Chapter 64 Turbulent Times

For the next period of time, the lives of Yun Bai and the others gradually stabilized.

It was not just Yun Bai; Yun Qian, Shen Qi, and the others were all in a period of growth and ascent.

Their initial success was a huge encouragement, and the two young girls were full of drive.

They used their lunch breaks and the time after school in the afternoon to set up stalls at the West Market to sell their goods, and at night, they would burn the midnight oil in their small courtyard, rushing to make Medicinal Pills.

Yun Qian was responsible for the core flavoring and recipes, while Shen Qi helped with processing Materials, shaping, and bottling.

Business was unexpectedly booming.

Yun Qian's crisp, loud hawking and her unique Inedia Pills soon made a name for themselves in the West Market.

Many Cultivators, Young Misses and young masters from wealthy families, and even some ordinary people who cared about their appetites, all became their regular customers.

Leaning on the State Religion as their backer (although they were just using Master Jiang's name), combined with the fact that the two young girls looked well-behaved and sensible, the local ruffians at the West Market never dared to come and harass them.

However, great success also brought new challenges—the speed of purely manual production could not keep up with the overwhelming demand.

Yun Qian was often so tired that her little face turned deathly pale, and her headaches also seemed to show a trend of worsening due to overwork.

Late at night under the lamp, she rubbed her sore temples, looking at the Materials and semi-finished products piled high on the table, her delicate brows knitted tightly.

"This won't do… It's too slow…" she muttered to herself.

There were many miscellaneous books in the library her brother had left behind, and she began to frantically search through them.

Those books about mechanism arts and ingenious inventions, which she had only flipped through casually before, had now become a Treasure Trove in her eyes.

A bold idea took shape in her mind: could she use Formations and mechanism arts to replace repetitive manual labor?

In the following days, Yun Qian seemed possessed.

She sold Medicinal Pills and attended classes during the day, and at night, she dove headfirst into piles of books and her makeshift "workshop."

She used collected scrap wood, gears, some cheap metal parts, and even dismantled a broken clepsydra timer from home to start her frantic "inventions."

Shen Qi and Yang Peilan often saw her squatting on the ground, her little face dirty, but her eyes shockingly focused, her slender fingers covered in wood shavings and grease, writing and drawing on those strange-looking parts, muttering to herself.

She tried to design a mixing device that could automatically and evenly mix the basic Inedia Pill powder with concentrated flavor liquids; a shaping mold that could precisely control the size and weight of each pill squeezed out; and a turntable that could rotate at a constant speed to allow the pills to be heated and dried evenly…

She failed again and again, and drawing after drawing was scrapped.

But the innate stubbornness in Yun Qian's bones and her natural sensitivity to Formation diagrams and mechanical trajectories allowed her to find the key from her failures time and time again.

Finally, on a night with a bright moon and sparse stars, when the first simple "assembly line" she had assembled by hand—driven by a weak Spirit Stone—successfully spat out Inedia Pills that were uniform in size and emitted a milky fragrance, a smile even brighter than the stars bloomed on Yun Qian's pale face!

Shen Qi and Yang Peilan gathered around, watching in stunned silence, before bursting into cheers of surprise and joy.

This "assembly line" style of production greatly improved efficiency!

Yun Qian's talent for Formations and her spatial imagination were fully displayed in solving these problems of mechanical linkage and energy transmission.

As production surged, Yun Qian's specialty Inedia Pills became completely popular in Chu Prefecture city.

Imitators soon appeared, and Inedia Pills of various flavors popped up on the market like bamboo shoots after a spring rain.

But thanks to her reputation as the "originator," stable quality (especially with quality control guaranteed by mechanism production), and the word-of-mouth accumulated from the beginning, her business was not only unaffected but became even more prosperous due to the expanded demand.

Many wealthy families, well-known restaurants, and even some began to place long-term orders with her to use as specialty snacks for guests or themselves.

What Yun Qian hadn't expected even more was that those Cultivators who often needed to leave the city to hunt Yao Beasts and explore Secret Realms also became her big customers!

They were especially fond of flavors like spicy, five-spice, and meat sauce—flavors that were rich, savory, could boost their spirits, and satisfy their appetites. They would often buy dozens or even hundreds of bottles at a time as dried food reserves for long journeys.

At the end of the month, they tallied the accounts.

When Yun Qian and Shen Qi poured all the Spirit Stones they had accumulated over the month onto the table, the pile of Spirit Stones, shimmering with a soft luster, made the whole room a little brighter.

They counted them over and over again, their fingers trembling slightly with excitement.

"Forty… forty-one thousand seven hundred and sixty Spirit Stones?!" Shen Qi's voice trembled with disbelief, her eyes wide as saucers.

Yun Qian also stared blankly at the pile of Spirit Stones, her heart churning.

It worked, it worked.

Yun Bai matured while fighting demonic creatures on the Cang Plains, and Yun Qian and Shen Qi also began to grow in the city.