Sen managed to escape Falling Leaf’s wrath mostly unscathed. Her fury had been pretty halfhearted after he waved the pill in front of her. She clipped his chin with a claw and drew a negligible amount of blood. He thought she’d done it mostly to prove a point. Don’t wake me up from a nap unless there’s danger imminent. On the whole, it was a sentiment with which Sen agreed. That ultra-mild chastisement did nothing to dampen his good mood. He had succeeded in making a pill. He didn’t even care if it was the right kind of pill, although his general impression of it told him it was. The fact of the pill was far more important to him than the nature of the pill. He could do it. He’d have to worry about making the right kind of pills, of course, but that was a worry for the next day, week, and probably several months. He allowed himself to simply bask in his success for a moment, letting the exuberant inner light heal over the thousand cuts his confidence in his alchemy skills had taken.

After that initial glow of success wore off, he exited the galehouse – quietly – and made his way to Fu Ruolan’s home. He had no idea if the woman slept at all, but he thought it was probably the exception, rather than the rule. She answered the door with a frown, but it didn’t look like he’d woken her. At worst, she had the look of someone who had been interrupted while deep in thought and whose mind was still mostly on the task she’d walked away from. He gave her a big grin and triumphantly held up the pill between two fingers. She blinked at it before her eyes went wide. She seized his arm and dragged him into the house.

“How?” she demanded. “How did you do it?”

Sen kept the explanation concise. She’d observed him making elixirs a few times, so he didn’t need to go into any depth to get across the essentials of the process he’d employed. After he finished, she sat there with a finger idly tapping against her cheek. He didn’t know what she was pondering but decided it was best to let her speak when she was ready. He glanced around the room, but the decorations were sparse. There were some touches that made it feel like a home. He saw a comfortable blanket folded up on a chair. There was a cup of tea that looked like it had gone cold hours before. There were a few scrolls scattered about. His eyes lingered on those. From what he could see, they were alchemy scrolls. His fingers twitched with a desire to grab them, but he knew better. She’d just tell him to put them down or give them back. She’d already given him the only text about alchemy she wanted him using for the time being. And he couldn’t really complain. The primer had a lot of incredibly useful information in it. He just wanted more. There was never too much knowledge in his opinion.

“May I see the pill?” asked Fu Ruolan.

He turned his head back to her. She had an amused look. No doubt, she had guessed at his thoughts. He withdrew the pill from the storage ring where he’d stored it for safekeeping. Reaching over, he dropped the pill into her outstretched hand. He felt a faint swirl of qi and the barest whisper of her spiritual sense as she examined the pill. His own examination of the pill hadn’t revealed any problems with it that he could identify. Of course, his inability to identify them wasn’t a guarantee that the pill was as it should be. There could be issues with it that he lacked the experience to recognize. The longer Fu Ruolan sat there with the pill, the more nervous he became. Eventually, she made a discontented noise and handed it back. Sen lifted an eyebrow at her.

“Is there something wrong with the pill?”

“Wrong?” she asked. “No, I wouldn’t characterize it as wrong. Come with me. I want to show you something.”

Sen followed her back into her miraculous storage treasure. They didn’t go nearly so deep that time. Instead, they stopped at a set of shelves that had dozens of small boxes on them. None of them were labeled, much to Sen’s disappointment, but Fu Ruolan picked one up off the bottom shelf. She flipped it open and pulled out a small round pill. She handed it to him. He held the pill in his hand and then did much as she had done with his, examining it with his qi and spiritual sense. He frowned at it. It was a healing pill, technically speaking. It just wasn’t a very good one. At best, it might help speed up the healing of a broken bone. He supposed it would probably be good for mortals who needed some help healing cuts, assuming they were also getting stitched up and properly bandaged. A quick look at Fu Ruolan revealed an expectant expression. Right, he thought. This must be what I was supposed to make. He pointed at the pill in his hand.

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“This is what the recipe is meant to produce?”

She nodded. “Indeed. Is your pill like that?”

Sen put the pill he had made next to the one Fu Ruolan had given him. While they were the same size, the similarities ended there. While his pill gave off a dull blue glow, the other pill was simply dull blue. He could feel the qi radiating off his pill, if only gently, while he had to search for the qi in the other pill. It was very clear that what he had made was a much better version of that pill. He really wanted to simply enjoy his success, but he could understand why Fu Ruolan was unhappy. If the pattern held true and all of his pills were of a better quality, then the results of making the pills for his body cultivation might become unpredictable. Unpredictable results were not a good thing with body cultivation. Bodies already reacted somewhat unpredictably. Adding unpredictability on the pill side of the equation enhanced the danger for the cultivator. It made the odds of failure much higher.

“Normally, I’d see this as a good thing,” muttered Sen.

Fu Ruolan laughed a little. “So would I, in any other circumstance. This is one time when you want to make exactly what the recipes call for.”

Sen paced back and forth. If push came to shove, he could just take his chances. No, he would take his chances. His apparent inability to move forward was unacceptable. At some point, stagnating would catch up to him and deliver different kinds of bad results. There was also the possibility that he could fine-tune his pill refining once he got a better handle on it. Just because this one pill was better than the recipe normally produced, it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that every pill he made would be like that. They needed more information.

“We don’t know enough yet to be forecasting problems. Hells, we don’t even know if I’ll be able to repeat this minor miracle.”

“Speaking of that, we should go test it right now.”

“Agreed,” said Sen, suddenly very interested to see how a second attempt would turn out.

They left the storage treasure behind and entered Fu Ruolan’s alchemy workshop. They’d spent so much time in that space working together that they dropped into familiar routines immediately. Sen got the fire stirred up a little and settled the cauldron on the stove with some water in it. Fu Ruolan produced the plant and reagents he’d need. The biggest difference was inside of Sen. Where fear and worry had once dominated his mind, now there was hope and some of that old confidence he’d felt. He moved through the process with a calm assurance. Having done the recipe this way once already, he had a better idea of what to expect and when to expect it, which let him prevent problems he’d had to solve or fix the first time around. While he dropped almost instantly into the space where he wasn’t thinking, he was aware that he was smiling so hard that it might have hurt if he was still a mortal.

In what felt like no time at all, he was done and lifting the cauldron away from the heat. Bleeding the heat away, he set the cauldron on a table. While he didn’t know exactly how well the pill would turn out, he was very confident that he’d succeeded again. Eyeing Fu Ruolan, he gestured to the cauldron. She’d been there for all of those failures. He thought she might enjoy being the one to reveal a success.

“If you’d care to do the honors,” he said.

With a little nod, she walked over and lifted the lid. She peered down briefly before glancing over at him. She dipped a hand into the cauldron and came up with another round pill. Sen grimaced. He didn’t even need to take out his original pill to tell that the new one was an improvement over his initial success. The glow was brighter and the sense of qi around it was stronger.

“Well, it’s not substantive proof, but it looks like a trend is forming here.”

Sen closed his eyes. “You know what? That’s a problem for future Sen.”

“Future Sen?”

“Yes, future Sen. The me who will be trying to make the pill for my body cultivation. Today Sen is just going to be happy that I finally made pill refinement work.”

Fu Ruolan’s brows furrowed, and she almost started to speak a few times before she shook her head.

“You’re right,” she said. “This is critical progress. You should be happy about it. We can worry about those other problems when they actually become problems.”