A drop of medicinal elixir merged with a ball of wine and was instantly ignited. A terrifying burst of energy exploded.

“That Fierce Yang Butcher’s wine really is crazy. Once I added some medicinal energy, what it becomes can’t even be called medicinal wine; it’s poison wine! If someone really drank this, they would undoubtedly die.”

Long Chen looked in shock at the raging ball of liquid that was floating in the air and releasing fierce fluctuations. It had taken him many tests to reach this point of successfully merging the medicinal elixir with this fierce wine.

He extracted a drop and placed it on his tongue. He immediately felt like a bomb had exploded in his mouth.

His ears, nose, and mouth all began to emit smoke, and tears streamed down his face. That wasn’t from emotion.

“The medicinal effect has increased by almost a hundred times. This isn’t just cooperating, it’s a metamorphosis. With such a terrifying medicinal effect, its side effects are probably huge. Ack, fine, I’ll try someone else’s wine.”

Long Chen gave up on using the wine made by Tu Qianshang. His wine was too domineering and was not suitable to be refined into medicinal wine.

Long Chen chose a wine made by a female disciple. Her wine focused on nourishing the soul, like a spring rain washing over the world, a realm of returning vitality to a withered world.

She had previously been a wood cultivator, and her wine contained her comprehension of life. Long Chen tried combining dozens of soul nourishing medicinal pills with it.

This was a very complicated process. When trying to merge medicinal pills with wine, the proportion, the control, the sequence, etc. could all affect the final result.

Even if the medicine managed to merge with the wine, the medicinal wine’s effect might not be stable enough. It would still need to go through repeated tests and experiments to maximize its effect.

Despite his skill in medicine and despite being able to figure out everything about the wine’s composition, merging them together was still incredibly difficult.

It had to be known that when Pill Valley was cooperating with the Wine God Palace back then, it took them thousands of years to create just over ten medicinal wines. From this result, it could be seen just how difficult it was to merge two different arts.

However, Long Chen wasn’t directly refining medicinal wine, but having the wine work together with his medicinal pills. It was a bit simpler. Instead of creating a whole new painting, he was taking a painting and adding a few things to make it even more beautiful.

But even though he was just searching for a way to have them work together, the concoction would have several times their effects, and the maximum effect he could achieve was ten times.

After all, this kind of process couldn’t match refining medicinal wine from scratch.

This kind of cooperative medicinal wine would have huge side effects once the medicinal effect multiplied by over ten times. Long Chen didn’t have the time to research those side effects, so he could only give up on those abnormal medicinal wines.

He spent three whole days creating seven types of medicinal wines. Five of them could be used now, while two of them needed more observation time.

Of these five, there were two that satisfied him the most. One was something he called the Spirit Nourishing Soul Raising Wine. Its nourishing effect on the soul was extremely powerful.

The other one was called the Muscle Strengthening Bone Hardening Wine. The wine had come from a body cultivator disciple in the Wine God Palace, and Long Chen managed to strengthen its effect even more with medicinal pills.

These two wines were both ten times more effective than their predecessors and also very beneficial to him. Not only were they more effective than pills, but they also tasted good. To tell the truth, after years of eating pills, Long Chen had grown completely sick of them. Now that he could change the horrible taste, he felt more blessed than ever.

Because researching more medicinal wine would take too long, Long Chen moved on. He opened the spatial ring the expert from the Wine God Palace had given him.

“Haha, an arm bracer King item! I’ll take this.” A golden arm bracer appeared in Long Chen’s hand. Ancient runic lines were carved into it, and it was as heavy as a mountain. This was definitely something good for Long Chen.

With this arm bracer, he could block the attack of a King item with his arm instead of using his saber. Sabers focused more on offense than defense, so switching to defense placed him in a passive position.

“Damn, even these two fur boots are King items?!”

Two fur boots appeared in his hands. On the outside, they didn’t even look like King items, but there were countless runes inside. Even the soles had a formation supporting them.

“Alright, hopefully, the previous owner didn’t have foot fungus.” Long Chen took off his boots and put them on.

Buzz.

He had only just put them on when their runes lit up. They had originally been a bit too big, but they slowly shrank to perfectly fit him.

He kicked the ground and a fierce gale erupted. As Long Chen poured in his spiritual yuan, the boots began to shine and space started to distort. He hastily pulled back his spiritual yuan.

“So this isn’t a weapon King item, but as long as I have enough spiritual yuan, I can basically teleport.”

Long Chen was shocked by this ability. This was his first time wearing equipment on the King item level. Now he found that not all King items needed a Jade Core to activate.

