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  As mentioned earlier, the two most crucial materials for refining Li Gou Dan are Zi Yu Zhi and Xue Ying Hua, both of which must be at least a thousand years old.

  Zi Yu Zhi can be let go, but Mo Qingchen bought some hundred-year-old ones at the Lingyao shop at that time. Some wealthy cultivators would buy young fungi to nourish their bodies and plant them under the water caltrop tree in a corner of their portable medicine garden. They only need to be watered with fine wine from gourds every day, and they will grow well. Now they are all over a thousand years old and have become rare and precious spiritual medicines.

  That Snow Condensing Flower gave Mo Qingchen a big headache, as it generally grew in extremely cold places. The 500-year-old Snow Condensing Flowers in Tianyao City were too expensive for Mo Qingchen to afford. As for the younger Snow Condensing Flowers, due to their poor preservation and low value, some of them weren't worth buying, which was why none of the shops here sold them.

  Fortunately, Mo Qingchen was lucky and happened to meet a monk from afar at the market stall, among many things, there were two well-preserved Snow Congealing Flowers that were 200 years old.

  Mo Qingdun spent all his savings at that time and finally bought it down.

  Xue Yinghua is extremely demanding of its growing environment, and ordinary medicinal gardens cannot support it. Mo Qingchen had no choice but to buy ice stones to surround Xue Yinghua, carefully nurturing it every day. Even so, one of the plants still died, but the surviving one slowly bloomed with five flowers after being watered with Zhongmei wine.

  A single Snowflake Flower, no matter how many flowers bloom, only one can produce seeds. Mo Qing dust waters it every day, taking down the seed-producing flower and re-sowing the seeds, while continuing to water the rest to meet their annual requirements.

  It turned out that Mo Qingchen found that the seedlings of Xue Yinghua were more difficult to grow than when they were transplanted with the whole plant.

  Up until now, Mo Qingchen has only collected over twenty Millennium Snowflakes, and some of them are still short on years.

  Luckily, she had refined the Li Gudan. The amount of Xue Yinghua was extremely small, which made her slightly more at ease.

  Ligoudan is a very precious elixir, the main reason being that its raw materials are hard to come by. Refining it isn't easy either, but the formula for this elixir is quite common and can be found in several jade slips given by Mo Daxian to Mo Qingchen that describe the art of refining elixirs, one of which contains this very formula.

  Although Mo Qingchen had been familiar with the Dan formula for refining Lí Gù Dān for three years, she still carefully reviewed it again with her divine sense.

  Ligudan is not an ordinary dan medicine. Whether it's fengyao, chengdan or shoudan, there are corresponding handprints and finger techniques.

  In order not to waste the raw materials, Mo Qingchen did not start refining the elixir but instead practiced the hand seals required for each process.

  In the step of refining medicine, there are 99-81 hand seals to be made, each with its own variation. If there is even a slight mistake, it will get stuck at this step.

  Upon reaching the stage of Cheng Dan, there are over two hundred hand seals. As for collecting the elixir, aside from hundreds of hand seals, there is also a complex set of finger techniques.

  Mo Qingchen practiced the hand seal for refining medicine for eight days before she could complete it smoothly. By the time she mastered the technique for forming Dan, two months had passed.

  At this time, Mo Danyan came to tell Mo Qingchen. The Yao Guang faction had opened the mountain gate and was recruiting disciples, letting her try, but she was firmly rejected by Mo Qingchen.

  Mo Daxian entangled for several days, seeing Mo Qingchen unwilling to change his mind. He sighed and from then on, the frequency of drinking increased, and the expression could not hide the desolation.

  Mo Qingchen understood that Grandfather must have felt guilty in his heart and thought he had dragged down his granddaughter's future.

  Mo Qingchen saw it in his eyes, but didn't say much. At this time, no matter what he said, he might not be able to untie the knot in Grandpa's heart. The only way to fundamentally solve the problem was to help Grandpa recover as soon as possible.

  As for the Yao Guang Sect, Mo Qingchen didn't think it was a pity to have missed it. In recent years, Mo Qingchen's horizons had gradually broadened, and he knew that there were many Xianmen sects on the entire Tianyuan continent, each with different times for recruiting disciples.

  She was still young and would have plenty of opportunities to join a Xianmen sect in the future, but if she were to abandon her defenseless grandfather now just to enter the Yao Guang Sect, one of the four major Xianmen sects, then she would be leaving behind emotional scars.

  Mo Qingchen rubbed his slightly cramped fingers, let out a breath, no wonder it's said that apart from experience, the most important thing for an alchemist is innate talent. Setting aside the intuition required to mix the ingredients in the right proportions during the preparation of medicine, control over the fire during fusion, and the sense of timing when forming and collecting the dan, just mastering the hand seals and finger techniques needed to refine high-level spiritual medicine would likely make countless people tremble with fear.

  In the Cultivation Realm, there is a saying that goes: A large amount of spiritual stones and spiritual medicine can turn anyone into an alchemist, but no matter how many spiritual stones and spiritual medicine you have, they cannot turn an ordinary alchemist into a Grandmaster Alchemist.

  This sentence illustrates the importance of natural talent.

  Mo Qingchen couldn't help but think of a well-known phrase from his original world, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration", but that 1% inspiration was the most important.

  Mo Qingchen didn't know what his innate talent was for alchemy, but he understood that when it came to learning hand seals and finger techniques, he had a pretty good grasp of them. Even so, he still spent a lot of time mastering the hand seal technique for just one type of pill, no wonder Grandfather told him to wait until after building his foundation before getting involved in alchemy.

  On this day, after bathing and changing clothes, Mo Qingchen, who felt that everything was in top condition, finally decided to start refining the Lihuo Dan.

  She set up a hidden spirit array, relying on her intuition to prepare the medicine, and took out the alchemy furnace to start refining the elixir.

  Mo Qingchen knew that refining the Ligu Dan required a large and prolonged amount of true fire, maintaining it would consume an astonishing amount of spiritual power.

  She is now only at the fifth level of Qi refinement, with a pitifully small amount of spiritual energy inside her body, and it's inevitable that she won't be able to hold on, which is where the Spiritual Supplement Pill comes in.

  Mo Qingchu had a faint feeling that even if she was fully prepared, she would still be stuck at the bottleneck of insufficient spiritual power.

  But anyway, we have to try no matter what, not for the sake of success, but to understand just how big the gap is, so that we can think of other ways.

  Although she knew it was just a trial, Mo Qingchen still went all out with her utmost effort. The outcome was beyond her control, but as long as she did her best at every step, she could guarantee that much.

  Blue flames left Mo Qingchen's fingertips, quickly filling the bottom of the crucible. As the true fire burned brighter and brighter, Mo Qingchen felt that the temperature of the crucible had reached its peak, she began to add the ingredients according to the Dan formula.

  Zi Yu Zhi was spinning in the dan furnace when Mo Qingchen just urged the true fire, and he felt his spiritual power crazily surging towards the dan furnace.

  Mo Qingchen quickly swallowed the pre-prepared Spirit Recovery Pill, but found that the spiritual energy contained in the pill dispersed within his body and supplemented his spiritual power at a rate that was simply a drop in the bucket compared to the speed of consumption.

  But in an instant, the blue flame at the bottom of the crucible flashed and went out, while the purple jade fungus inside the crucible was as hard as a thousand-year-old mysterious iron.

  As expected, Mo Qingchen smiled wryly and stared blankly at the gradually cooling pill furnace, having made up his mind.