Chapter 93: Everyday Life

At the summit of the Golden City’s pyramid, Vidnina had already begun her daily sword practice again.

As a deathless retainer, she, like the player, could improve her swordsmanship through relentless training. And the corpse-soul naga, born a master of the blade, granted every sword technique a bonus of one level in sword mastery. In other words, once she learned a style of swordsmanship, her starting level was already level two.

What was more, she found it far easier than others to raise that level further.

Knowing her own advantage, Vidnina naturally would not let each day’s practice slip away. When she was in the Underworld Palace, she sparred with Liu Zhi; and whenever she came out each day to help him gather herbs, she practiced on the pyramid’s summit.

Today was no different. As she trained, Vidnina glanced toward the giant serpents by the river, still looming over the Golden City. There were clearly two more of them today. It seemed that their long lack of fruit had left them somewhat unsettled.

Still, the Golden City’s suppression over the giant serpents remained in effect. More than ten days had passed by now, and there had been no incident of the serpents charging into the city.

In recent days, Vidnina had moved her sword practice from beneath the pyramid to its summit, where the skeletons had more difficulty climbing up. It also served, in a way, as a watch over the giant serpents.

As the sky gradually darkened, Vidnina slid down from the pyramid, while the herb-gathering skeletons, under the protection of other deathless troops, gathered toward the pyramid as well, preparing to return together to the Underworld Palace.

Just as Vidnina was descending, she suddenly sensed that something was wrong. Lifting her head, she discovered that one of the giant serpents by the river seemed to be missing.

This startled her. She was not sure whether that serpent had given up on this place, or whether it had finally ignored the rules of the Golden City and slipped secretly inside.

Vidnina did not dwell on it. Raising the long sword in her hand to signal the herb-gathering skeletons to assemble quickly, she at once ordered the other deathless troops to search the Golden City.

As for Vidnina herself, she first led the herb-gathering skeletons back into the Underworld Palace.

At that moment, the Underworld Palace was also shifting from day to night. Since the divinity of the Feathered Serpent had fused into the palace, the sun no longer bathed everything in gold as before. In daytime, it looked more like an ordinary overcast day, all dull and gray.

But at night, once the red moon appeared in the sky, the situation changed. When the red moon rose high above, the entire Underworld Palace seemed to come alive, the world around it wrapped in a faint, luminous glow.

And Liu Zhi, who had shut himself away in the alchemy cottage for the entire day, finally emerged.

He needed to meditate and recover his mana, then practice his swordsmanship for a while.

At this time, the herb-gathering skeletons would bring over the various medicinal herbs they had collected that day, supplying Liu Zhi with what he needed for his daily alchemical practice.

Only after beginning to study alchemy did Liu Zhi realize that unlike sword practice, which could be improved simply by training, alchemy consumed the brain itself.

At first, he had thought that with the alchemy cottage, he could make alchemical potions mindlessly. But he had never imagined that the reason the cottage guaranteed the creation of the simplest potion as long as materials were available was because, during the process, if any action went even slightly wrong, it would forcibly correct you.

And the correction method of the alchemy cottage was microcurrent adjustment. Not to mention Liu Zhi himself, even a deathless being like the Fate-Weaving Spider Woman could sense the cottage’s good intentions under the stimulation of those tiny electric currents.

Liu Zhi, unwilling to keep getting shocked, could only follow the steps with complete seriousness, making each potion meticulously and producing standard results.

In fact, after being stimulated by the currents so many times, even when Liu Zhi left the alchemy cottage, his movements remained exactly standard.

As for the potion progress percentage, that was even more infuriating. It was not like experience, where every completed bottle counted as one point. Rather, during the alchemical process, if a new adjustment was made, the percentage would change accordingly.

For example, if the herbs were handled especially well, stronger than the standard method, then after receiving the electric stimulation, the alchemy cottage would very reasonably record that fact and use it to raise the percentage.

So from the very beginning, Liu Zhi kept trying to improve his work on the herbs themselves—what kind of herb had the best effect, how those effects should correspond to one another, and so on. He kept studying all of it.

For Liu Zhi, this was all mental labor, not something that could be achieved by simply refining one successful potion after another.

In the end, he could only learn from large laboratories: divide the materials into different portions according to varying ratios, then prepare them by the most standard method.

But there was a problem with that. In a real large laboratory, everything could be handled automatically, and it could even calculate success rates, determine which method was most reasonable, and which was most excellent.

Inside this alchemy cottage of less than fifteen square meters, however, things were different. Liu Zhi had to perform every standard preparation himself, again and again, and then record the final results.

In a full day, he could produce at most about thirty alchemical potions.

And fewer than one in ten were truly effective. Even now, among the four basic alchemical potions Liu Zhi had, only the formula for the Water Affinity Neutralizer had been raised to fifteen percent; the others all hovered between seven and eight percent.

After a tiring day, Liu Zhi naturally needed to relax his mind a little.

He could not pile all his time into the alchemy cottage. He still had to practice swordsmanship, and he still had matters in the Underworld Palace to attend to.

For instance, the city wall that had already begun taking shape always needed his inspection. And he had sent some of the deathless into the mist beyond the Underworld Palace as well. Though few returned, whenever one did, Liu Zhi would go and see what they had brought back.

Today was no different. After stepping out of the alchemy cottage, he planned to take a walk over by the city wall.

Compared with Liu Zhi, the Fate-Weaving Spider Woman’s progress in studying spider silk was rather good. Of the six different kinds of spider silk, even the one with the lowest progress had already reached around thirty-seven percent.

Many times, the Fate-Weaving Spider Woman had even produced high-quality spider-silk potions, whose effects were far stronger than ordinary potions.

Liu Zhi wanted to see what use these potions could have on the city wall, and that was something he needed to observe and record every day.

But just as Liu Zhi stepped out of the alchemy cottage and was about to head toward the wall, he suddenly saw Vidnina sliding toward him.

It was not yet time for sword practice. Had something happened?

That thought flashed through Liu Zhi’s mind.

Vidnina lifted her head and said, “Snakes... in... city...”