Chapter 359 – Life 92, Age 16, Martial Disciple 2

After Jon left me alone with Yong GeHong, the Pill Lord’s posture shifted from that of a subject to that of a Ruler.

“Apprentice Fang, you have been able to advance your cultivation base more quickly than I had expected. However, speed should not be your goal. If you wish to grow to your full potential, then you must take things slowly and only advance when you are confident in your success. While I cannot detect any flaws in your cultivation base at the moment, if you continue to advance recklessly, you will only leave behind hidden dangers that will eventually cripple you. Understood?”

I lower my head in submission. “Yes, Lord Yong.”

Based on his tone, I could tell that the Pill Lord was genuinely concerned about me advancing too rapidly, but he didn’t give a damn about me advancing recklessly or crippling myself. He only wanted to slow me down.

As I still wanted to get the Rank 2 and 3 manuals for the Writ of Pill Fire from the man, I was willing to put on the mask of a submissive disciple and pretend to be obedient, but I had other ways to get these manuals if necessary. I was certain that the Pill Lord’s desire for me to slow down was somehow rooted in Jon’s mission, and my primary concern was blocking this mission from being completed successfully.

Still, while I didn’t necessarily plan to listen to the Lord’s advice, I would indeed advance slowly and methodically, but only in relative terms. To an outsider like Lord Yong, my rate of advancement would be horrifying.

I had done my best to maintain a respectful demeanor, but Lord Yong must have noticed something wrong, because the moment I raised my head and looked at him, I saw him flinch and make a decision.

“Apprentice Fang, as Young—Jon suggested, having reached Martial Disciple 2, it is time for you to learn the basic skills of an alchemist. Come over here.”

Without waiting for me to respond, Lord Yong turned away and walked to the room’s pill furnace.

Unlike every alchemy workshop that I had been in on the Nine Rivers Continent, the alchemy workbench in this room was not set against one of the walls. Instead, it had been placed in the center of the room, allowing for people to approach it from many sides at once.

A square, half-meter-tall pill furnace took up half of this workbench, and upon his arrival, Pill Lord Yong laid out three herbs on the other half.

“Apprentice Fang, the most basic pill in a Disciple Alchemist’s arsenal is the Rank 1 Qi Gathering Pill. The three herbs used in the basic formula for this pill are the blue peony, the astragalus root, and the schisandra berry.” As he spoke, the Pill Lord gestured to the herbs on the workbench. “To successfully concoct a pill, one must first carefully purify these herbs and then blend them together into a complex tapestry of medicinal energy.”

The Pill Lord reached around and tapped on two hand-sized formation inscriptions on the side of the pill furnace facing me. “Place your palms on these inscriptions and trickle a small amount of energy into them. Only a small amount. Do not try to push energy into the furnace’s inner chamber.”

While I had seen formation-inscribed pill furnaces before, I had only played around with them briefly, as I had never seen much point in them. So, having Lord Yong show me how to use one properly was a bit of a unique experience.

Upon empowering the two formations, I didn’t notice any immediate effects, but when Lord Yong began heating the furnace, I understood.

In ‘normal vision,’ I was suddenly able to see into the pill furnace’s inner chamber, where sparks of red energy danced around in the empty air.

After several long minutes, the furnace reached a temperature that the Pill Lord deemed appropriate. So, he picked up the blue peony from the workbench and tossed it inside.

The moment it entered, in my formation-enhanced vision, I saw the sudden appearance of a ball of green and black energy that was covered in a layer of gray sludge.

“The first step is to free the herb’s energy from its physical shell.”

The Pill Lord placed his hands on either side of the furnace and channeled a stream of energy into a pair of formations. Then, he moved his hands to another set of formations, which allowed him to control this energy and melt the gray sludge, which slipped to the bottom of the furnace.

“The green energy is the peony’s medicinal energy. It is what will produce the beneficial effects that we’re after. The black energy, however, is toxic and will cause a body harm. The next step is to purify this energy.”

Saying this, the Pill Lord began tapping a series of formations in a well-choreographed dance. Each time he touched a formation, he would push a small amount of qi into it, causing the formation to shoot out a line of energy and attack the peony’s toxins.

This somewhat reminded me of the automated formations that I had once used in my pill factories, but the energy that these formations sent out didn’t behave as I would have expected. It didn’t exclusively target the herbs’ toxic energy. It also shot through nodes of pure medicinal energy.

Whether because Pill Lord Yong was trying to make a point or because he was just incompetent, by the time all was said and done, only about 75% of the flower’s toxins had been destroyed, and nearly 25% of the medicinal energy disappeared along with it.

The Pill Lord then proceeded to throw both the astragalus root and the schisandra berry into the furnace and cleanse them in sequence. Once this was done, he then reached up and began tapping on a set of formations on the top of the furnace.

“Once all the herbs are cleansed, you next need to prepare them for melding.”

Confused, as this was not a process that I had ever seen before, I watched as the formations along both the top and bottom of the furnace sent out waves of heat that began destroying both toxic and medicinal energy alike.

“You must ensure that the herbs fit together properly. Otherwise, the concoction will fail.”

