Sen had planned to wait until the next day and take his plan to Fu Ruolan, but it nagged at him as he tried to focus on reading the primer. He found himself rereading the same passages over and over again as his attention slipped from the book to the possibility that he might finally crack the problem of pill refining. Of course, that came with equal parts excitement and trepidation. If it worked, it would be a fantastic triumph. If it failed, Sen cringed to imagine the blow that might deliver. While he and Fu Ruolan had spoken optimistically about finding some new approach or idea, Sen didn’t think it was going to happen. He was pretty sure that they had exhausted the list of likely and unlikely options, and there had been plenty.
He had thought that perhaps his passive qi gathering was interfering with the process somehow. While Fu Ruolan had been a little startled by the revelation that he was doing such a thing, she had agreed it was worth exploring. Then, she had suggested that his aura might be muddying up the process. That had taken a little explanation. While Sen was aware that there were such things as auras and had even used his to some extent, the dragon hadn’t been big on explaining exactly what auras were or how they functioned under normal circumstances. It turned out that it was simply a small field of energy around a person. Cultivators generally enjoyed more powerful ones that were also much more tightly controlled, which was what allowed for things like auric imposition. Sen had tried to bypass that problem by hiding. He assumed that whatever it was that he was drawing inside himself included his aura. That much had been true but didn’t yield success.
They had tried changing to ingredients grown in different locations. They had tried other simple recipes. They had tried changing cauldrons, changing locations, and even using flames generated entirely from fire qi. Fu Ruolan had even made some of the alchemical recipes under identical conditions, only to end up with perfectly functional pills. He wasn’t sure who was more upset by that, him or her. He thought he might have edged her out with his despair, but it was still a close thing. With so many ideas coming up empty for them, it was hard to feel like this idea was any better, but any idea beat no idea. And it might work. That was what had kept him going more than anything else, the distant possibility that something might actually let him make a pill.
He had even entertained the idea that his disdain for pills had somehow poisoned the process. After examining his feelings on the matter, though, he had to dismiss it. Whatever hard feelings he once possessed had been burned away by the fact of his overwhelming need. No matter what he might have thought before, he hadn’t been so bought into those ideas that he was ready to die for the principle. He was no saint who had taken a vow to forsake pills forever. He’d probably always view them askance, but he’d taken pills in the intervening time since his first, traumatic experiences with them. They were just another tool that cultivators employed. He would always default to elixirs when given the option, though. He had a strong sentimental attachment to them that he didn’t expect to ever lose.
The part of Sen that took hope in the possibility of success urged him to go and simply try to do it. There was no benefit to waiting since he had a new idea to test. The sooner he knew, the sooner he could take appropriate next steps. If it worked, he had a viable pathway forward and could start testing out other recipes in the manual. That would let him both build confidence and develop his own skill base with the new approach. The part of him that had been lashed by failure wanted to wait. Granted, if he failed again, which seemed far more likely, it would only be him there to see the failure. It would still cut, but maybe it would wound him a little less deeply. That part argued that it would be to try with Fu Ruolan there. Even if he failed, she might spot something that would give her an idea about how to move forward.
Those opposing impulses warred inside his head, gaining and losing ground, and generally preventing him from thinking about anything else for more than a minute or two at a time. Sen finally settled the debate by deciding that he would test it out tonight and again the next day. If he failed, he could face that first failure in private. That might make another failure in front of Fu Ruolan sting a little less. Plus, if he somehow succeeded, he’d want a chance to replicate the success with a witness present. Sen had come to realize that he didn’t really understand what he was doing when he made elixirs. He barely even engaged his mind while he was doing it. He felt his way through the process, rather than thinking his way through it. He grasped that his intuitive feel for it was a major contributor to his success with elixirs, but his lack of insight into his own methods made them difficult to explain and all but impossible to teach to someone else. While that wasn’t a major concern for him, it was something that troubled him in the abstract.
