Chapter 708: The War Begins

"I see, the Starfield Pill...."

Inside the cave residence, the two sat side by side and went straight into the topic. Luo Chen nodded. "Yes. I recently acquired the formula. I succeed every now and then, but the refinement process is far too complicated. It usually takes two full days just to complete a single batch."

"Two days for one batch?" Meng Changshou stared at him in surprise. "You think that's slow? Let me tell you: You're actually very fast! In my sect, even seasoned third-tier alchemists need three full days to barely refine a single batch. And even then, they must remain completely focused, which affects their cultivation state. That's why nobody is really making them anymore."

Luo Chen showed a surprised expression, though inwardly he remained calm. He had deliberately revealed a portion of his alchemical proficiency to draw Meng Changshou's attention. Judging from the reaction, it was working.

"Tell me your issues in detail. I actually do know some things about the Starfield Pill."

Luo Chen naturally had no objections and described several details. At the end, he added, "I want to simplify the procedure, but I cannot find a starting point. Do you have any suggestions?"

After listening, Meng Changshou showed no hint of surprise. The Starfield Pill formula had long been discarded by the Medicine King Sect, and they had encountered every issue Luo Chen mentioned. At this point, the solution came easily to him.

"It's not difficult. Your thinking is still confined to the habits of low-tier alchemists."

"The habits of low-tier alchemists?" Luo Chen blinked.

Meng Changshou stroked his beard and smiled. "At low realms, the spirit consciousness is shallow, so alchemists process ingredients one by one. Over time, that becomes a habit. But Adepts have strong and enduring divine consciousness. We can process several ingredients at once. All you need to do is categorize materials by properties and refine each group in one go with the corresponding technique. That will simplify the process and increase efficiency."

Luo Chen was utterly flabbergasted. In that instant, it felt as if light had broken through the clouds. So it was that simple! The Starfield Pill required a great many ingredients, but he had the habit of sorting them anyway, so he knew that they fell into only five broad categories. Each category could be processed with one or two techniques at most.

Once he understood, Luo Chen rose and bowed with genuine sincerity. "Thank you for the guidance."

Meng Changshou waved his hand casually. "These are merely basic principles. No need for such courtesy."

Luo Chen sighed. "For alchemists with proper sect inheritance, they are basic principles. But I am alone, and I don't even know how many rounds of trial and error it would take to arrive at such simple truths."

So it went in most matters of the world. A problem might seem insurmountable only for the solution to be hidden behind the thinnest of veils. With a little guidance, a casual tap will pierce through. Alone, one might have to stumble through countless failures before finding the way forward.

Once Luo Chen sat down again, Meng Changshou asked the question he cared about most. "That year, Qing Danzi presided over the refinement of the Nascent Soul Pill. The formation served as the core, thirty seasoned second-tier alchemists provided the foundation, and five third-tier alchemists supplied primordial true fire. With such a lineup, there should have been no possibility of failure. Yet after thirteen attempts, the process still collapsed in the end. Can you describe the specific details and the cause of that failure for me?"

"In my view, the base medicinal extracts were prepared by different people, and that was what caused the final fusion to fail."

Meng Changshou rejected that instantly. "That is impossible. The Green Pill Valley's grand formation is an ancient joint-refinement formation. Even if the extracts are handled by different alchemists, the formation harmonizes their properties. That cannot be the cause of failure."

Luo Chen froze. He had been inside the formation himself yet had never sensed that level of harmonisation. Meng Changshou spoke of every detail from the number of alchemists, the count of failures, with such precision that it felt as though he had witnessed it firsthand.

Suddenly, Luo Chen recalled someone.

Could Xuan Yunzi have been the Medicine King Sect's spy inside Green Pill Valley?

The thought flashed by. Luo Chen forced his mind to settle and focused on recalling the exact moment of the final failure, when the furnace had exploded. He spoke hesitantly. "Then, I think it might be... the fire source..."

Meng Changshou frowned. "Do you mean Qing Danzi's alchemical fire, or the primordial true fire refined by the five of you?"

Luo Chen pressed his lips together and said with growing certainty, "Both. The combined true fire of the five of us reached too high a grade. Qing Danzi's alchemical fire could not match it, and instead of being the primary fire, it actually took second place. That reversal of hierarchy might have indeed caused the failure and triggered the furnace's explosion."

"Is that so..." Meng Changshou murmured as he sank into thought. Golden flames flickered at his fingertips as if he were testing something.

Luo Chen glanced at it. The flame was incredibly pure. Its grade was below his own Withering-Flourishing Fire, but the wielder's control was far more exquisite.

