didn't take him long to analyze what it did. It did nothing.
There were some pathways he couldn't decipher but he had deciphered enough to figure out that the formation was absolutely useless. The energy would just go here and there. There were some elements to control the energy but a simple energy circulation mechanism is useless.
With no conversion or storage elements, the energy would just be following the pathways forever and ever till the ink is corroded and the formation destroyed.
This was a good method to temporarily store the state of the energy and introduce delay but given that the formation wasn't connected to anything it was all useless.
"Give him a pair of goggles, he is very interested in formations." Seeing him stare at the formation with puzzlement Zou Shi said.
"Oh? Then what are you doing learning alchemy? Don't aim too high little friend, if your intelligence is divided, you will achieve nothing." Xu Wei gently reminded him.
"Unlike formations, the bar set for alchemy is not unreachable for him. He's just learning alchemy to continue his stay in the sect." Zhang Wuji intended to just smile and nod but Zou Shi responded for him.
Xu Wei nodded and signaled his disciple to give him the goggles. Zhang Wuji put the googles on and exclaimed. The simple diagram on the ground expanded into a humongous three dimensional structure with multiple layers, colors, symbols, matrices, it was dizzying.
"Li'er, give an introduction to your junior brother." Xu Wei ordered his disciple.
"Junior brother, the grand formation is made for alchemists and as you know the minimum requirement for alchemists is high stage body refinement. The reason for that is the ever changing nature of pill refining. Even if it is the same recipe there are always minute differences in the ingredients. These differences mean changes in almost all the steps of pill refining. The fire, timing and in the worst cases even the order of the herbs need to be changed.
"One's five senses are not enough to keep track of what is happening in the cauldron. The delay introduced by them is enough to ruin the whole process. I'm not very familiar with alchemy so you'll have to ask uncle master Zou for the details. All I know is that for the change in the medicinal essence to show itself in a change perceivable by the five senses, the time taken is enough for a new variable to be introduced.
"Therefore the only way to keep track of everything would be using your qi. But only qi condensation realm and above cultivators can sense energy. So a special assist formation is used to amplify the meagre feedback that the qi from body refinement realm alchemists gives and convert the energy signature directly into sensory feedback."
"But you said senses introduce delay so shouldn't sensory feedback do the same?"
"Oh no that's different. The mind has a closer connection to one's life force than to the body. Sensory feedback in this case is the qi flow mimicking the sense perception and not senses giving a feedback. The end result would be perceived as feelings such as discomfort, heat, irritation and others. Your body won't actually feel it but qi flow will mimic the condition.
For example when your body suffers discomfort, like being stuck in an awkward position or seeing someone's eye getting pierced by a needle, qi is unusually active in the chest region in a way which induces irregularities in the life force which leads to the feeling of discomfort within you. This time qi will get unusually active to directly make you feel discomfort. So the first step is skipped and so is the cause for the bodily discomfort. So there is no delay here. Well there is delay in the formation but it doesn't matter in entry level pills."
Zhang Wuji nodded in understanding and Shen Li continued "The grand formation has three parts to it. The illusion space and it's contents, the illusion body through which the alchemist operates and the connection between the alchemist and the body. Depending on your cultivation realm and the pill you choose the space is constructed. The illusion body is a direct replica of your own.
In your case the body is not suitable to refine pills. So this additional formation I made will make a template high stage body refinement realm body for you in the illusion. This is a very simple formation used just to feed the template information. In the five layers you see, the top white one you saw earlier is the control layer. The third layer just stores the template information. The second and fourth layers are used to connect with the grand formation.
The last layer is called support layer. It provides alternate pathways to reduce load on the main functioning layers, provides extra space for pathways if you don't want your main layers to be crowded, sometimes it has conversion or storage elements. Basically it has everything that is needed to support the main function of the formation. It is not needed for this formation but I just added it as it is a good habit to have a support layer. I added security features in it, I didn't want to just leave it empty."
Now knowing what all the layers were for, he could understand the formation a little. The third layer was an illusion formation. The storage of information didn't happen in binary with different energy states and everything. Instead the template was stored in an illusion space. Illusion spaces directly stored thoughts. He didn't understand the mechanism within. When asked Shen Li simply said that's how illusion spiritual energy worked.
The other layers were simple energy pathways. There were some other elements involved but they played a smaller role. The second and fourth layers had to arrange the spiritual energy in a particular pattern to connect to the grand formation. Though there were many he didn't understand, there were some that could be further simplified with the circuit theories he knew. So he suggested a few changes.
Shen Li initially simply wanted to entertain him for Zou Shi's sake but the more he listened the more he was pulled in.
"Ahem." The two stopped their discussion and looked at the source of the interruption.
"You two can discuss things later. Li'er, don't just stop at how, try to optimize it. Now get the formation running. The two of us have other things to do."
"Yes master. Junior brother, sit at the center of the formation, I'll get it started."
Zhang Wuji sat at the center and waited. Soon the formation started to shine and he found himself in the familiar white space when the blinding light dimmed. There was a cauldron surrounded by a huge formation. There were various herbs lying around.
"Now listen," He jumped forward and turned around to look at the speaker. It was his mentor. "Sorry for startling you."
"How did you get here? Can the formation be used by multiple people at the same time?"
"No. Brother Xu used his control over the grand formation to help me guide you. Now sit back down, there's a lot to learn."