The next week of life inside of the Sect became quite amusing. Everywhere on the streets at every stall, bar or gossip alley rumors were beginning to spread about two uncanny incidents that had occured recently.
"I’m telling you, I saw it with my own eyes! A Fire Spirit ran past my house while I was hanging my laundry and the sheets got instantly dried!"
"It was so fast I barely got to see it for a split second!"
"It vanished somewhere around the middle of “Badside” street."
"Must be an omen, but what sort?"
"My second cousin’s brother’s friend works as a Guard on the Sect’s wall and he said that a HUGE monster was spotted inside the safe zone and that it took a whole team of Foundation Establishment cultivators to take it down!"
"No WAY!"
"Mnaaaa yeees! I have a fang from it to prove it! Here!"
"That’s a fang? You sure it’s not a tiger’s claw?"
"No, it’s a fang! It was THAT big! Level 30 or something I hear! The Sect has disallowed any low level disciples from going into the forest anymore until they find out how the beast got through the safety net.
Of course, people were blowing shit out of proportions, but that’s how rumors tend to work. And that WAS a tiger’s claw, since me and Fung had all of the actual fangs of the wolf still inside our rings.
When we had gone to the guard barracks to report the monster attack, the guards had begun to make fun of us for getting scared away by some scrawny little rabbit, until Fung had promptly produced the creature’s severed head on their table, arrow still stuck in the brain and all. The head was larger than a grown man’s torso, and was also mangled pretty badly, as the System had extracted all of the teeth as “components”. After seeing the two guards on duty scream like little girls at the sight of it, I had felt a little better.
After asking how the hell we had managed to subdue such a large monster, we just told the guards how we had pumped it full of arrows, with me demonstrating a rapidfire shot on a nearby barrel and leaving them so dazed they had to collect their jaws off the floor.
The second jawdrop came when we told the guards that we were not even in the Foundation Establishment bracket, but rather just some meager Qi refinement stage youngsters. Heck, I was not even a Sect disciple yet.
After they had taken us seriously, they had called the Sect Elder that usually handled security issues, a big guy that you could easily pass for a villain with a twirly moustache and a heavy set of lamellar plate armor.
When he inspected the dead body, he grew a rather serious expression on his face, and ordered a Sect Lockdown for the proximity forested area to be carried out immediately, so that some “cleaner” teams could go and check it out for a possible monster infestation.
The Sect Elder told us that this had not been the first incident, and that other monsters had approached the sect during the past week-and-a half, as the “cleaner” teams had found more than ten other stray “monsters” in the vicinity and had taken care of them all, but that the clashes had been “covered up” on purpose as to not create a panic. Still, with this latest evidence on the table, the influx of monsters could not be “ignored” anymore, since our wolf had been the closest any of the monsters had ever come to the sect so far.
After that, he congratulated us for our bravery, then gave us a token that could be used at the forges to order one piece of armor crafted, at the expense of the Sect. We were quite glad to receive that, so we had climbed to the forge level as soon as we had left the barracks and then had asked Bang if he knew anyone that could process the leather of the direwolf. When he had seen the dead monster, he had also screamed like a little girl, much to the amusement of the jolly old Forge Master, who then informed us that it was indeed a “good kill” and that he could craft an [Arrowstop Tunic] out of it, that reduced incoming pierce and slashing damage. I had told Fung to become the recipient of the item, since he usually “tanked” more often than I did, in the way that our two-man group worked.
Since we were at the subject of gear, I took the time to ask the old Forge Master for a list of all of the items that he could make, and he gave me an entire tome the size of a yellow phone book with all of the recipes available for crafting at the sect forges. It was quite nice, with highly detailed hand-drawn pictures of the end-product, as well as the magical “buffs” listing in case of the magical gear.
While our Blue Mountain of Books Sect was not a smithing-inclined Sect by any measure, it still had a few decent craftsmen and a very large list of item recipes, because the Sect was a knowledge-hoarding Scholarly sect instead. I knew that the best way to ensure my safety, just in case I ran into another encounter like that Dire-Wolf, was to have a full set of magical gear equipped on my body. There was no comparison between letting a monster take a bite out of your armoreless exposed ass or having it bite you in your heavily plated ass instead. Even if it ate the plate, the ass might still remain safe.
Which led me again to the issue of money. Damnit! I have to figure something with Fung and Lingfeng about the financial situation. I already owe Fung too much money as it is. While HE might not notice, his family surely will and begin to think that I’m some bimbo milking him dry for all of his cash.
