Beauty and the Bodyguard

Chapter 1458 - No More Roads

"Little brat, you still don't feel anything?" Lin Yi looked at Skybolt pig sitting in the co-drivers seat.

"Oink..." The pig shook his head lazily.

"What a useless ability you have; why do I keep you around?" Lin Yi couldn't help but be amused- this guy was just sitting with no reaction to anything. Were they headed to the fruit or not?

"Oink, oink!!!" The pig didn't seem to be pleased.

Without much of a choice, Lin Yi continued moving onward following the marker on the GPS- there wasn't any route-finding here. Since it was just a white area on the computer, Lin Yi could only follow that one coordinate marker he placed earlier.

He wasn't sure if there were any roads in front, so Lin Yi had to constantly stop after realizing the road was a dead-end before turning back to find another road.

As he turned back, he still needed to go to nearby towns to get more oil- there was a gas backup in the car, but Lin Yi was worried there wouldn't be any more stations further up, so he might as well get some now.

There weren't many residents in the towns, and they didn't have many visitors, either. They didn't question Lin Yi's odd behavior. Though it did surprise Lin Yi how odd their behavior was. Why were they acting like it was the most normal thing in the world for a stranger like him to just come into their town like this?

But, every time Lin Yi's road was met with failure- he had to turn back again and again until he was forced to stay at one of the towns' inn. There, he went through the routes he had taken in the past days and thought out a general map.

What was the most tragic was the fact that they had almost gone through all the routes on the map- there was no other route that moved onward.

Just when Lin Yi was getting ready to try another small path, the sky suddenly became covered in snow- snow flying everywhere, to the point where the world was enclosed in white vog. The visibility was terribly poor.

The visual barrier was a problem even for Lin Yi- even the jade space couldn't help him sensing his environment. The world was still white.

Lin Yi could only find another inn and settle down as he went through his options.

What troubled him was when he asked the boss of the inn regarding the snow here- the answer he gave was that this blizzard might last anywhere from three days to one month. This was something common in the Northern lands.

The car was parked under Lin Yi's room, and Lin Yi didn't need to sleep, so he could sense any possible danger as he was practitioning. Though he didn't need to worry about anyone.

"Damn pig, can you find the fruit or not?" Lin Yi was getting frustrated- he'd spent so much time on all the far roads, and the location marker that seemed so close was always unreachable. It was irritating.

"Oink..." The pig said sulkenly.

Lin Yi sighed. The landscape wasn't the same as back in ancient times. These changes were to be expected.

Lin Yi even thought that if he couldn't find a plan, he might have to ask Tianlong to send a helicopter- but he didn't want to attract too much attention, either. The fruit clearly was something good, so if the hidden houses or something knew about it, they might come and try to take their share.

The natural weather wasn't something Lin Yi could change- the only thing he could do was wait patiently. Fortunately, he was a patient man- and after the first day's temporary worth of frustration, his heart calmed down.

He took out the refiner's personal notes of Zhang Liju and flipped through them.

At first, he felt that refining medicine was an easy task- but after looking through the notes, he realized just how much of a frog in the well he had been. The things he had experience with before weren't even real refined elixirs. In ancient times, someone of Lin Yi's level- a powerful doctor- was called a medicine maker in the words of an elixir refiner. He'd be the lowest level of the refiner, not even enough to enter that world.

Naturally, medicine makers, while seemingly basic in the eyes of a refiner, were still powerful to normal people. They were more than enough to cure people, and what the refiner dealt with wasn't the masses. Instead, it was the practitioners!

The refiners could condense all the aspects of elixirs, and most of their craft had to do with practitioning. For example, they could increase the chances of breaking through with things like qi gathering pill or soul gathering pill, as well as heal broken meridians with the meridian opening pill. In the eyes of the refiner, these were more common medicines!

Lin Yi never expected something as common as the qi gathering pill was already something people fought each other over for- was it that refiners were just too high up a dream, or was it that his own vision was limited since he'd only been preoccupied with the practitioners of the hidden houses?

A refiner was a big title- they had their own ranking titles as well, similar to practitioners.

The strength of a refiner was defined using Sky, Earth, Mystic, and Golden- at first, Lin Yi assumed that it was only something people used to differentiate how strong or how weak someone was from each other, but it seemed that it had already existed a long time before in the past. It was no recent invention.

But, while it was the same levels of Sky, Earth, Mystic, and Golden, it was slightly different from the reasoning they used for battle strength. Every stage had seven ranks- Golden class first, Golden class second, all the way to Golden class seventh!

Every rank had its corresponding elixirs and medicines that the refiner could refine, such as the qi gathering pill, which was a Golden class third level elixir! This refiner's personal notes only introduced some thoughts on the medicines and elixirs of Mystic first level, and that was it.

From the looks of it, Zhang Juli back only reached the first Mystic level as a refiner- and he never broke through after that.

From the looks of it, it was very hard to raise one's strength as a refiner. Juli also mentioned that anything after Mystic- Earth and Sky- was something of legends. He never found out if they even existed.

Was there someone who set these levels themselves intentionally, with no possibility of anyone actually reaching those stages- or did that exist, and it was just his own lack of ability and strength? Juli only made a simple guess.

And so, when talking about certain elixirs and medicines, they were referred to only with third level or fourth level, without mentioning the classes- it wouldn't be written as Golden class third level or Golden class fourth level, because nobody saw anything better than that!

Mystic third level and the fourth level was something Juli had never heard of before- he tried looking for people who had made medicines above the first Mystic level, to no avail! He had connections all over the world, and even he couldn't find it- it wasn't likely anyone could!