Chapter 761 - 238: Schooling My Father in the Ancestral Hall

"The measurements are off?"

"The position of the Pill Furnace..."

"No, no, no, this requirement is from the Thirteen Surgical Prescriptions..."

The crude mud-brick house had been arranged to look like an old yet shabby Daoist temple.

A middle-aged man in a Daoist robe paced back and forth, rummaging repeatedly through the big bookshelf.

"The Cantong Qi of the Book of Changes," "Mystic Discussions of the Alchemy Room," "Collected Achievements of the Golden Core," "Master Embracing Simplicity," "Jinhua Jade Liquid Grand Pill"...

After sweeping his gaze around once, Jiang Si finally confirmed.

This wasn’t anywhere else; this was exactly his childhood home.

His father, obsessed with Alchemy, and that treasured Pill Furnace of his.

Whoever dared touch his Pill Furnace, he dared fight them to the death.

He still remembered how, when he was little, he accidentally fell while his father was refining, and instinctively grabbed the Pill Furnace.

He got slapped.

"Son, do you know who I am?"

When he was a child, this was the sentence the man most often asked while holding him.

"I’m the last Daoist in this world! Once I attain Immortality, our whole family, chickens and dogs alike, will ascend to the heavens!"

For a very long time, he had no steady job and no stable income.

He only did odd jobs; once he earned some money, he would buy ingredients and come back to refine Elixirs.

And so it went, for more than twenty years.

"One liang of mercury, one liang of alum with the moisture slightly removed, one liang of saltpeter roasted dry, one liang of table salt roasted dry, plus five qian of cinnabar, one liang of green vitriol—no problem, no problem at all..."

The father, scratching his head in frustration—a sight he hadn’t seen in a long time—made Jiang Si feel a bit bored.

"Outer path."

He lowered his head and looked at the cat he’d picked up on the road.

It was trembling, its heartbeat not fast, already on the verge of death.

So he put the cat into the quilt—the family had one bed, very simple, with only a single quilt on it.

There was no need to heat the room; his father was always refining Elixirs, the Pill Furnace blazing hot. Aside from the fumes it gave off being somewhat problematic, perhaps even poisonous,

it basically wasn’t so bad that one couldn’t stay inside.

This batch out of the furnace was another heap of pitch-black trash.

"Wet fine sand... bake the embryo over a gentle fire, one stick of incense burned through, raise it to a steady flame, when two sticks burn through, raise it to a fierce flame, when three sticks burn through, remove from fire and let cool... maintain moisture to prevent the gypsum from drying and cracking and letting the Elixir escape... if the Elixir is white, the heat is insufficient; black or purple means the fire was too strong, inferior grade and unusable... yellowish-white is top grade..."

Holding the inferior waste of interlaced black and purple, Jiang Changshou’s pupils were bloodshot.

"How could this happen? The steps were clearly right! Where did it go wrong, where did it go wrong..."

He turned his gaze to Jiang Si. "Right, you’re the only accident."

In the end he grabbed Jiang Si by the shoulders and shook him. "Son, you ruined your dad’s Treasure Pill!"

"Dad, did you put your Pill Furnace in the wrong place?"

Playing with the dying cat, watching it slowly expire, Jiang Si spoke without lifting his head. "No attention to celestial phenomena or the Five Elements, no Abnormal Fire, just using an Ordinary household flame—how are you supposed to refine a True Pill?"

His father looked stunned. "Celestial phenomena, Five Elements? And where would Abnormal Fire come from?"

"Doupo..."

Before he could finish, someone burst in.

"Jiang Changshou! Are you trying to get yourself killed?!"

Jiang Si finally looked up.

It had been a long time since he’d seen his young mother.

In his blurry memories, his mother was always aged, weak, the wrinkles on her face filled with inextricable sorrow.

Whatever happened, she would only yield and apologize.

Her back was always bent, head lowered, as if something was pressing so hard on her that she couldn’t breathe.

Yet when she was young... though at this point she was already in her thirties.

Her back was still very straight, her voice not yet heavy. On the face not yet covered in wrinkles there was plenty of vitality and sharpness.

Apart from her features, she was almost a different person from the mother in his memories.

"If you poison the child to death, I’ll shove you into the latrine pit!"

As she spoke, his mother grabbed him and yanked him over.

But his father only waved his hand. "Go, go, go, get out of here, don’t disturb my Alchemy."

"Hurry up and drop dead already!"

His mother dragged him out of the room.

Because he’d gotten separated from his mother on the road, he had instinctively returned to this home.

As his mother tugged him out, there came a loud explosion from inside, followed by his father’s wild laughter.

"What was wrong? It’s right, it’s right, it’s right!"

He’d gone mad from backlash.

This is the end of those who cultivate only the path of the Outer Pill.

Those so-called Ancient Alchemy methods were mostly crooked, sinister ways meant to harm later generations of cultivators.

Only that there were indeed some principles of the great Dao of Cultivation hidden within them.

After being organized and optimized by countless NovelPhoenix authors, they were finally distilled into the true method of Cultivation Immortality.

Yet no matter how many times he told his father, the man remained obstinately obsessed.

He acknowledged only this Ancient Alchemy.

"You mustn’t turn out like him, son."

Holding his hand, his mother, who had been so irritable and furious just moments before, suddenly spoke in a gentle tone.

She now had a few hints of the image in his memory.

"Mm."

His mother gently stroked his face, then simply picked him up in her arms. "Cold, son?"

"It’s alright."

"Where’d this cat come from?"

Only then did Jiang Si remember the cat he’d picked up on the road.

He touched it again; it had already gone stiff.

So he casually tossed it into the trash heap.

"Found it."

"Do you like cats, son?"

"Once it’s dead, that’s that."

The snow was still falling, heavier and heavier.

After holding him for a while, his mother said, "This snow keeps sneaking down my collar. Son, block the snow for me."

Saying this, she squatted down and hoisted Jiang Si onto her back, treating him as a parasol against the snow.

"Hmph, we don’t need him. Just the two of us, mother and son, we can still live a good life..."

The branches beside them, heavy with snow, gave a crisp crack in the cold wind, and more snow slid down to the ground.