鳳腦芝] will grow like a calabash, with pits like five-colored peaches. Then, a phoenix-brain fruit is planted and watered with Yellow Solution, which after three years will grow into a red tree, like a pine, five or six feet in height, with a jade-white fruit like a pear [赤樹白子]. Lastly, the adept plants the seed of the red tree, waters it with Swirling Solution, waits another three years for the growth of a vermilion tree like a plum, six or seven feet in height, with a halycon-blue fruit like the jujube [絳樹青實]. Upon eating this fruit, the adept will ascend to the heaven of Purple Tenuity. The fourth stage involves two comparatively quicker waidan steps. The adept repeatedly boils equal parts of the Yellow Solution and the Swirling Solution, and transforms them into the Blue Florets of Aqueous Yang [水陽青映]. If you drink this at dawn, your body will issue a blue and gemmy light, your mouth will spew forth purple vapors, and you will rise above to Upper Clarity [Shangqing]. But before departing earth, the adept's last step is to mix the remaining Elixir of Langan Efflorescence with liquified lead and mercury to produce 50-pound ingots of alchemical silver and purple gold, make incantations to the water spirits, and throw both oblatory ingots into a stream. Despite the carefully detailed Purple Texts' waidan recipe for preparing langgan elixirs, scholars have doubted that the authors actually meant for it to be produced and consumed. Some interpret the impractical 13-year elixir recipe as symbolic instructions for what later came to be known as neidan meditative visualization, and is more a "product of religious imagination", drawing on the respected metaphors of alchemical language, than a laboratory manual drawing on the metaphors of meditation. Others believe this "extravagantly impractical recipe" is an attempt to assimilate into conventional waidan alchemy the ancient legends about langgan gems that grow on trees in the paradise of KunIun. The Shangqing Daoist patriarch Tao Hongjing compiled and edited both the c. 370 Taiwei lingshu ziwen langgan huadan shenzhen shangjing and the c. 499 Zhen'gao 真誥 "Declarations of the Perfected" that also mentions langan elixirs in some of the same terminology. One context records that the early Daoist masters Yan Menzi 衍門子, Gao Qiuzi 高丘子, and Master Hongyai 洪涯先生 swallowed langgan hua 琅玕華 "langgan blossoms" to feign death and become xian transcendents and enter the "dark region" beyond the