The Wu Tan City medicine market was a chaotic sprawl of stalls, tents, and shouting vendors that occupied three city blocks and smelled — depending on where you stood — of dried herbs, roasted beast meat, or something significantly less pleasant. Xiao Yan walked through it with his First Tier badge visible on his chest and a list of ingredients in his hand.

Yao Lao had given him a new recipe: the Energy Recovery Pill, a Second Tier medicine that would accelerate his Dou Qi absorption by nearly fifty percent. The ingredients were expensive and finicky — Jade Spirit Root, Fire Lotus Seeds, seven-leaf Green Spirit Grass, and the core of an Ice Toad — but with his alchemist income finally stabilizing, he could just barely afford them.

'Haggling,' he muttered, approaching the first stall. 'I am an alchemist. Alchemists do not need to haggle.'

The stall owner, a wiry man with the permanent squint of someone who spent his days examining herbs for flaws, immediately quoted him a price that was thirty percent above market rate.

'That's outrageous,' Xiao Yan said.

'Price just went up ten percent.'

'Why?'

'Because you insulted my integrity.'

'I didn't know integrity could be insulted by stating facts.'

The stall owner stared at him for a long moment, then burst out laughing. 'I like you, kid. Price back to normal. But only because you're the first customer today who didn't try to threaten me with their cultivation level.'

Xiao Yan completed his shopping with a lighter coin purse and a heavier storage pouch. The ingredients were good quality — better than what he'd been using for his practice pills. If he could successfully brew a Second Tier pill, his cultivation would accelerate to the point where the three-year deadline might actually be achievable.

The challenge, of course, was that Second Tier pills were exponentially harder to brew than First Tier. And he had exactly three weeks to learn.