The Eternal Saint of Alchemy

On the distant horizon, a faint flame flickered, its color purple, neither a campfire nor a lamp.

Xiao Fan jumped off the carriage and stood on the shaft to take a look. The wind was blowing from that direction, carrying a faint smell of burning and a slight chill.

He turned to Master Gu Yuan and said, "I'll go see what happened. If I'm not back in half an hour, you should all return to Shahe Town."

Gu Yuan was about to speak when Xiao Fan waved his hand and said, "Too many people will easily expose our identities. If that person really has a base near the Black Sand Sea, then I can better conceal my presence."

Yun Ruoxi looked at him but didn't stop him. Instead, she said, "Be careful."

Xiao Fan nodded, circulated his true energy, and with a flash, disappeared into the darkness. His figure also vanished.

The wind on the Gobi Desert is very strong; it feels like sandpaper on your face.

He bent down and leaped lightly onto the ground, so fast that he made almost no sound.

As it drew closer, its outline became clearer; it was not a campfire, but a lantern hanging in the air.

Xiao Fan stopped about a hundred feet away from the fireball, hid behind a weathered rock, and looked up ahead.

A person is sitting under the lamp.

It was a man dressed in a gray-black robe, sitting cross-legged with a bronze cauldron in front of him, its mouth wide open.

The purple flame rose from inside the cauldron and hung in front of his chest. It did not rise or spread, but instead condensed into something the size of a fist, resembling a vertical eye.

Xiao Fan held his breath and focused his mind, minimizing his true energy and even reducing his heart rate to a minimum.

He dared not use his divine sense to investigate, for fear that the other party would detect the fluctuations of his spiritual power.

The gray-robed man had no covering over his head, and in the darkness of the night, his dark gray robe could be seen blending into the surrounding sand.

If it weren't for the purple flames still illuminating his body, Xiao Fan wouldn't have believed that this was a person.

Inside the bronze cauldron, something seemed to be being refined. The purple flames would occasionally flicker, and a wisp of extremely faint black smoke would rise from the cauldron's mouth and drift away with the wind.

Xiao Fan looked at the bronze cauldron, a glint of light flashing in his eyes.

Although the patterns on the cauldron were not clearly visible, the aura emanating from it was exactly the same as what Yang Kai had sensed in the copper box in the Dry Bone Ridge and in the seal of the White Bone Beach.

This person is refining the embers of the Taiyin within the cauldron.

He is refining some kind of substance.

Xiao Fan observed for a while longer, and guessing that the person wouldn't move anytime soon, he quietly retreated.

He retreated slowly and steadily, each step precisely avoiding the falling sand and stones, afraid of making any noise.

After returning, he recounted everything he had seen in detail. "Refining the Taiyin Embers? What can be extracted from this?"

The Yin energy is inherently decaying and rotten, and having been sealed and suppressed by the Nine Towers for over a hundred years, the remaining Yin fire contains far too many impurities. Forcibly refining it could very well harm the cultivator.

"That's why he used the purple flame as a catalyst," Xiao Fan explained. "That purple flame is a special kind of flame, leaning towards the yin attribute, which counters the embers of the Taiyin. It's used to nourish the spirit with fire, refine the cauldron with qi, and finally extract the essence—"

He didn't say the rest. Everyone present understood the meaning of his words.

This is someone trying to extract pure Yin energy from the embers of the Taiyin.

Xiao Fan turned around and returned to his carriage, where Han Fei had already prepared the horses. Without lingering, he jumped onto the handlebars and whispered to Han Fei, "Let's go back to Shahe Town. No detours, just this way!"

The carriage turned a corner and sped off in the direction it had come from. Xiao Fan leaned against the carriage wall, closed his eyes, and his mind kept replaying the purple flame and the figure sitting by the campfire, silently refining something.

This person was on the edge of the Black Sand Sea, heading west.

To the west of the Black Sand Sea, there are hardly any nodes on the map, but there is the westernmost border of the Great Qing Empire. Beyond that lies a desolate land, and further still, unknown territories.

Where is he going? How exactly is the extracted substance to be used?

Xiao Fan opened his eyes and looked at the sand dunes in the distance through the crack in the car window.

By the time we returned to Shahe Town, it was already getting dark.

The carriage had just stopped in front of the inn, and Xiao Fan hadn't even jumped off when he saw a figure sitting in the inn's lobby.

He was a man in his forties with a short beard, wearing a dark red short robe, and a bronze token with a black flame pattern hanging from his waist.

Earth Fire Hall.

Xiao Fan raised an eyebrow, but did not dodge or avoid it, and walked straight into the hall.

Gu Yuan followed, glanced at the man's clothes, sneered, walked to the counter, took out a silver ingot from his pocket, and ordered, "Give me two rooms, prepare hot water, and serve me a pot of tea."

The middle-aged man in the red robe was drinking a cup of tea when he saw Xiao Fan enter, and his gaze fell on Xiao Fan.

Xiao Fan sat down at a table to the side without saying a word until the waiter brought the tea, at which point he picked up the bowl and began to drink.

"You are Xiao Fan?" The middle-aged man in the red robe put down his teacup and asked respectfully, but a hint of doubt flashed in his eyes.

"What is it?" Xiao Fan continued drinking his tea without looking up.

"Master Wei asked me to tell you something." The middle-aged man took out a letter from his pocket, placed it on the table, and pushed it in front of him. "In your last letter, you said that a year had passed, but the Master thought it was too long and asked you to set a date as soon as possible. The Earth Fire Hall has prepared a top-quality fire spring and would like to invite you to come and have a chat."

Xiao Fan finally raised his head, looking at the letter in his hand, but did not reach out to take it. "Why is Master Wei in such a hurry? It's clearly written in the letter that we'll talk about it after the New Year."

The middle-aged man smiled slightly, a smile with an indescribable meaning: "The master said that if you need anything, someone can come and pick you up."

"It just so happens that the Earth Fire Hall recently acquired a fragment of an ancient alchemy formula, which is said to be related to the legacy of the Supreme Alchemist, Young Master Xiao. He should be interested."

Xiao Fan paused in his act of picking up the teacup. A fragment of the Grandmaster of Elixir?

He put down his teacup, reached out to take the letter, opened the envelope, and glanced at it.

The contents of the letter were largely the same as what the middle-aged man had said, except for an additional sentence at the end: "There is a method for refining a strange fire in the incomplete text. If Young Master Xiao is interested, you are welcome to come to the Earth Fire Hall for a discussion."

He suddenly thought of something.

The method of purifying the strange fire. The gray-robed man I saw in the Black Sand Sea last night used purple fire to refine the embers of the Taiyin.