When we got back to my place, Lingfeng was already waiting for us right at the entrance with a worried look on his face. The other Elders had told him about the forest incident, and he was similarly disturbed by the news. We went inside and he began to explain why everything was more serious than the apparent surface problem of a stray monster. When shit like this usually started happening, it meant that a Qi-flood was underway. The world had Qi-tide “cycles” that were poorly understood. These cycles caused the zones with high Qi density to suddenly start expanding, and they would begin to affect the surrounding areas for large swathes of land which would then suddenly transform “normal” forests or wilderness territories to Qi-infested areas, with all of the creatures within becoming either Spirit Beasts or Monsters, with the prevalence of the Monster-type being a lot higher.
Every Village or Sect that was within the “flooded zone” or at the periphery would get swarmed with maddened wildlife attempting to tear down everyone and everything in their way, even eachother, which of course was very bad for the local humanoid population. It was the main reason why the whole planet had not been conquered as of yet by the intelligence of humanoid-kind and their magic, and people were still forced to stay within the “safe” areas of the planet, where the Qi concentration was at the lowest. All of the humanoid empires and kingdoms that existed in the world were like small “islands of safety” among a “lake” of massive threats that came from the Qi-infested monster areas.
What I was hearing on the other hand was “blah blah System shenanigans for limiting the humanoid npcs and keeping them in the dark and afraid” and “the System is coming for yo’ ass, clench dem’ buttcheeks”
Therefore, I brought up my issue of finances. I told Lingfeng about my problems and he was instantly like:
"You silly girl, did I not just tell you to ask me about small expenses like those in the first place, since I would cover them? If you need a new Pill Forge or vials or other random stuff like that for your alchemy, I see no problem with sponsoring you. And I thought you did not like wearing armors because they are heavy and cumbersome and that carving that bow was a challenge you had set for yourself."
Well, FUCK! I have had a sugar “Daddy?Uncle??” all of this time and I did not even know it!?
"Lingfeng, I think that both you and Fung have a very skewed opinion about what can be labeled as “small” expenses. A normal person would need to work and save money for their entire lives to even make up half of the amount that Pill Forge has cost. Just how fucking rich are you guys anyway?"
"Umm...If I were to approximate it all in low level spirit stones, about 10 million?"
"Fungus? You?"
"200 million...for the whole branch of my clan…but my own stipend is nowhere near that, a few hundred thousand at best."
"A few hundred thousand he says...fucking spoiled-rich-ass brat-ass gorilla-faced-ass does-not-know-the-value-of-money-ass stupid dum-ass priviledged-ass person-ass!"
"My ass is hurting only from hearing that burn!"
"As it should!"
While Lingfeng was somewhat a rich guy, he did not have that much in the way of ACTUAL cash, since all of his “riches” were in the form of practical assets like a couple of Spirit Springs, hotels, restaurants, the odd Apothecary shop here and there, which were all mostly out of the Sect’s borders.
All he had “at hand” were a few thousand spirit stones of different grades, and he did not even have any gold because it was “useless to him”.
I made him cough up all of his current stones, then I spent the whole rest of the day “upgrading” some of the more high-level stones by transferring the white Qi from the lesser ones to the higher ones.
I had also made sure not to waste any of the elemental Qi, and had just moved it away into lesser ones, creating some weird-ass 100% fire, water, earth, and air spirit stones that nobody had ever seen before.
While I was moving some of the Fire Qi from one stone to another, I had accidentally squeezed some more Fire Qi into an already full “cell” which got me a prompt from Timmy.
Timmy: Warning! Overcharged spirit stone detected. Current cell capacity at 105%. Overcharged spirit stones become more and more volatile as the overcharge increases and can result in a cascading cell breach and Qi release. Basically, careful with overcharging these because they can blow up in your face, BADLY! Especially the Fire ones!
Well, that’s another thing to experiment with! Spirit stone grenades, HAH! Later though.
I also asked Lingfeng if there were any spots around the Sect that had a higher concentration of good Qi compared to the environment. My cheapskate instincts told me that the most uncostly way to upgrade spirit stones was to find some specific spot where Qi gushed out from the earth and abuse the constant flow. He told me that there were indeed a few spots similar to what I had described around the sect, which lay on top of ley-line intersections, allowing for a higher concentration of Qi to be found in the world, and that he would take me to one of such places during the next few days if I wanted to. He told me that even my current home lay on top of a minor ley-line intersection, since the house had built-in formations that needed a constant Qi-flow to remain active.