It seems my control over my primordial true fire is still lacking...

Silence filled the cave residence. Only the crackle of flame broke the stillness. After a long while, Meng Changshou returned from his thoughts with a contemplative look. He glanced at Luo Chen, who was tapping lightly on the jade scroll, and cleared his throat.

Luo Chen put the jade scroll down and smiled. "Have you figured it out?"

"I have a few ideas," Meng Changshou said with a laugh. "But without understanding the Green Pill Valley's formation myself, I cannot be sure. Still, your earlier explanation was quite enlightening."

"As long as it helped." Luo Chen nodded and tapped the jade scroll again.

Meng Changshou glanced at the jade scroll and asked, "Are you worried about the coming Frontier War?"

"Indeed. I feel like a headless fly with no direction," Luo Chen said with a shake of his head. "There is nothing I can do. I am simply too weak, and I have almost no choice. Do you perhaps have any suggestions?"

"Suggestions?" Meng Changshou chuckled. "Do you truly mean to compete with the orthodox major sects?"

Luo Chen could only smile helplessly. He knew Meng Changshou was stating the truth, yet accepting it just like that was not something he could do.

While he was still mired in uncertainty, Meng Changshou suddenly said, "Why insist on pursuing something large? Those small third-tier spirit veins everyone ignores are still genuine third-tier. Why not take several of them?"

Luo Chen frowned. "The Frontier War's pact allows only one territory per sect. What is the point? Wouldn't we be doing the hard work only for someone else to claim the benefit?"

Meng Changshou burst into hearty laughter. "Have you never heard the tales of immortals moving mountains and filling seas?"

***

A month later, Moonbreak surged into motion. Countless streaks of light pierced the clouds, shooting toward the depths of the Howling Moon Mountain Range. Supreme-grade flying boats crisscrossed the sky, each one bearing cultivators ready for war. Ten colossal vessels, each towering over a hundred zhang, spanned the heavens and rumbled off in different directions.

The Frontier War had begun! With the force of a landslide, they would conquer the Howling Moon Mountain Range!

On the Crimson Flame Dragon Boat, five Adepts gathered together. Luo Chen stood at the helm with two of his partners on either side. Between them lay a massive map, projected in the air by Luo Chen's Water Mirror.

The map was dotted with points of crimson light. Each point represented the attack target of a particular sect. Some locations did not bear just one mark but several layered atop one another, which meant that several major sects had set their sights on that same spirit land.

When the time came, they would launch joint assaults. As for who would ultimately claim those lands afterwards, that held little importance to Luo Chen. His attention at this moment was fixed on three particular mountains: Dream Return Ridge, Azure Iron Mountain, and Snow Wolf Plateau.

"Dan Chenzi, are we really going to do this?" Diwu Qi could not help but ask.

Luo Chen lifted his eyebrows and said, "We agreed on this beforehand. Now that the time has come, how could we hesitate?"

Diwu Qi said anxiously, "But there are already people eyeing those other two spirit mountains."

"As long as we take them first, they will be ours," Luo Chen said mildly.

From the side, Jiang Yu suddenly asked, "What about the Falling Cloud Sect? One force taking over more than one spirit land would violate the pact."

Luo Chen tapped his finger on the mark representing Snow Wolf Plateau. "When the time comes, we simply move the other two mountains to this location. Then it will become a single spirit land."

That was Luo Chen's strategy for this campaign. If he had to move mountains to make things happen, then mountains he would move! After Meng Changshou's guidance, all of his earlier doubts had vanished.

Within the cultivation world, there had long been talks of creating artificial spirit lands and transforming existing ones. Many immortal cities were constructed by cultivators and artificially elevated into third-tier spirit lands. As for transforming a spirit land, Green Pill Valley had once occupied only a single mountain. Yet now everyone knew that Green Pill Valley possessed five third-tier spirit mountains.

The "secret" lay in how the sect's forebears, during a previous Frontier War, had used great methods to simply relocate several spirit mountains from other regions to the sect's territory. Such spirit lands were not actually artificial; they preserved the original fengshui patterns and the flow of the spirit veins. As long as they were properly nurtured afterward, their spirit energy density would be in no way inferior to regions where spirit veins had formed naturally.

Luo Chen's current strategy was to seize a small third-tier spirit mountain as quickly as possible. Then, with the same momentum, he'd invade other marked targets and occupy those spirit lands as well. In the end, he would move them all together and gather them into one. If the opportunity presented itself, he even hoped to get his hands on a couple more spirit mountains.