The boots were on his feet, while his arm bracer was covered by his sleeve. No one would be able to tell what they were from the outside, and he also found that they didn’t affect his movements.

He was delighted and hastily looked at the rest of the King items. However, he didn’t find anything else that suited him. The majority of these King items were weapons, as well as some sets of armor.

Long Chen didn’t like heavy armor, because their powerful defense sacrificed agility. He didn’t like that way of fighting.

Heavy armor was really only suitable for group battles, especially those in the vanguard. But it wasn’t suitable for fighting on his own.

Looking at the other treasures, he saw quite a few medicinal pills. But he wasn’t interested in those.

He also found quite a few secret tomes. They ranged from introductory Battle Skills to profound magical arts. Many of these arts were ones that built on top of each other to grow stronger.

Long Chen couldn’t help but sigh inside. No wonder that person had said he hadn’t been willing to throw this away even after all these years. He had probably once had a dream of forming his own sect to leave behind his inheritance.

“Oh, what’s this?” Long Chen suddenly took out an ancient beast hide. It was dried up with age.

The beast hide depicted a map, and there were two circular areas that were like the eyes of a skull. Seeing that, he suddenly found that the more he looked at this beast hide, the more he felt it looked like a human skull.

At the space where the eyebrows met, there was a small mark. It was a very strange mark. It wasn’t an immortal character, and he wasn’t able to understand what it meant.

“This thing’s probably incredibly old. Even the power of the beast hide is so great. However, just what is this map for? Probably only he knows, but now that he’s given me this spatial ring, it means he wants to sever all his ties to it. I can’t ask him… Agh, I’ll just put it aside. If it’s to be mine, it can’t run away, and if it’s not to be mine, then I wouldn’t even be able to find it. There’s no need to waste time thinking over it.” Long Chen shook his head and put the map away.

“Hahaha, now for what I really wanted, the yuan spirit stones.”

Long Chen directly moved all the yuan spirit stones in the spatial ring into his primal chaos space. Taking a rough estimate, he guessed there were around one billion two hundred million yuan spirit stones.

He knew that these yuan spirit stones were not just that person’s. They were the result of him destroying several sects when he had been taking vengeance for his loved one’s death.

Looking at these yuan spirit stones, Long Chen couldn’t help but feel that the Xuantian Dao Sect really had declined. One of the three great sects of the heavens had ended up so poor that this one person had more yuan spirit stones than the entire Xuantian Dao Sect.

It really was as the Xuan Master had said. If the Xuantian Dao Sect continued to endure as they had been, they wouldn’t have been able to do so for much longer.

Long Chen had Huo Long and Lei Long devour these yuan spirit stones, and then he began extracting the yuan spiritual energy.

His 108,000 immortal platforms began to rapidly revolve, crazily absorbing that energy. Runes appeared on top of them one by one.

Two days later, his immortal platforms shook and grew another level. He had reached the fourth Heavenstage of Foundation Forging.

His immortal platforms were different from other people’s. Each layer of their platforms would be smaller than the last. But Long Chen’s layers were the same size, making his immortal platforms cylinders. At the center was the image of a flower with thirteen petals.

When he reached the fourth Heavenstage, his immortal platforms trembled fiercely and then compressed. After one day, they had shrunk to a slightly smaller size.

But the compressed immortal platforms were more solid, and as they revolved, a faint light came from them.

At the same time, Long Chen felt each one of his immortal platforms had strengthened to the point that they were now several times stronger than when he had been at the third Heavenstage.

This didn’t delight him. As his immortal platforms strengthened, so did his physical body. However, he found that the power of his physical body was not quite able to match the power of his immortal platforms now that they had grown so much stronger.

The problem lay in the fifth star. Without condensing the fifth star, his physical body wouldn’t even be able to endure the power of the Nine Star Hegemon Body Art.

Now that he had reached the fourth Heavenstage, he had stepped into the mid Foundation Forging realm. Right now, his physical body was still strong enough to keep up with his immortal platforms.

But what about the fifth, sixth, and seventh Heavenstages? And then there was the tenth Heavenstage and beyond. According to his experience, his body would go through heaven-toppling changes upon reaching that level. If he tried to use his immortal platforms at that time, wouldn’t he just blow himself up?

“I can’t continue like this. If the fifth star refuses to appear, then I need to think of some other way to strengthen my physical body. But the azure dragon reverse scale is way too strong. With my current power, let alone subduing, just broaching its outer defenses would be impossible. What am I supposed to do?”

Long Chen had mixed feelings now. As he was racking his brain for ways to strengthen his physical body, Xia Youluo came over.