Mae took her mortar and pestle into the back of the shop and started rolling the mixture inside into three equal sized balls. Once she was done she placed the three pills on the pill rolling tray, put the top on, and moved it back and forth until the pills were perfectly round.
Once she was finished, she opened up her cauldron and put the three pills inside. When most people think about alchemy they think about putting a flame under the cauldron to burn out the impurities. This was only true for Fire, Earth and neutral pills, however. If one used such a method on the water pills she was attempting to make, the fire chi from the fire underneath it would enter the cauldron, and the water chi would neutralize it, being used up in the process. If, on the other hand, you were to use the element that fed water, Metal, the water chi would be slightly stronger. With water chi, however, one could remove more toxins, as more of the ones a water chi mixture would produce would dissolve in water chi. So you had to choose between making purer pills or stronger pills. One could also use both, though that was far more difficult, and beyond Mae’s skill level at the moment. If she wanted to use both, she would have to use water then, when the pill was almost finished, use metal chi to improve it, splitting the difference between the two and getting about 70% of the benefits from both methods.
Mae chose to use Water Chi this time. First she injected her chi into the cauldron and started swirling it around. This made the pills float into the middle in the shape of a triangle. She then sent a stream into each, ordering it to pick up toxins when it was in the pill and drop them when it was out of the pill. Through her chi sense she could tell that the chi was getting contaminated within the pill, but was almost pure when it reentered the pill. The sisters had taught her many other forms which the chi could take which were more efficient, like the loop form which looped the chi back and forth in the shape of infinity, but she couldn’t manage three such shapes at once yet.
After circling the chi through the pills for almost an hour she could tell that the chi wasn’t any more contaminated when it came out than when it went into the pills, so she stopped circulating her chi through them and withdrew the three streams from the cauldron. She left enough chi in it that the pills continued to float and grabbed her tongs. When she opened the lid of the cauldron a fog came out of it, the water and vinegar within the ingredients having been driven out by the purification that had occurred within the pills. Synthesis, combining multiple effects into one, would also drive out the water and vinegar, but she hadn’t yet learned to do synthesis.
Mae carefully removed the three pills with the tongs and laid them on a cloth on the table beside her. Thankfully, no customers had come in to disturb her as she did this or she would either need to stop and hope she could make up the difference when she got back, getting ahead of the toxin production once more, or would have to carry the cauldron to the front and try to split her attention.
Because that hadn’t happened she was able to successfully finish three pills. She looked them over. All contained Middle Cleansing levels of Water Chi and were above 90% purity. Mae could probably get to above 95% purity with practice, but some of the toxins the pill contained required higher purity chi to extract them. Maybe chi purity should be the next thing she trained.
--
Shen and Ponma went by Chen’s Talismans and Relics and retrieved the boat. The three new people were all meditating at Master Chen’s orders, likely getting used to the elemental chi. Without actually cultivating it they would have to either learn to produce it or channel the energy directly from the bracelets into their work, so this practice would directly translate into a core job skill in the future.
They put the boat in Shen’s cart and went back up the mountain where they put the boat onto the lake. The kids there had filled several jars with blossoms, so the two of them loaded a few jars into Ponma’s cart before filling her bag with empty and vinegar jars and having him climb into the boat. “Ok, I’m going to teach you to fly a boat so that you can teach it to the next person you send out to pick the special blossoms, though this works on flying swords too, you just have to anchor your feet to the sword.”
She quickly taught him how to anchor his feet before teaching him how to control the boat. After all, this was a lesson on flying a boat, not a sword. He could practice the anchoring skill once he got a flying sword. He sent a bit of water chi into the formation on the bottom of the boat and it lifted just above the surface of the water. She told him how to issue commands through that string of chi and soon the boat went straight up by about twice the height of a house. After calming down from his mistake he focused his mind and ordered it to slowly move forward. It jerked forward and he tried it a bit more gently, and this time it only slid forward by about the length of the boat.
She had him practice by flying in circles or patterns or by moving up or down to specific heights, then after an hour of practice, when they were too far away from the others to be seen, she told him where to find the good blossoms. Thirty minutes later he reached the place and gently sat down on the surface of the vines.
She pulled several jars out of her storage bag and sat them in the boat, then instructed him in how to properly pick the flowers to minimize any damage. The small amount of damage the other blossoms were receiving from being drug in on the vine and not picked carefully only slightly weakened the water chi inside them, but for these superior blossoms she didn’t want to risk losing even 10% of the chi, as these were worth so much.
After she was certain that he could properly pick the Late Gathering Blossoms, she showed him where the Peak ones were, and once he had a jar of those she showed him where the Foundation level ones were. As they didn’t yet have a market for these they didn’t pick any, but at least she knew he could do it without damaging them. She told him to contact her if he found a buyer, as she wanted to make custom jars for the Foundation ones, and they contined picking the blossoms.
