72:

A month slipped by Xiao Feng as he fell into a routine, his days passing by him in a structured, orderly manner that was reminiscent of his life on earth as a college student. ‘

His day opened up with a hearty breakfast, however much he may criticize the lack of chai as a beverage option, before he’d spend around two to three hours practicing alchemy with Lianhua.

Lianhua had deemed the ingredients required for the first step in refining the beast bonding pill too expensive to be used for practice, not unless Xiao Feng intended to follow through with the entire pill refinement. So instead, the next time he had gone to attend class, Lianhua had already prepared a lumpy mixture that she’d obtained by mixing together multiple low-quality spiritual herbs.

With the Essence Cultivation Art active, Xiao Feng had no reason to struggle with the kneading process. As he discovered for himself, there were two key things to keep in mind while kneading lumps in a mixture over an open flame.While the ingredients Lianhua had used in the current mixture were too weak to cause anything but a minor surge that would be contained by his spiritual silver pill furnace, the same would not be true for a melange of the bone marrow of a stoneback ursine and the blood extract of a lesser shadow wyrm.

Firstly, the reason why Lianhua kneaded the melange of ingredients was to aid in the refinement process, yes, but also because unlike him, she couldn’t see the lumps in the mixture and needed the feedback from her Wind Qi to get a rough idea of what was happening inside the pill furnace.

Not even Grand Alchemist Xin Wu should be able to replicate the effects of Divine Sense and see through the pill furnace, though with a title like that, Xiao Feng supposed that he didn’t need to.

He could.

The second observation Xiao Feng had made was on the necessity of fine Qi control. A lump was merely a pocket of concentrated Qi that had a risk of destabilizing the refinement process if it was corrected early on. If his Wind Qi moved too fast or cut in too deep, the Qi would flare and risk not only destabilizing the mixture, but also possibly causing the pill furnace to explode.

Conversely, if Xiao Feng wasn’t thorough enough, he risked leaving lumps behind.

Both those observations had led Xiao Feng to create a novel method of his own, one that required the Essence Cultivation Art to function.

He would first aid the heat source in refining the mixture with a whirlwind of Wind Qi that occupied nearly the entire circumference of the pill furnace, continuing until the abutting boundaries that distinguished one ingredient from another was melted away in the favor of lumps that highlighted areas where the ingredients were being particularly resistant.

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Then, Xiao Feng would will the whirlwind to break off into smaller, mini whirlwinds that targeted the individual lumps that had formed. His method turned out to be far gentler and more efficient than Lianhuas, because instead of repeatedly kneading the entire mixture he simply focused upon the areas where Qi had gotten too concentrated.

And it worked.

Xiao Feng had downplayed his achievement by taking a week before he employed his new method because Beast Master Zen had reminded him of the dangers of being marked a prodigy. Though he supposed a part of it was inevitable, a week was far more reasonable than a day.

Still, the shock on Lianhua’s face when she lifted the lid of the pill furnace to reveal a perfectly uniform, refined mixture was hard to forget and Xiao Feng could understand why. Fine tuning Wind Qi to knead lumps in a mixture was more a matter of practise rather than talent and failing was part of the process.

From then onwards, she had approached her lectures with a newfound zeal, as if she’d started to believe that there was a method to his madness and he actually had agreed to the duel knowing he had a chance at winning, however preposterous that notion might be.

They had moved on to shielding, an aspect of the process that he’d found quite fun to learn. Again, far cheaper and less volatile ingredients were used for him to practice with.

Catching the ingredient as it was falling into the mixture was the riskiest part, as letting it fall directly could cause an explosion in the worst case scenario, while it would always ruin the refinement even in the best case.

Xiao Feng managed to do so with unerring accuracy every time, but he had some trouble with what should be the easier part. He had been neglecting his cultivation as he adapted to his life in the continent of Tian and it showed, as he found himself losing control over the shielding past the ten minute mark more than once.

It wasn’t a matter of qi control or difficulty, because all he had to do was to ensconce the ingredient in a layer of Wind Qi and wait for it to dissolve. But Xiao Feng lacked the focus and discipline of his predecessor and that was not something he could inherit from his memories and meandering thoughts were all it took for his focus over the ingredient to falter

Two weeks of daily practice fixed that, all while Xiao Feng dedicated another two hours every day to regular cultivation in the cultivation chambers.

In the past week, Xiao Feng had moved on to learning the second method of kneading the mixture, the one Lianhua used after more than two ingredients were added. She had demonstrated how weave two spirals of Wind Qi that served as tubes through which the mixture was supposed to intersect, before being diffused through a gentle umbrella of wind that returned the mixture to the pill furnace’s base so that the cycle could begin anew, through her pill furnace with the top open.

Xiao Feng got to see exactly how Lianhua had done it, but despite spending the past three weeks dedicated two hours to the Warrior’s Temperance cultivation technique, he found himself struggling to maintain a continuously moving shape in his mind’s eye for more than a few minutes.

He was pretty sure that if it came down to it, he could rely upon the soul space to augment his perception and manage it, but Xiao Feng wanted to try and learn alchemy the proper way before he relied upon his unique advantages.

That was why he was in the alchemy division, after all. And the best part about learning alchemy was that it also gave him insights into how he could elevate his chai to the next level.