"Little thing, you still can't feel a thing?" Wei Zhao glanced at the Heavenly Thunder Pig in the passenger seat and asked. "Squeak-squeak—" The creature shook its head lazily.

"What use are you to me, with powers this weak?" Wei Zhao did not know whether to laugh or cry. The little thing had lain flat in the passenger seat the whole way without so much as a sound; he had no idea whether it had sensed the presence of the Fire Spirit Sacred Fruit at all.

"Squeak-squeak! @#$%!" The Heavenly Thunder Pig seemed to grunt twice in displeasure.

Wei Zhao had no choice but to press on in the direction indicated by the GPS coordinates. There was no navigation map for this region whatsoever; the entire screen of the car's computer showed nothing but blank space, so all he could do was set a coordinate and then search, by rough bearing, for a route he could actually travel.

Since he could never be sure whether a road lay ahead, Wei Zhao would often make it halfway before discovering that he could go no farther, and be forced to turn around, retrace his steps, and look for some other way forward.

Every time he doubled back, he also had to drive to the nearest town to refuel. The car did carry a small reserve of gasoline, but Wei Zhao feared that once he pressed further on there might be no gas station to be found, so it was hardly out of his way — he simply filled up whenever he returned.

The town held few residents and few outsiders, yet nobody asked a single question about Wei Zhao's peculiar behavior, which surprised him somewhat. Why were these people not wary of strangers? It was as if his appearing here were the most natural thing in the world.

Still, almost every attempt ended in failure; each road he took eventually petered out with no way to continue. This forced Wei Zhao to take a room for the time being at an inn in the town, and then, drawing on the routes he had traveled these past few days, sketch out a rough map from memory.

What was rather tragic was that every route on the map appeared to be one he had already walked, and still he had found no way to press on.

Just as Wei Zhao was preparing to try another small path on foot, goose-feather snow began drifting down from the sky. The flakes filled the whole heaven until nothing before him could be made out; everything in sight was a haze of white, and visibility was abysmally poor.

This was the visual obstruction caused by obstacles. Even when Wei Zhao entered the jade pendant's space to sense what lay outside, all he saw was still the sky thick with flying snow.

He was not far from the Extreme Cold, Far North now; cold weather and snowfall were only to be expected.

All Wei Zhao could do was take a room at the town inn for the time being and wait for the snow to stop before slowly working out some other plan.

What vexed him was this: he asked the innkeeper how the snow fell here, and the answer he got was that a heavy snow might continue anywhere from three days to a month — a thing that happened often in the Far North.

The car was parked right below Wei Zhao's room. He did not need to sleep, and even while cultivating he could keep track of everything around him, so he had no particular worry that someone might get at Feng Xiaoxiao inside the vehicle.

"Damn pig, can you find the Fire Spirit Sacred Fruit or not?" Wei Zhao was growing irritable. He had come such a long way, and just as the coordinates were nearly within reach he found himself unable to go on — infuriating, to be sure.

"Squeak-squeak..." The Heavenly Thunder Pig let out two small, aggrieved whimpers.

Wei Zhao sighed. The terrain and landforms of today differed from those of ancient times; after so long a time, change was only natural.

Wei Zhao even wondered whether, if he still could not think of a way, he ought to have Feng Tianlong send a helicopter. But he did not want to make a great show of it — the Fire Spirit Sacred Fruit was plainly a treasure, and if those hidden clans and the like got wind of it, might they not come and seize it?

Weather was nature's own doing, beyond Wei Zhao's power to change; the only thing he could do was wait it out, slowly. Fortunately he was a man of ample patience, and after the brief restlessness of the first day his mind settled into calm.

Wei Zhao took out the alchemist's notebook of insights left behind by Zhang Liju and began turning through it slowly.

Originally he had thought compounding pills a simple enough business. Only after reading this alchemist's notebook did he learn what it meant for a petty practitioner to stand before a true master. What he had done before could not even be called pill refinement. In ancient times, a formidable physician of Wei Zhao's sort was known among alchemists as a mere apothecary — the most rudimentary of their kind, not even to be counted as having set foot inside the gate.

Of course, though apothecaries ranked lowest among alchemists, they were more than enough for ordinary people; for healing the sick and rescuing the dying, an apothecary would do. Alchemists, however, directed their art chiefly at cultivators.

The pills an alchemist could refine ran to every variety, but the great majority concerned cultivation — Qi Gathering Pills and Spirit Gathering Pills that increased one's power and helped one break through, or Meridian Unblocking Pills that repaired internal injuries and mended damaged meridians. All of these, to an alchemist's eyes, were quite ordinary pills.

Wei Zhao had not imagined that so common a pill as the Qi Gathering Pill would already be so fiercely sought after. Was it that the ranks of alchemists were too hard to advance, or that his own horizons were still too narrow, confining his notion of cultivators to the hidden clans alone?

Alchemist was merely a general term; within it, too, there were ranks, just as there were among cultivators.

An alchemist's strength was likewise graded by Heaven, Earth, Profound, and Yellow. Wei Zhao had assumed that the four divisions were nothing more than something modern people had devised to tell strong from weak at a glance; it now appeared that such a ranking of strength had existed since ancient times, and was no recent invention.

Yet though the ranks were the same Heaven, Earth, Profound, and Yellow, the subdivisions within each rank differed somewhat from the divisions of strength. Every rank was split into seven grades — Yellow Rank first grade, Yellow Rank second grade, all the way to Yellow Rank seventh grade.

Each rank corresponded to the pills that could be refined at that level; the Qi Gathering Pill, for instance, was a Yellow Rank third-grade pill. This alchemist's notebook of insights, however, covered only as far as some reflections on the Profound Rank first grade; beyond that, higher levels were nowhere to be found in it.

It seemed that Zhang Liju, in his day, had reached no farther than the rank of a Profound Rank first-grade alchemist, and had never broken through again.

From this it was plain that an alchemist's strength was indeed hard to improve. Zhang Liju had noted as well that the Earth Rank and the Heaven Rank above the Profound Rank were creatures of legend; whether they truly existed, he had never established in all his life.

Had the grades been deliberately set at a height that could never in fact be reached, or did they genuinely exist, with the limit lying in his own ability and strength? Zhang Liju had offered only a simple conjecture.

So when a given pill was spoken of nowadays, people generally said only "third grade" or "fourth grade," dropping the words "Yellow Rank" that came before it; nobody said "Yellow Rank third grade" or "Yellow Rank fourth grade," because no one had ever laid eyes on a third grade or a fourth grade of any rank other than Yellow.