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Shaking those thoughts off, he dropped the primer onto the stone table he’d made for such things and went into the common area of the galehouse. Falling Leaf was stretched out on a blanket near the fire and sound asleep. He didn’t know how she managed to sleep so much. He didn’t think he was physically capable of it unless he was injured or had skipped rest for too long. He also knew her senses were at least as sharp as his, so he made a point of keeping quiet when he entered the kitchen. He sealed the door with air qi so that he wouldn’t accidentally wake her up. He glared at the cauldron that was set aside on a stone counter that looked like it had grown straight out of the wall.
“You and I have had our differences, cauldron,” said Sen. “If you think you could cut me some slack for a while, I’d really appreciate it.”
The cauldron didn’t say anything, but Sen didn’t sense any active malevolence from it. He decided that was probably the best he was going to do. He closed his eyes and centered himself the way he would before conducting his sword or spear forms. No matter how badly he wanted this to work, he still needed to approach with a calm mind. Otherwise, he’d be likely to fail because he rushed something that he should have handled more slowly. He felt the qi in his channels moving at the steady pace of his passive cultivation. He looked at his dantian and had mixed feelings. He had recovered much of the qi he’d spent fighting those beasts in the last push to get home, but he worried about what might happen if his dantian got full again. That strange double helix formation around the edge of his dantian was just going to keep making that dense liquid qi. There would come a point when there simply wasn’t any room left. His mind started to drift in that direction as he wondered what he might do in that situation, but he refocused and let those concerns wash away. They were real concerns but not ones that required immediate attention. Going down that road was a distraction and nothing more.
It took longer than it should have, but Sen eventually found the calm that he wanted. With one last mildly suspicious look at the cauldron, he stoked the fire in the stove and put the alchemist tool on top of it. He did a quick mental review of the ingredients and then set to work. Every time he’d attempted to make the healing pill, the process had felt unnatural to him, unnecessarily forced and rigid. So, Sen discarded anything in the process that felt that way to him. He added the ingredients in the order that seemed best to him, which was not at all the order the recipe insisted on. When he felt that intuition to adjust something, be it heat or the amount of qi in some specific spot in the cauldron, he did it. He dropped into that almost trancelike state he usually assumed when making elixirs. It felt right.
The process didn’t fight him anymore. He didn’t feel failure loom at every moment. Instead, he felt the ingredients fusing and merging in ways that he didn’t think the recipe writer ever anticipated. He suspected that whoever had come up with the recipe would have abandoned the process long since under the mistaken belief that it would fail. With each passing moment, though, Sen became more and more certain it was working. He didn’t celebrate victory early. He knew better than to declare success before he had the pill in hand but worry stopped nibbling away at his confidence. He entered into what he might think of as a dance with the contents of the cauldron. The components tried to move one way and, if it felt right, he let them. If it felt wrong, he guided them back to where they needed to be. He was a partner in the movements, not a king to dictate motion.
He lost himself in that dance, releasing his conscious mind more and more until silence reigned inside of him. He let instincts guide his qi until, abruptly, there was nothing more to do. His eyes snapped open and he swept the cauldron off the stove, bleeding the heat away with a swift application of fire qi. He set the cauldron on the counter and took a deep breath as he tried to ward off both hope and fear. When he’d steadied himself, he lifted the lid from the cauldron. His eyes scanned for the charred mush he’d come to expect and, instead, locked onto a perfectly spherical object that gave off a dull blue glow. With a trembling hand, he reached down and gently picked up the pill between two fingers. He let it roll back into his palm and just looked at it. Disbelief and joy did a little dance inside his soul as his hand closed around the pill. He lifted his fist over his head.
“Yes!” he screamed in a voice that shook the galehouse.
One second later, Falling Leaf crashed through the kitchen door, eyes wild and barely conscious. Her eyes locked on him and relief flooded her expression. Then, her gaze tracked from his face to his arm and his upraised fist. A feeling of deep dread took root in Sen, as the relief on her face transformed into a murderous glare. He scurried back as she stalked toward him with shadow claws forming around her fingers.
“Oh shit,” said Sen.