So I guess my home had not been assigned randomly afterall, eh? Formations for what? For trapping the demon girl in case she went nuts, most likely! Another thing to worry about.
In the end, we had a pile of about 50+ “exceptional” high-grade spirit stones that were worth a fortune. I had kept them from between 80% to 95%, since it was impossible to find 100% pure ones in nature, but even at that purity, they were still worth a shitton more at that moment than before the upgrade.
I told Fung to take some of these back to his clan and tell them that they came from Elder Lingfeng, which was politely asking for the Tai’s clan assistance to sell some of his “collection”, because the younger generation needed “low level spirit stones” for their cultivation instead of his “treasures”. The Tai had immediately responded in a very polite and positive way, assuring us that the stones would be put up for auction immediately, and that we would be receiving the low level spirit stone counterpart the moment the items sold.
Which they did, instantly. There was not a single cultivator out there that did not know the absolutely insane value that our stones possesed, not to mention the fact that they were being sold for low level spirit stones in exchange, which was ridiculous. Items like these “pure” stones would only be usually traded for other valuable items, and very rarely for other stones.
With only an evening’s worth of stone upgrade time, I had earned back my debt to Fung and had even made a large profit. And since the whole affair had come from the side of Elder Lingfeng, nobody had doubted the authenticity or the reasons for the sale. In the end, Lingfeng was one of the companions of the Hero of the Sun, so him having “rare” stones was not unusual, neither was the fact that he had asked for many low level spirit stones in exchange, since just about everyone in the sect now knew about the existence on his “niece” that he visited every day like a dotting uncle, niece who was a low level cultivator.
Still, there would only be a limited number of times that we would be able to pull that trick, before people began to ask questions, even with Lingfeng’s reputation as a cover screen. Greed runs deep in the world, and if people suddenly began to think that Lingfeng had somehow found out a method for upgrading spirit stones, then they would find some way to harm him, even at his level. There were always bigger fish in the sea to be wary of.
After Fung had come back with an insane pile of low level spirit stones in his ring, I had just told him to keep them inside there for the moment, since I had no more room in my house to keep even those lying around as well, and spirit stones also “stacked” in the ring interface, taking very little space. Because of all of the collected ingredients, I now barely had enough room only for sleep in my dormitory.
Since I had so many ingredients at hand and we were not allowed to step out of the Sect because of the monsters anymore, I decided to resume leveling up our alchemy. After a couple more days after the stone influx, the rare cauldron that Fung had asked for finally arrived, alongside with a surprise “complimentary” book of Alchemy recipes as a gift from the Tai Clan for our dealings with them, which had been profitable for both parties. Inside were quite a few recipes for “solid state” pills, which were exactly what we needed at this moment. I think someone at the Tai Clan had noticed Fung’s attempts at learning Alchemy alongside with myself, and they were just giving us the book to help level their Young Master.
As far as the new pill cauldron was concerned, it was a weird looking thing, coloured in a nuance of that could not decide itself whether it was silver, bronze, or gold based on the angle you were looking at it, which I was actually hoping was because of the contained titanium alloy, because otherwise I cannot see how the damn thing could actually resist the corrosion. It had a flat bottom, unlike the more common variety of Pill Forges which tended to have the shape of a witch's cauldron with a round bottom, and was also supporting 4 hinges located around the cardinal points on the exterior, which allowed for other things to be clamped on either below, above or even on both sides. It was pretty well built and with a smart minimalistic design, but also still allowed for a lot of extended options like intake-outtake valves, the aforementioned pill forge add-ons, and many other doohickeys that I had yet to figure out how to install or to use.
We had immediately taken the cauldron to the forges, where the jolly old Forge Master had immediately begun to measure the thing from top to bottom in all directions and then had taken notes of all the dimensions.
Once the analysis was complete, he told us to come and check with him again in about 3 days, and that he will have a separator addon already crafted by that time. Since we were already at the subject, we had asked him which of the other add-ons he was able to craft, and for the exception of a couple of really weird ones that required unusual materials in their crafting, he was capable of creating pretty much every item on the entire list.
I was really glad to hear that, because if we ever needed another type of add-on, we knew where to come.
