Airan didn’t waste time beating around the bush.
Looking across the small table, he offered a proposition: he would act as her financial sponsor, supplying her with a new low-grade furnace and a steady stream of herbs so she could focus entirely on refining her craft.
The girl hesitated, her pride flaring up slightly.
She didn’t want to accept charity or deep favors from a stranger, asking straight away if Airan expected to buy her pills afterward.
Airan calmly assured her that she would sell the refined pills through his trusted channel, with the profits split on a strict 70-30 basis—70 percent for Airan and 30 percent for the girl.
To anyone looking from the outside, a 70-30 split heavily favored Airan.
But the logic was airtight.
The girl had to worry about nothing except the act of refining; Airan handled the capital, the risk, the logistics, and the herb acquisition.
Even with her current 3-star success rate, finding an alchemist capable of producing high-quality low-grade pills—let alone approaching near-perfect quality—was exceptionally rare.
Airan’s sponsorship wasn’t driven by reckless emotion or sympathy.
Even though she was attractive, he wouldn’t invest a single spirit stone if the math didn’t check out.
His long-term game plan was much deeper: he aimed to build a rock-solid relationship with Max’s daughter, an outer disciple of the Violet Sect currently at the 6th Level of Qi Condensation.
Outer disciples had a constant, heavy demand for medicinal pills.
In the local market, middle-grade pills ranged wildly based on quality—low-level middle-grade pills cost around 400 spirit stones, mid-level ones went for 500, and upper-level ones commanded 600, while upper-grade pills scaled from 700 to 900.
These prices were steep enough that even someone like Max struggled to afford a steady supply for his daughter.
By backing this alchemist, Airan would secure a direct pipeline of pills to feed up the chain, eventually gaining powerful backing from a Violet Sect outer disciple who held sway over the very city they lived in.
It raised an obvious question: why didn’t Airan simply upgrade his own specialty—spirit wine—and rake in massive profits that way?
The limitations were practical and dangerous.
Airan currently sold his middle-grade wine to Max at a discounted 120 spirit stones, which was why Max bought exclusively from him when standard middle-grade wine on the open market started at 160 to 170 spirit stones.
True middle-grade wine makers were exceedingly rare, usually locked away working exclusively for wealthy major families and powerful clans. This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
If Airan wanted to upgrade his middle-grade wine into an upper-grade product, the hurdles multiplied.
He would need entirely new, advanced equipment just to sustain the volatile spiritual potency, and the refining process itself demanded the precise Qi control of a 7th to 9th-level Qi cultivator—a tier he hadn’t reached yet.
Furthermore, the volume reduction during upper-grade concentration was brutal: taking 1 kilogram of middle-grade wine would yield only 250 grams of upper-grade product.
While that 250 grams could easily fetch 300 spirit stones on the black market, Airan knew better than to chase quick riches.
Flooding the market with high-tier luxury goods would inevitably attract the greedy eyes of the city’s major clans and aristocratic families.
Until his cultivation and combat power reached a level where he could comfortably protect his foundation, staying under the radar and letting an alchemist handle the high-end trade was the only path to survival.
Author’s Note: Thanks for reading Chapter 19!
Airan’s journey from a penniless herb collector to a spirit distiller starts here.