"Ah!" Han Li thrust one hand high into the air and clenched his fist, shouting out in his excitement.
At that moment, his childish nature showed itself without a trace of disguise.
His guess had evidently been right: closed doors and shuttered windows hampered the bottle's draw on the threads of white light. It was only in open, unobstructed ground that the bottle drank in the light more readily and could form a greater cluster of light. Though he still did not know where those threads came from, or what use the tiny motes of light swallowed by the bottle might serve, he had surely taken a great stride toward unravelling the mystery.
Han Li felt that he was on the verge of unlocking the bottle's secret, and this made him more excited than ever.
Only when the sky was nearly light did the glow around the bottle gradually fade, and the bottle return to its stillness. All the while, Han Li watched its transformations from beside it, all the while keeping careful watch that no one else should discover what was going on here.
He bent down, picked the bottle up, and examined it. Nothing about it had changed from before; the stopper was still stuck fast, and would not come off.
Han Li was disappointed, but seeing that day was breaking, he reluctantly tucked the bottle away. He still had to rush back to the stone chamber to sit in meditation and cultivate.
Over the days that followed, at a certain hour each night, the bottle produced the same strange spectacle. Countless threads of light, like moths flying into a flame, were drawn to the bottle, then transformed in turn into great numbers of tiny motes of light that the bottle greedily devoured.
Just as Han Li began to believe this would go on happening every day, on the eighth day another change came.
When Han Li arrived at their customary spot, set the bottle out, and arranged it, the absorption of the motes lasted hardly half a quarter of an hour before it stopped. Then the dark green markings upon the bottle suddenly blazed with a dazzling green light, and a few golden ancient characters and symbols surfaced across its surface. These strange characters were soft in their construction and curious in their strokes, bearing within them an indescribable savor of high antiquity, and they went on flickering and drifting about the bottle's surface without pause.
That uncanny display, too, lasted but an instant before vanishing again, leaving only a few protruding golden characters on the bottle's face, as though everything had returned to the point from which it had begun.
Having witnessed so many strange happenings in these past few days, Han Li no longer made such a fuss over them as he once had. Even stranger things than these could take place on the bottle without greatly startling him now.
He picked the bottle up carelessly and, on a whim, tried the lid.
Gently, without the least effort, the stopper came away in his hand.
Unbelievable! Han Li stared in shock at the stopper in his grasp.
Had he truly taken off, so heedlessly, with no trick or skill at all, the very difficulty that had plagued him, the great worry he had been unable to solve for several days?
By the time Han Li confirmed that what he saw before him was real, that the bottle's secret had dropped right before his eyes, he could no longer contain the excitement in his heart. He brought his eye to the mouth of the bottle and peered inside.
Within the bottle, a tiny droplet of emerald-green liquid, no larger than a soybean, rolled slowly about, dyeing the whole wall of the bottle a shimmering green.
What was this?
Han Li felt rather let down. After all his pains, he had gained no more than this one dull little thing.
Disheartened, he stoppered the bottle again, put it away in his leather pouch, and turned toward his lodgings, all that surge of excitement of a moment ago scattered to the four winds.
Though the stopper had at last come free, the result left him thoroughly dissatisfied.
Han Li resolved that, when he had nothing better to do, he would come back and seek out the secret of this green droplet. Perhaps, in time, it might gift him a small surprise.
What he needed to do now was return and sleep properly, to make good on the rest he had lost. All these nights he had not slept well, and his practice by day had suffered terribly for it. On top of that, his listless spirits had provoked a few questions from Doctor Mo.
Ever since Han Li had become Doctor Mo's personal disciple and broken through the first level of the Formula, he had come to feel there was no longer any motive to keep cultivating it. Added to that, the results of the practice displeased him so thoroughly that he could not summon the spirit for it no matter how he tried.
Doctor Mo had therefore scolded him severely over the matter.
But when practice hour arrived, Han Li was still drowsy, listless, utterly without energy.
This state of affairs drove Doctor Mo nearly to distraction, and for a time he wondered whether he had chosen the wrong pupil.
Thinking of this, Han Li himself felt a little aggrieved. It was not as though he wanted to be like this, but he was truly not in good form.
What Han Li could not have expected was that, on the very day after he woke from that sleep, he once again threw himself, of his own accord and with all his heart, into a frenzy of cultivation.
The reason for such a turnabout was no more than a few light words of Doctor Mo's.
"Every time you advance a level in this Formula, I shall double the silver I pay you each month." Doctor Mo had at last seen the longing for wealth in Han Li and, from the very root, found a remedy. With one simple sentence, he bound Han Li onto the war-chariot of desperate cultivation.
In the days that followed, Han Li strained every sinew to master the next level of the Formula.
Each day, from dawn to noon, from noon to evening, he entered the stone chamber twice and sat in meditation and cultivation, leading a dull, monotonous life that repeated itself without end, casting everything else to the back of his mind.
So that he might devote himself single-mindedly to his art, undisturbed by the affairs of the outside world, Doctor Mo closed off all of Spirit Hands Valley to the outside for the time being, treating and curing the sick beyond the valley's mouth, and seeing to it that Han Li never need worry again over even his daily clothes and meals.
And so, little by little, the matter of the bottle faded from Han Li's memory.
Autumn went and winter came; spring passed and summer arrived.
In the blink of an eye, four years had gone by, and Han Li was fourteen years old.
He had grown into a dark-skinned, silent, and resolute country lad. To look at him from the outside, he was no different from any other farm boy of an ordinary rural family—just as unremarkable, neither handsome and dashing nor dapper and charming.
He shuttled each day between the stone chamber and his lodgings, from his lodgings back to the stone chamber, occasionally going to Doctor Mo to learn a little medicine and turning over the various other books in his quarters. And so the whole valley became his entire world, and, in due course, he cultivated his Formula up to the third level.