I could now finally safely spend a skill point to unlock the [Automatic Alchemical Essence Isolation and Separation] skill that I had discovered earlier.
Timmy: You now have 9 Unassigned Skill points left.
Once the separator had been also installed, we were now in business.
Which I also “officially” decided to inaugurate, and “hire” Fung as my right hand man at my Pharmaceutical Company which I promptly named Pills-R-Us. I was now CEO Trina in charge of RnD and Fung was Deputy Director in charge of Transportation and Distribution.
Of course, Fung did not get any of that and told me that I’m acting weird again. I just told him to call me Boss T. from now on, and laughed evilly.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
With the recipe book the Tai had given us, we began to grind some Alchemy. It was slow going, but we were making progress. My immediate goal was still to get over 100 to unlock the identification of 4 properties.
When it came to Alchemical products, there were four “major” categories of potions or pills that one could make. Of course, there were many sub-variations and even a few exceptions, but it usually went like this:
Restorative Potions or Pills: These things were aimed at restoring or repairing a diminished or damaged stat, from the most common Healing product to the more abstract and weird ones like Dispel or Remove Curse potions. These also included the recipes for curing poisons, diseases and magical afflictions as well, because the overall goal of these types of products was to put you as close to perfectly healthy and unaffected as possible.
Buff Potions or Pills: The second set of recipes, which were aimed at boosting a certain attribute or skills for a certain amount of time. Most were aimed at short buffs that could last between a few seconds to a couple of hours, but there were even some fucking rare-ass and super-expensive potions out there that gave you a permanent stat increase or buff. You may wonder “but hey, if there’s some pots out there that can give you perma-stat increase, then won’t the rich just keep popping those until they get god-like?”. Well, short answer, no. There was a thing called Pill Poison that prevented that, but I’ll come back to that a little bit later.
Poison Potions or Pills: The third set of recipes, which were aimed at creating all sorts of nasty or undetectable poisons. If it wasn’t obvious enough, these were used for killing or debilitating a target using poisons.
The mastery of the poison arts was vast, and there were a myriad of ways one could kill another being using these products, each with a specific goal or target in mind. Poisons were the most “custom made” products on this list, since they were catered more towards individual use rather than general applications.
Utility Potions or Pills: The last set of recipes, which were aimed at creating stuff to aid a person in or out of combat that did not involve direct consumption. They were your “grenade-like” explosive pots, the sticky glue potions, the lubrification and derusting pots, freezing potions, underwater breathing pills, levitation pills etc., basically any other whacky effect that could be obtained via Alchemy that was not included in the previous three categories was found here instead.
Our recipe book had a few recipes of each type, but it was obvious that these were not “top of the line” recipes by any margin. They were high enough for the Alchemist that had made them to not want to share them for free, but not rare or weird enough to be considered “hoardable secrets”.
Ever since I had unlocked the Autocraft option, whenever I would make a new batch, I would get an Alchemy screen that depicted the ingredients that I had placed within the Pill Forge, the catalysts, and the approximate expected “product outcome” if nothing went wrong or any contamination occurred. The contamination problem would pop up from time to time when things that were not supposed to be in the recipe would find their way inside of the cauldron, like random earth stuck to the plant, other medicinal juices that had rubbed or dripped on the plant from other species because of improper preservation, or even stuff like hair that dropped from my head in the mix by accident. After a couple of “hair contaminations” lowering my product’s outcome, I had immediately instituted “laboratory level” mandatory cleanliness everywhere around the Pill Forge, and had proceeded to remove the hair from my arms (and legs, since I was doing it anyway and I was looking like a cavewoman underneath my robes) by waxing it off with a mix of forest resins, beeswax, sugar and lemon juice. Fung did not get spared either, and I had a sadistically good time ripping all of his manly hair away from his body while he screamed like a little girl under my waxy assaults. After that I would wear a headcover and mask to make sure I would not lose hair or drip saliva in the mix, before going to work. Fungus needed no head protection since he was bald, so that was a bonus for him.
Usually, it would take a few ingredients “mixed” together to obtain a product, but there was also another option, and that was to extract the “medicinal essence” from the ingredients by using only one type of ingredient in the Pill Forge in large quantities.
