Evan Lin got out of the car together with Lynn Chen.
Back inside, Lynn Chen kept glancing at Evan, wanting to say something but holding back.
Upstairs, Lynn watched Evan return to his room without a word, and a faint sense of disappointment flashed through her heart.
"I used to wish he'd just leave, so why does it feel so weird now that it's actually happening?"
"Lynn Chen, are you losing your mind?" she muttered to herself, frowning as she glanced at Evan's closed door and patted her own cheeks.
She pushed down those thoughts, grabbed some clothes, and went to take a shower.
Inside his room, Evan took a deep breath and pulled out the Brownrock Grass from his pocket.
"The spiritual qi I absorbed from Zhong Shuiyu at Imperial Grand should be enough to grow this Brownrock Grass to the stage where I can use it now."
Evan glanced at his left hand, as if he could still feel the soft sensation from Zhong Shuiyu's chest.
With a thought, a faint strand of spiritual qi began to flow from his palm into the Brownrock Grass.
As the spiritual qi kept pouring in, the Brownrock Grass started to tremble, its leaves slowly unfolding. The color deepened, the ocher hue growing richer, and its whole appearance gradually resembled the texture of rock.
After a long while, the spiritual qi in his left hand was spent, and the Brownrock Grass had grown by about half a finger's length.
"That's about twenty years' worth of medicinal potency added. The conversion rate for spiritual qi is still too low, but for someone at the first layer of Qi-refining like me, it's enough."
"With this Brownrock Grass, I should be able to break into the second layer of Qi-refining."
With that thought, Evan didn't hesitate. He crushed the Brownrock Grass between his fingers.
Lacking the conditions for alchemy here, Evan simply put the whole sprig of Brownrock Grass into his mouth.
As soon as the Brownrock Grass entered his mouth, a gritty bitterness filled Evan's senses, along with a wild surge of power rushing into his body through his mouth and nose.
"Since I can't make pills out of this, I'll just have to absorb the medicine's effects with my cultivation method. It'll be slower, but it'll work."
Evan slowly closed his eyes and began to run the Creation Method.
The Creation Method was a technique Evan had obtained years ago from a certain immortal sanctuary—a method for directly refining the essence from raw herbs to strengthen himself, skipping the trouble of alchemy, though at the cost of lower efficiency.