“According to the pill formula’s instructions, I only need to wait another hundred breaths before opening the furnace and retrieving the Pill!”
Patiently, Fang Ping waited a moment longer.
“Extinguish the fire, reduce the liquid!”
Fang Ping stopped the refinement.
The treasure cauldron was sentient. The formless restriction within it automatically ceased.
Without the constraint of the formless restriction, a pungent, spicy odor accompanied by a strong smell of scorching immediately spread through the air.
Pinching his nose, Fang Ping leaned forward and peered into the treasure cauldron. Inside, he only saw clumps of burnt medicinal residue shaped into irregular pellets.
“Wonderful. That even saves me the step of retrieving the pills!”
Pill refinement was delicate work.
Even the mortal pill dao was not something a Qi Condensation cultivator could master on their first attempt after casually reading a pharmacopoeia for a few days.
“Perhaps it is the effect of the spirit fire. Compared to mortal flames, it was a little too fierce?”
Fang Ping made a preliminary judgment based on the description in the Minor Restoration Pill formula.
Although the refinement failed, the result was not unexpected.
His expression remained calm as he prepared to wash the treasure cauldron and attempt a second refinement.
In passing, he wanted to see if the Purple-Gold Treasure Cauldron had undergone any changes after its first pill refinement, or if there was anything else it could do to aid him.
Just as this thought arose, a shocking scene occurred.
A silver radiance suddenly lit up within the Purple-Gold Treasure Cauldron.
That radiance was ethereal, powerful, and ancient, as if it had flowed out from the endless river of time.
The next moment, the radiance transformed into a divine light capable of reversing the passage of time. Under its wash, the burnt medicinal residue inside the treasure cauldron slowly floated into the air and separated.
As if time were flowing backward, the residue reverted into various medicinal materials, appearing neatly sorted into their respective categories inside the cauldron!
Only after completing this process did the divine light dissipate, fading back into the cauldron.
In the blink of an eye, the treasure cauldron returned to normal, as if nothing had ever happened.
Only the medicinal materials before his eyes, restored to the exact state they had been in before the furnace was opened, silently proved what had just occurred!
“The residue from a failed refinement actually turned back into medicinal materials?”
After standing dazed for a long while, Fang Ping looked at the materials before him, wild joy surging in his heart!
Just what was the origin of this treasure cauldron, that it could actually reverse time?
Fang Ping had previously suspected its grade was above that of a Spirit Treasure. Now, it seemed he had still underestimated the rank of this supreme treasure.
Worried that the might displayed by the treasure cauldron might only be a fleeting illusion, Fang Ping quickly began his second attempt.
Because his emotions were too agitated, the result of this refinement was even worse than his first attempt.
Before a quarter of an hour had passed after opening the furnace, black smoke began to rise from within the treasure cauldron.
By this point, Fang Ping no longer cared about the success or failure of a mere batch of Minor Restoration Pills.
He quickly stopped the refinement and sent the Purple-Gold Treasure Cauldron the thought of resetting the furnace.
Just as before, that magnificent aura of time emerged once again. It caused the medicinal residue inside the treasure cauldron to flow backward, reverting into the original medicinal materials!
“Haha, this treasure cauldron really does possess the ability to reverse time!”
After trying several more times in succession and successfully reversing it each time, Fang Ping no longer had any doubts about the treasure cauldron’s ability.
During this process, since he was mentally prepared in advance, he noticed another detail.
The formless restriction within the treasure cauldron not only prevented medicinal power from leaking during refinement, but it also confined all changes within the cauldron during the reversal. The power and aura of the divine light did not leak out in the slightest.
Unless someone stood directly in front of the treasure cauldron and witnessed it with their own eyes, they would not sense anything unusual even if they were close at hand!
To Fang Ping, this was undoubtedly good news.
With the concealment of the formless restriction, he would not need to worry about attracting the attention of other cultivators when using this treasure cauldron in the future.
However, he still had many uncertainties regarding the specific effects of the time reversal.
After a brief thought, Fang Ping devised a series of tests.
…
Ten days later.
After undergoing nearly a hundred reversals and completely consuming all the Minor Restoration Pill materials he had purchased, Fang Ping had basically worked out the rules governing the treasure cauldron’s time-reversal ability.
First, regardless of what kind of Pill was being refined or whether the refinement succeeded, the treasure cauldron could restore it to the state before the furnace was opened. However, it could only be reversed a maximum of nine times per day.
In the Great Dao of this world, there was a saying that nine was the utmost limit of numbers.
Fang Ping guessed that the treasure cauldron’s limit on reversals was perhaps related to this law.
Apart from the daily limit of nine reversals, the reversal ability itself was not omnipotent. It had certain restrictions!
For example, after opening the furnace, once the refined Pills or medicinal residue were removed from the cauldron, they could no longer be reversed—even if they were taken out for only an instant before being put back.
Another example was that finished Pills placed into the cauldron could not be reversed.
It was impossible to take away the refined Pills and then infinitely reverse time to exploit a bug, nor was it possible to restore medicinal materials by cheaply purchasing discarded Pills and medicinal residue.
As for medicinal materials that had already been reversed to their pre-furnace state, they could be taken out freely. When placed back into the cauldron for refinement, they were no different from brand-new medicinal materials and could still be reversed again.
In addition, Fang Ping discovered that the time point of the reversal was not fixed.
By default, the treasure cauldron restored everything to the state of the medicinal materials before the furnace was opened, but this could be altered according to Fang Ping’s wishes.
As long as he desired it, he could precisely reverse time to any point during the Pill refinement process.
This meant that when refining a certain Pill in the future, if he encountered a difficult hurdle, he would not need to start from the beginning every time he reversed the process. Instead, he could directly revert to that specific moment, saving a great deal of time and Spiritual Power.
…
Combining all these rules, Fang Ping arrived at a theoretically plausible deduction for the treasure cauldron’s ability.
Namely: the time and space within the cauldron were very likely independent from the outside world. It was a “black box.”
After materials were placed inside, as long as they were not taken out, everything that happened within remained chaotic and indeterminate to the outside world, no matter how many times he refined them. That state could be freely reversed and reset.
Only when Fang Ping, the “observer,” saw a result that satisfied his intentions and brought it back into the outside world would that final result truly become fixed in that exact instant.
Incidentally, aside from the pill dao, he had also tried placing items unrelated to medicinal materials into the Purple-Gold Treasure Cauldron while testing its time-reversal ability.
For example, spirit materials and ores that could be used for artifact refinement.
Unfortunately, during these attempts, although the divine light of time reversal did appear, the results were chaotic. They could not precisely return to the materials’ original forms.
As for whether it only worked on the pill dao or if there were other restrictions, Fang Ping had no way of knowing for the time being.
In any case, after this detailed and thorough testing, he had confirmed the greatest use of the Purple-Gold Treasure Cauldron.
It was for refining Pills!
With this treasure cauldron, it was equivalent to having nine free opportunities to practice every day, without needing to worry about any loss of materials.
More importantly, when refining rare Spirit Pills in the future, he could rely on the treasure cauldron’s repeated reversals to ensure that every furnace of materials would inevitably be refined into a furnace of Pills!
The significance of this was immense.
With this treasure, even if his talent in the pill dao was as poor as a pig’s, he could rely on repeated reversals and constant practice to eventually master the corresponding refinement techniques!
Every transmigrator really does get a gold finger. The saying had not lied to him!