As for how they would move the mountains when the time came, Meng Changshou had only been too happy to share the method in exchange for alchemical formulas—specifically, for the first-tier Spirit Passage Pill and the first-tier Blood-Burning Pill. Which meant there was only one thing left to do.

"We must be fast, faster than everyone else. We will conquer Snow Wolf Plateau and use it as our foundation, then seize the remaining spirit mountains."

Luo Chen struck his palm against the map and set the plan in stone. The other four exchanged glances. Even though they had mentally prepared themselves for this long ago, they still could not help being shaken by Luo Chen's bold resolve.

Under the force of that resolve, no one voiced objections. Whether for the sake of the spirit mountains or for the Starfield Pills that Luo Chen regularly provided, this was a battle in which they had no choice but to stake everything.

***

The Crimson Flame Dragon Boat flew fairly fast, but everywhere it passed was already engulfed in war. No one knew how Wolf Emperor Defiant Howl had done it, but it had indeed united all the wolf clans of the Howling Moon Mountain Range into a single force.

Recent intelligence even reported that the number of third-tier demonic wolves within the wolf clans was steadily increasing. It was as though wolves from the countless wild mountains were also converging on this region. Because of that, the human cultivators had already begun encountering small packs of demonic wolf troops not long after leaving Moonbreak.

But Luo Chen's group did not slow down for such encounters. Even when demonic wolves attacked the Crimson Flame Dragon Boat, the five Adepts did not lift a hand. Instead, they left everything to Wang Yuan, Cen Guangyi, and the others.

At present, the Crimson Flame Dragon Boat carried nearly three thousand cultivators of the Luo Tian Alliance. There were as many as thirty Initiates among them. As long as they did not run into an enemy with a large force, nothing along their path could hope to block their advance.

Luo Chen extended his divine consciousness outward, keeping an eye on something else not far away. A cultivation family was also heading toward Dream Return Ridge. It was the He family from the Sky-Scrapping Domain, and they had only a single Adept in the family.

The upper sect of the Sky-Scrapping Domain, Sky-Scrapping Cliff, had joined the war, and many of the forces from there had followed. Besides the major sects, there were quite a few first-rate cultivation families like the He family.

"They are all here to scavenge for bargains," Luo Chen muttered.

Before long, news came from Diwu Qi's side as well. "The ones heading to Azure Iron Mountain are the Myriad Phenomena Sect. They have two Adepts and a very high chance of taking the mountain."

Luo Chen nodded. With that, the situation around Snow Wolf Plateau became clear. He now knew which two spirit mountains lay closest to it and which forces were coveting them. Those two forces were not especially strong, so they wanted to pick what they saw as easy fruit. Yet the demonic wolves entrenched on Dream Return Ridge and Azure Iron Mountain were only weak when compared to the truly massive third-tier spirit veins. The two forces would still have to pay a considerable price to gain control over those territories.

"We're too slow. Charge at full speed!" ordered Luo Chen in a ringing voice.

Fu Jiusheng, who was in charge of controlling the Crimson Flame Dragon Boat, answered at once and activated the vessel's formation at full power. The dragon boat's speed immediately surged again.

***

At dawn the next morning, the massive dragon boat halted outside a stretch of rolling green mountains. Most mountains were low except for one that jutted abruptly from the range. Its summit flattened into a broad terrace as if carved by a single sword stroke.

"Is this Snow Wolf Plateau?"

Luo Chen stepped ahead of the others and stood at the prow. The head wind pressed his robe against his chest, and snowflakes drifted thinly from the sky. When he lifted his gaze, he could faintly see distant snow-capped mountains thousands of li away. This place was near the border of the Great Snowy Mountains.

Luo Chen then looked toward Snow Wolf Plateau. Massive demonic wolves were emerging slowly from between the peaks.

Many wolves filled the undulating landscape, and their demonic energy surged. At the forefront stood the three demonic wolves that ruled Snow Wolf Plateau, each one glaring at them with a fierce and hostile glare. Their fur was pure white, and their eyes shone blue-green. Two of them stood seven or eight zhang tall, while the one in the center rose beyond ten zhang, towering like a moving hill.

At the sight of that colossal demonic wolf, the thousands of cultivators on the Crimson Flame Dragon Boat swallowed reflexively. The sound merged into a single sharp gulp. It was a third-tier mid-stage demonic wolf! The howling wind could not drown out the deep growls rolling between the mountains, and everyone knew this would be a fierce battle.

At some point, every pair of eyes turned toward Luo Chen in unspoken accord.

The young man in a crimson Daoist robe slowly raised his right hand and let out a single long battle cry.

"CHAAAAARGE!"