Unless one had a very good forge, separator, and Alchemy skills, the secondary or tertiary medicinal essences would get lost, leaving only the “desired” one as the end result. At the moment because of my Alchemy skill level, I was only able to separate just two medicinal essences from a base ingredient, with the rest getting lost as residue. By extracting a medicinal essence, the overall potency of the original medicinal essence would get reduced, but would become independent. Before I had gotten my hands on the new Pill Forge, the conversion loss was at a catastrophic 50 %, but after the upgrades, it had gone down to below 30%+. I assumed that the best of the best tools would allow for total lossless extraction. If a plant had, for example, 31% desired medicinal Qi, after extraction I would only be left with 21% essence.
The medicinal essences themselves were weird things. Most looked like colored powder residue or juice that would remain at the bottom of each section of the separator addon, based on priority.
When inspected with spiritual sight, the medicinal dust looked like incredibly tiny colored capsules, each containing a mote or two of the medicinal Qi associated with it.
The stuff I had managed to find so far went something like this:
The Rgb Red-colored powder was called Essence of Health and was used for Hp restoration.
The Rgb Green-colored powder was called Essence of Stamina and was used for Stamina/Fatigue restoration.
The Rgb Blue-colored powder was called Essence of Magic and was used for Qi/Mana restoration.
Sulphur yellow-colored powder would amplify the Strength of the imbiber.
Blood-colored powder would amplify the Constitution of the imbiber.
Grass green-colored powder would amplify the Adroitness of the imbiber.
Bright yellow-colored powder would amplify the Perception of the imbiber.
Silver Blue-colored powder would amplify the Intelligence of the imbiber.
Pink-colored powder would amplify the Charisma of the imbiber.
Metallic gold-colored powder would be used to obtain a temporary all-stat increase across the line.
Of course, then came the weirder types of medicinal Qi:
Orange-colored powder would amplify fire-related spells or potions.
Teal-colored powder would amplify water-related spells or potions.
Light green-colored powder would amplify wind-related spells or potions.
Sugar brown-colored powder would amplify earth-related spells or potions.
Metallic silver-colored powder would amplify the Smithing Skills and Arts of the imbiber.
Turtle greenblack-colored powder would amplify the Defense and Armor related skills and Arts of the imbiber.
Steroid yellow-colored powder would amplify the Offense and Weapon related skills and Arts of the imbiber.
Purple-colored powder would be used to temporarily increase the Spellpower Modifier of the imbiber, making all spells stronger.
Crystal blue-colored powder would amplify the run and movement speed of the imbiber.
Bile green-colored powder would cure diseases.
Poison darkgreen-colored powder would neutralise poisons.
White-milk-colored powder would dispel magical effects.
Of course, these were just the ones I had discovered so far. I was certain that there were a whole lot more of these things out there.
Another thing to note is the fact that the essences themselves had a certain concentration. Since the essence capsules of the essence dust were a type of Qi container as well, they were similar to the spirit stones in that regard, with one exception. While I could still move the medicinal Qi motes with my branch-tentacles in and out of their essence containers, I had no way of increasing the “container’s” quality, unlike the spirit stones, who had quality tiers even for the base container. The only way to create new bigger and better containers was by further using alchemy to refine the essences. High concentration essences had better built container-particles that could accommodate many more medicinal Qi motes per the exact same volume, but refining an essence to a higher quality tier required an enormous amount of the lower-end stuff, with the amount of conversion loss of rate being dependent on the tools used for the refinement.
Basically, you would require cart-loads off low-level healing herbs just to get a decently concentrated essence by the end of the refinement process.
At least that's what would happen if you were doing things the “legitimate” way.
I had found a way to bypass all of that bullshit alltogether by using the 100% spirit Stones that I was able to make, as attached catalysts to the refinement process.
The Pill Forge had these weird attachments at each cardinal point as well as below the bottom, where the Fire burner/generator was at, slots in which you could place a spirit stone, and have the Qi inside of the stone act as a catalyst for the reaction occurring inside of the cauldron or as magical booster for the Fire. The purer a spirit stone was, the more pronounced the effects would become upon the end results.
By using 100% pure spirit stones as catalysts and Fire generators, I had managed to drag the medicinal Qi loss to below 5%, which was way more than just “acceptable” for a Rare quality Pill Forge. Also, while being used in conjunction with the Automated essence refinement process, the pure spirit stones would allow for the creation of much better essence containers, allowing me to obtain medicinal essences that contained even above 90% medicinal effect concentration inside of the dust, which was absolutely jaw-dropping-incredible for my level of alchemy. Only grandmasters would usually be able to obtain such high level concentrations, and only by using the most legendary of tools, if done the “normal” way. But because I had found a method to create 100% pure Spirit stones, I was now “gaming” the Alchemy autocraft part of the System as well, which was dependent on the spirits stone concentration when used as catalysts to boost the results of whatever was happening inside of the pill forge.