Once all of the jars were filled they returned to the shore for more, placing the filled jars in her cart, and filling both of their bags and the boat with extra jars. They returned and, with both of them collecting blossoms, they were able to return to the dock just as the sun was setting.
They landed the boat beside the barn and stored it inside the barn. Shen moved both of their bags and all of the ones in the boat into her cart, then Ponma’s when she ran out of room. They had six jars from before, plus the nine that fit in the boat and the eleven from their bags, six in hers and five in Ponma’s slightly smaller bag, though the ones in the bags only took up the space of the bag.
While she was doing that Ponma paid all of the workers. They seemed much more excited than usual to get paid, probably because they had gotten such a large raise. Once they were finished with their jobs they quickly finished loading Ponma’s cart and the other two boys walked with them down the mountain, a journey of about five li. When they got back to town Shen offered to unload the carts herself as she had delayed them, and the two boys from Fisher thanked her, then went home. After an hour she and Ponma had unloaded all of the carts, filled out the paperwork for the sect to send someone to pick it up, and locked up the warehouse. They went to the cafeteria, getting there near the end of the serving time, ate, and then said goodbye and went home.
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Back at her room Shen took out the white bracelet and looked it over. She had already carved the five elemental symbols into the outside of it, taking her time so that she got the best performance out of it, but hadn’t started on the inside yet. She knew that the purification method she was using wasn’t as good as it could be, so she thought over how to improve it. She wasn’t sure whether feeding it with its feeding element or removing the excess with its competing elements would work better. The second was more complicated, but it did allow you to theoretically reach 100%, and was likely the method used by the city in its defenses.
She tried injecting a mixture of the four other elements into the fire chi in her Fire spirit beast core, and they quickly evaporated the chi that was there, creating a massive amount of neutral chi. She could tell that doing so stressed the crystal, as you were only supposed to inject fire or neutral chi, but the fact that they mostly neutralized each other caused most of the stress to quickly disappear.
She was about to remove all of the chi from the crystal and refill it with fire chi when she decided to examine it more closely to get a better understanding. She started meditating and focused her mind on the crystal, searching around for the fire. At first she didn’t see anything but after a few minutes of searching she felt a tiny bit of fire chi. She sent her consciousness over to investigate it and saw a tiny spark floating there. Surprisingly it was at 15% purity, rather than the 6% that was in the core before she started. She then felt something else nearby in two places and went over. In those two spots she saw a grain of sand and a speck of gold dust. Both were at 13% purity. While there was about 1% of the fire chi left, there was less than half of a percent of the Earth and Metal chi left, and with her having injected so little Earth and Metal chi to begin with the amount here was all but insignificant. As for the Water and Wood chi, the former was likely neutralized by the Fire, and the later likely fed it.
While her use of the technique was obviously severely flawed, she could count this a success. She would need a better source of the other four elements and a better way to store the Fire that was being purified if she wanted to do this without damaging her beast core, though it could probably be used for the final storage of the Fire chi. Because the four different types of chi were separate she could remove the ones she didn’t want, dissipating the Neutral into the environment and transferring the Earth and Metal into herself, though they were too little to affect her own chi.
The obvious method to get the chi she needed would be to make a much bigger array, but she would need to find a flat area to build it. There were many such areas around the sect town, as the town was built by flattening a mountain peak, but all of the areas near the town had been seeded with grass so that they weren’t barren and built up at least ten centimeters over the 500 years since it was flattened. Besides, if she only did it with a formation or array, she wouldn’t get better at doing it herself, which would limit the performance of the formation.
She decided to try it at the training field instead. Leaving the bracelet on the desk and saying goodbye to Mae, she ran to the training field she had used last night. The field didn’t have a worker stationed there at night, just a sign hanging in the middle of the entrance which warned you that there wouldn’t be an attendant so you would be on your own. Shen ignored the sign and went inside. She decided that she would only use an array to help her gather the energy, so she covered most of the training field in an array that was as large as the one the special field used, and placed a formation for feeding a person in the middle of it. She drew in the chi, noting that most of it was Earth chi once again, and decided she could work with this.
She had all of the chi go into a Wall which surrounded her just so that she could store it, and took all of the Earth chi from it, forming it into a ball. She then started using tiny bits of the other elements from it and feeding it into the Earth chi, carefully removing the bits that were more like that element along with the other elemental chi, dissipating it into the air. She could tell that both elements had gotten very slightly purer during the process, though lost a bit of chi overall, but she couldn’t concentrate on multiple streams at once so she had to get rid of the extra chi.
