In the beginning, Han Li had no mind to compound the latter two medicines, for they had naught to do with the advancement of his cultivation. Yet after turning the matter over long in his thought, he reflected that he was, after all, half a man of the jianghu, and who could tell whether some heaven-sent calamity or mortal mishap might not one day befall him, or whether he might not be swept into the killing and maiming of the wandering world? Better, then, to have in readiness a few rare remedies against poison and wound, lest he be struck down by venom or steel and perish for want of a good medicine, and go to his grave most unjustly done by.
Having reasoned thus, Han Li compounded a modest store of the latter two medicines, to carry at his side against that unforeseen day, for a man has but the one life, and he had no wish to die before his time. It cost him somewhat in the amounts of the other two spirit medicines, and so the advancement of the formula was slowed by a little; yet this too could not be helped, for the world is not so made that every good fortune may be had at once, and in certain hours a man must choose and be content with his choosing.
On the very day the medicines were finished, Han Li followed the manner of taking set down in the recipes, and swallowed of each a "Yellow Dragon Pill" and a "Golden Marrow Pellet." Those two drugs, as was only to be looked for of such peerless saintly remedies, were mightier in their working than tongue can tell, and under that astonishing force of their elixir he burst through the bottleneck that very night, and so trained the fourth layer of the formula to perfection.
No sooner had he attained the fourth layer than Han Li felt a thing utterly unlike aught he had known before. His five senses, with a single tremendous shock, were lifted into a realm past all conceiving. Every object before his eye grew suddenly so bright, so clear, that the most trifling things, which aforetime he could by no means have espied, seemed all at once enlarged and laid open to his gaze; the fine filaments of a cobweb in the corner of the chamber he could now discern thread by thread. His hearing, too, was grown of a sudden so quick as to be past belief, and into his ears poured all manner of sounds, both such as he had heard before and such as he never had—the soft rustling of an earthworm burrowing in the soil a dozen or more paces off, the faint droning of some nameless insect as it flew before the house—all coming to him as though sounded close beside his ear, so true, so clear, so near. And a host of strange savors that sprang up of a sudden told him his sense of smell, likewise, was no longer the thing it had been.
Han Li was both amazed and overjoyed, for this was the first time in all his practicing of the formula that he felt his days of labor had not been squandered altogether in vain. In all the earlier layers his senses had indeed been quickened a little, but never had the change been so plain, so vast, as in the fourth. This was no slow and gradual gaining, but a change of the very kind of a thing, as though he had been wholly made over into another man. Beyond all this, he felt his body grown far lighter and more nimble, and his spirit had taken a great and lasting advance, so that he might go three or five days without sleep and suffer no great harm. Standing still in one place, he could know all that passed, great and small, within some sixty or eighty paces about him, and this power to hold all within his grasp filled him with fond wonder.
Now at length he understood that four full layers won were the true and first small measure of success in the formula. And he could not but muse that if the fourth layer brought so unforgettable a savor, of what marvels must the fifth and the sixth not hold the promise for him?
It was but a short while after Han Li had begun to grasp the wonders of the art that his master in name—Doctor Mo—came back again to his valley. Yet he came not alone, but brought with him a strange and secret personage. When Doctor Mo first set foot in Spirit Hands Valley, Han Li caught from afar the sound of that familiar coughing which he knew so well; he was at that very hour seated in his stone chamber in meditation, striving to press yet one strand further ahead. Marking the stir of the doctor's coming, he was quick to settle his qi and rise, then stepped out of the chamber and made his way toward the mouth of the valley to pay his respects to a master he had not seen these twelve months. And there, not far from the valley's mouth, he came upon Doctor Mo and met him.
At the first sight of him, Han Li gave a great start. The man was the same man, it is true, but upon his face there was written a gray and lifeless look, with not much of breath or spirit left in it. Even of old his visage had been sickly and sallow, but never so thoroughly broken and spent as this, as though the end of his days were already hard upon him. Yet stranger still, and more amazing to Han Li, was that behind him there followed a mysterious figure, his head wrapped in a hood of black, his whole body so tightly swaddled head to foot in a wide green robe that not a finger's breadth of skin was left to be seen. This figure was of extraordinary stature, tall and massive, a good two heads above Han Li, built like a titan of giants; yet because of the hood Han Li could not make out his face, though he could dimly guess that his countenance must be fierce and terrible to look upon, and monstrously ill-favored.
Han Li smothered the questions that thronged in his breast, and hastened to make his bow to the doctor, then stood respectfully by, awaiting the master's speech. He knew very well that the old man cared not one jot whether his disciple showed him courtesy and reverence; yet for his own part, being his disciple, he must fulfill the due forms and rites of master and pupil, and could not lightly let them go, lest the doctor take him for a proud and unruly fellow, which would but put him in a fouler estate. And from all that he knew of Doctor Mo, and of the heed his master was wont to pay to his cultivation, he guessed that after so long a parting the doctor would open with a question upon the progress of his formula, to sound out how far Han Li had come.
And so it proved. When Doctor Mo saw Han Li coming out of the valley to meet him of his own accord, he was a little taken aback, then coughed twice and asked, in a voice drained of all its force: "How fares your practice of the formula? Has it advanced by so much as a jot?" And upon his face appeared at once a look of anxious and eager hope. But Han Li had made ready his answer in his heart long before, and gave back as he had planned: "It is as ever, with no great change." For he had not the least intention of telling the doctor the true state of his practice, being unable to account for so miraculous a pace, nor explain how, with no outward aid at all, he should suddenly have leapt, as by a wonder, from the opening of the third layer to the fourth.
"Give me your hand," said Doctor Mo, and his face darkened as he spoke, and his words turned all hard and stiff. Han Li noted this change of countenance with care, and his heart gave a sudden lurch within him, and a faint unease stole over him. Yet he was not afraid to have the doctor lay his finger on his wrist, to seek out the estate of his true qi. For once he had entered the fourth layer, Han Li had found, to his surprise, that he could govern at will the measure of that strange true qi within him; he could hold it at the strength it had borne in the third layer, and so pass with all ease beneath the doctor's watch, and slip unseen past any examination of his master, nor need dread the old man's probing hand.