As the Pill Lord moved the three blobs of medicinal energy together, the powerful heat of the furnace forced the energy into shapes that slotted together nearly perfectly. When the three blobs finally touched, they melded together into the mixture that I was familiar with.

Finally, Lord Yong ramped up the temperature in the furnace and used this extra heat to help condense the herbs’ energy into a medicinal pill.

As soon as the pill coalesced and dropped to the bottom of the pill furnace, the Lord vented the excess heat, opened the furnace’s door, picked up the pill, and showed it to me.

“This is a Mid-Purity Qi Gathering Pill with roughly 71% efficacy. Consider this your initial goal. However, I expect you to aim higher than most of the trash who call themselves apprentices. You have a supreme talent for alchemy, and you must do it justice.”

Lord Yong took out another set of herbs and began a second round of concocting. This time, however, I noticed that he was using herbs of a substantially higher quality.

While the Pill Lord still used formations to inject the furnace with energy, this time, he didn’t let it just shoot out in straight beams. He used his fire affinity to guide the beams to exactly where he wanted them to go. Surprisingly, though, he still destroyed a bit of medicinal energy, and when he was done, the herbs were far from purified. About 15% of the toxins remained.

When he began overheating the furnace and melding the energies together, I saw why he had left these toxins in place. The toxins were key components in his design for turning the blobs of medicinal energy into puzzle pieces that fit together perfectly.

Stranger still, when the energies did lock together, the toxins, which had always appeared black to my formation-enhanced vision, turned a pale green.

After venting the heat of the furnace and retrieving his pill, Lord Yong allowed me to examine it. Where a normal Qi Gathering Pill was a uniform pale translucent blue, this one had two bands of white rings wrapping around its equator.

“To ordinary people, High-Purity pills might seem like unobtainable treasures, but to a true alchemist, a pill without patterns is worth less than trash.” Lord Yong took out a pill bottle and showed me its contents. There were pills with anywhere from zero to three rings around them. He lifted the two-ringed pill that he had just made. “This is a two-patterned pill. Its effects are an order of magnitude greater than a one-patterned pill, and an order of magnitude less than a three-patterned pill.”

“How… How high can you go?” I asked.

“Nine. The limit is a nine-patterned pill. When I was a Disciple Alchemist, I was considered rather ordinary. My limit was only two. For a genius such as yourself, however, I expect more. I dare not say that you reach nine, but if you cannot at least get to six, then you are wasting your talents.”

A Qi Gathering Pill that was nine orders of magnitude more effective than normal seemed like dangerous overkill, but making a basic Healing Pill nine orders of magnitude more effective could turn it into a life-saving treasure.

Still, I had to wonder… “What about the toxins? Why did they turn green?”

“Good question. Normally, toxic energy is dangerous, but when melded into pills correctly, it can become beneficial. With one-patterned pills, the toxins are only neutralized. With nine-patterned pills, the beneficial effects of the ‘toxins’ might become even more potent than the medicinal energy itself. Still, even if beneficial, the toxins will build up in a person’s body over time. They won’t cause any harm, but they will reduce the effectiveness of any pills that contain the same herbs as those previously consumed.”

“Why not just… get rid of them? Destroy them all.”

Lord Yong shook his head. “Not possible. At least, not normal herbs. I know of a few factions that have herbs capable of producing toxin-free pills, including the Palace of the Herb Sovereign, but access to such herbs is heavily restricted. And in any case, without the toxins, making patterned pills would be exceedingly difficult.”

I nodded in thought. More powerful pills would be nice, but were they worth the tradeoff? For something like Explosive Pills, the answer was obviously ‘yes.’ However, for Qi Gathering Pills, I couldn’t immediately see any reason to choose a nine-patterned pill over a Perfect Pill.

Still, for the moment, I didn’t need to weigh the relative merits of the different types of pills. I only needed to study these new pills and learn to make them for myself.

Lord Yong pulled a thin brown book from his storage space. “This details the functions of standard pill furnaces and how to use them. It also contains instructions for making the basic Mid-Purity Qi Gathering Pill that I showed you earlier. Study it carefully, and perfect this basic pill before trying to do anything fancy.”

While we had been talking, the room’s flag had been raised. Lord Yong walked over, opened the door, and accepted a storage bag from the attendant who was waiting there. Then, he passed it to me.

“Take these. Aside from carefully raising your cultivation base, I expect you to attempt to concoct at least 5 Qi Gathering Pills each day. As I said, with someone of your talents, concocting six-patterned pills shouldn’t be a problem. So, do not look for me again until you have concocted at least a four-patterned pill. If you run out of supplies, just talk to the attendant in the Assignment Hall.”

As I nodded my head in understanding, I sent a wisp of soul energy into the storage bag to study its contents.

Lord Yong had given me five hundred sets of herbs for concocting Qi Gathering Pills. From anyone else, I might have considered this a generous gift. But given the circumstances, I knew that this was just a way to keep me busy. After all, how long would it take for even a talented Martial Disciple to learn how to concoct one of these four-patterned pills?

Still, expanding my knowledge of alchemy was one of my top priorities, and if Lord Yong wanted to fund my research into Central Continent alchemy, then I would let him. I just had to wonder if he had any idea of what to expect from such an action.