She continued to do the same, dissipating the wall and drawing in more chi from the formation to create a new one every time the wall ran out of elemental chi other than Earth. She wanted to help prevent the Earth from shrinking by refilling it with the Earth from the formation, but she knew that would lower its purity, so she didn’t do so.
She got lost in her work and didn’t notice how much time had passed until it started getting brighter outside. She stood up, a tiny ball of more than 30 percent Earth chi in her hand, and knew that she had greatly improved with the technique.
She went to a nearby field, where the man in charge seemed to be an Earth specialist, as he wore an Earth beast core, and handed the ball to him before heading to the bath house.
She spent the day with Ponma, collecting more of the good blossoms, then, after they had unloaded the jars into the warehouse, quickly ate Last Meal and returned to the field. This time she got there before the woman left for the night and walked over to where she had worked last night. “Is this something you drew?” the woman asked her. “We’ve been wondering about it all day. We thought that we were finally going to get the upgrade, but some of the people that had worked with formations before said that it was a bit different.”
“Oh, yeah, I drew it last night after you left and left before you got here, as I needed to hurry to work. Sorry about the confusion.”
“Oh, it’s fine. We mostly had people argue over who got to use it to meditate, so few people got to test their techniques and had to use a different field.”
“I actually made it as a place where I could meditate and work on a specific technique, so that makes sense. I was the one who did the formation at the special field, so if you want a special mediation field too, I can make one. It would basically be like the one next door, but with more spots for people to sit, as they wouldn’t need to all be at a specific distance from the target. I could also purify the elements a bit before they got to the person if that would help. In fact, that’s the technique I’m working on here. I’m trying to develop my ability to purify chi so that I can make a formation or relic that reflects that.”
The woman nodded. “Wow. I heard that the person that made the formation next door was an outer disciple girl, but I didn’t realize she was so young.”
“I’m fourteen.” Shen said before sitting down in the middle of the formation. The people today had been careful not to damage it, so it only needed minor repairs.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to insult you. I’m 29, so you are less than half my age, so I thought you were young, that’s all.”
“Oh, ok.” she said, “I’m Mo Shen, by the way. I work at Chen’s Talismans and Relics, so if you want any work done, even for yourself, just come by and we’ll see if we can do it.” The woman nodded and Shen started to meditate. The woman watched her for a few minutes before putting up the sign across the entrance and leaving. This time Shen gathered the Fire chi out of the chi she was being fed. It was only around half of a percent pure, and there wasn’t much of it, but she was able to constantly gather the tiny amounts until she had a mass the size of her head.
For the first step she purified it as much as she could by simply imbuing it with what she understood about fire, bringing it up to 8.4%. She knew she should study fire more, as she hadn’t even come close to learning what the bracelet could teach her if that was the best she could do. Still, it took her hours to get to that point last night with the Earth chi. This step didn’t actually cost her any of the chi inside the ball.
The second step was to use tiny bits of chi of the other four elements to remove themselves from the Fire chi. The theory was that, if the five elements perfectly added up to neutral chi, then one could perfectly separate neutral chi into the five elements as well. Impure chi would therefore be chi which had more chi of one element, and less of the others. If one were to send a tiny bit of elemental chi into the one they wanted to purify, they could then force them back apart by removing any chi that looked more like the second type than the first, as they now had something to compare to. While this also relied on your ability to understand the different elements, comparing two things and separating out the things that didn’t match either based on which they were more like was much easier than trying to figure out what was an impurity without the comparison.
Eventually she hit a point where it didn’t seem like any more impurities were being removed, so she gathered new chi into a wall, removed the fire chi into the environment, and then purified the wall as best she could, making the other four elements in it around 7.5 to 8% pure. When she compared these purer samples of elemental chi to the Fire in the ball the differences were much more evident, so she was able to remove far more impurities by the time the sun started to rise. She was certain that she could remove more impurities if she kept at it, but she had to go help Ponma again, so she stopped meditating and looked at the Fire chi in her hand. She wasn’t familiar with chi at such a high purity, but she estimated that the marble size mass of Fire chi was between thirty and thirty five percent purity.
She sent it into her Beast core so that she could use it later. The tiny spark of 20 odd percent Fire chi that was already in there barely lowered the purity of the marble. The core, however, started to heat up and she could feel pressure building up inside of it. She removed a bit of the chi and managed to stabilize the core, but this was a phenomenon she hadn’t heard of before, so she would have to look into it. The small amount of chi that she had removed was absorbed into her slowly as she started circulating tiny but slowly increasing amounts of it through her meridians. She was in pain from the process, but she could tell that she wasn’t being injured from it. It was like stretching a tight muscle or the slight burn you feel when running more than you were used to. She kept doing the exercise until she reached the bathhouse, where she put the extra chi into her dantian, purging a small amount into the water, finished circulating what was in her meridians while soaking, then got out, got dressed, and went to work.