The amount for which the spirit stone catalyst accounted inside a reaction was quite high, allowing me to attempt and milk medicinal essences even out of household common ingredients like onions and apples, which was unheard of. Apples would give some nice Essence of Health for example, proving that even the Planetary System thought apples were a healthy product!
After refining many of my ingredients and freeing up the room-space inside of my dormitory from all of the accumulated herbal junk, I now had an entire collection of glass vials filled with many medicinal essences of different purities and effects that I could mix up in anyway I wanted.
My shelves looked like a terrible arrangement of all sorts of colors of the rainbow, strewn about without any seeming logic and leaving a rather discordant color gradient pattern onto the retina of the beholder.
Since I was now mostly dealing with extracted essences rather than with plain ingredients, I was able to create products and recipes of my own, which I had begun making by testing out the compatibility between the essences when I mixed them together.
Some essences were neutral to each other, and did not react at all, like the health, stamina, and magic ones. You could easily put all three of those together in one single pill and obtain a triple-effect product.
Some other essences would combine with each other and either lower the end effects, increase them, or change them into something absolutely new that could be either brilliantly good or horribly bad.
It had taken many permutation attempts for me to get the general idea about how the essences were able to combine with each other, but due to the sheer number of medicinal Qi types and the fact that more than one essence could be combined with another at the same time for different results, I knew that I had barely scratched the surface of what alchemy was able to create.
Unfortunately, after spending a few days grinding away at the alchemy skills, we had run out of Spirit Herb type of ingredients, and we were left with only the common household items. Messing around with those gave very little to no alchemy progression points, so they were just not worth it even if the quantities available were much, much larger, since we could basically just go to the marketplace and buy truck loads of the stuff.
Still, they were a good cheap alternative for essence extraction.
I was alternating with Fung as we took turns extracting essences and refining them, or attempting new mixtures.
In the end we had both shot over 100, with me getting stuck at 123 and Fung at 105.
When Fungus had managed to create his first high-tier pill from the recipe list by gaming the rig with pure spirit stones, he had pissed his eyes with joy instead of sadness and it had become a rather awkward moment, since I did not know what to say back to him. I'm just glad that he was happy and was feeling that he was actually accomplishing something, since he was a sensitive soul that did not subscribe to that “men don’t cry” bullshit slogan.
Because of the high concentration of essences that we were handling, some of the products that we had created had been automatically labelled by the system as 50+, putting us near the level of grandmasters when it came to the actual finished product, even though we were still around 100 alchemy skill-wise. This would have been impossible to create if I did not have that “ignore level requirements” module though, as the system would have disallowed me from even attempting to craft a level 50+ pill.
My personal crown achievement had been a triple rejuvenation pill that restored Hp, stamina and Qi all at the same time with barely any pill poison aka cooldown and 0 side effects.
The pill poison “debuff” was something that you would receive when consuming most alchemical products, and would vanish by itself after being purged outside of the body after a shorter or longer period of time, based on the potion that you had used. It also led to the creation of kidney stones if an adventurer became over-reliant on potions.
If you were to use another potion while still being affected by the previous pill poison debuff, it would turn into a damage of a time effect that would chip away at your health. If you continued to use more and more potions, the debuff would stack and it would become more and more dire until it would become out-right able to kill you.
The pill poison debuff basically acted as a pill/potion cooldown manager, disallowing people from potion-spamming.
A poorly made minor healing potion would have a cool down of more than 5-minutes because of its higher concentration of pill poison, while the high-end level stuff would only have a cooldown off around 30 to 40 seconds each.
In the case of the permanent-status-increase elixirs or pills, the pill poison resulting from the consumption of such an item would also remain permanently within you, albeit coming in a different form, which was that of debuff to another stat.
To give an example, a potion that enhanced a user’s strength by 2 permanently would also contain a pill poison that would lower another random stat by 1. If used a second time, the pill poison lowered another stat by 2, then by 3 etc, making it in such a way that you would end up losing more stat points than you were gaining after a certain point. This prevented people from using too many of these perma-increase products to obtain ridiculously high amounts of stats through judicious use of alchemical products.
Only legendary level products had perma-stat increases with zero penalty on the other side, and those would be usually fought over by the Sects in quite violent ways when one hit the market, involving even the Sect Masters, since even those high level dudes could still benefit from the products.
Sadly, even with me “gaming” the System, I was unable to create anything like that for the moment because of two main reasons: I did not have a recipe for such a thing, but there was a chance the I could still get the desired effect from my experimentation with essences, and another was the fact that the Pill Forge was not of a high enough quality to totally eliminate the “downside” debuffs even after being fully plugged-in with pure 100% Spirit Stones.
But for now, I was quite satisfied with what I was able to make. Out of all of the recipes in the book, I was able to make about 95% of all of them, and not because of a lack of skill, but rather because of a lack of ingredients, since some of the rarer products required weird-ass plants as a base.
Another absolutely grand stroke of brilliance came to me when I thought of coating the exteriors of my created pills with a layer of caramelized sugar. Surprisingly, this allowed for the pills to last much longer before they “expired” by losing all of their medicinal Qi strength, and would allow for a better “user experience” when consumed or held in the mouth during combat as an emergency item, which was a common practice.
Taking the pills that I had made to the stove/cooking menu, the coating “recipe” now even showed up on the list as [Coat Pill in Caramelized Sugar] and could be autocrafted. There were very few pills that could not be coated since the sugar would react badly with the essence within the pill and ruin the end effect.
I now held in my hand the sugar-coated Triple-Rejuvenation Pill I had made that had a cooldown of a meager 5 seconds and restored more that 50% of all resources, a Jawbreaker which I now officially advertised as “The Pill in the Stone, One Pill to Rule Them All!” to all would-be buyers.
In truth, there was such a thing as an “Ideal Pill or Potion”. The product would have no pill poison aka cooldown time, would restore a lot of resources almost instantly, would have long-lasting lingering positive effects or have very strong multiple effects, would have no pill poison accumulation or stat debuff downsides, and could be made out of cheap ingreds. The same for elixirs, with the ideal having no stat debuff downsides and a permanent effect of a multiple-stat increase in one go. Sadly, to create such a product was nearly impossible, but it was the “end goal” of all alchemists, besides finding the Philosopher’s Stone.
Timmy: Your intuition has unlocked an Alchemist only quest:
[The Search for The One]
Requirements for completion:
Discover or craft the best Alchemist Tools.
Find the elusive Ingredient or Essence that can temporarily boost Alchemy skill levels.
Craft a product with no pill poison/cooldown.
Craft a permanent elixir with no downsides.
Transmute Lead to Gold.
Reward:
[Recipe: The Philosopher’s Stone]
Description:
This is an incredibly rare and Indestructible Spirit Stone that recharges itself. It can go to 100% purity and can repeatedly be used as a catalyst or even as a regular Spirit Stone.
The stone can be used to ignore the law of conservation of mass, allowing you to receive more product out of a reaction than the mass of the ingredients you have put in.
It cannot be used in crafting recipes that consume a spirit stone altogether, but it can be used as a power source for any other recipes that just drain it.
Also grants an All-Stat increase to your attributes, based on your alchemy level, when worn as a trinket.
The item is Unique-equipped aka you can only wear one, wearing any extra does nothing.
Well fuck me sideways, that’s some fucking awesome trinket right there! I have to get my hands on that eventually!
Wait, did I see that right? Ingredient that boosts Alchemy skill? Won’t that become a circular boosting thing, where you could create ever-stronger alchemy boosting potions?
Timmy: Nope, there is a turning point where even boosted you would still get the same effect as non-boosted. Plus, you cannot chain-use those potions because of Pill Poison. Even if you somehow made alchemy boosting potions with zero pill poison, you would still hit the other cap.
Meh, so much for Alchemy level Over 9000!
But for non-capped alchemists like us, an Alchemy-skill boosting elixir would be a true blessing in disguise, because it would allow student alchemists to prepare potions that they otherwise wouldn't be able to make because of the Alchemy level restrictions.
The thing that made LESS sense to me though, was how pills or potions actually worked. Near-instant effects made no fucking sense! After barely swallowing a product, you would get the full effect from it! Where the hell was the digestion time or metabolism processing duration, wtf!?
It just meant that the ability to reach the “buffed” state or for self-healing was already existent within the body even before the pill, and the pill ingestion was just an “excuse” for the System to enable the “extra juice” or “repair mode”.