For all the stagnation that had marked the months he spent trying to make pill refining work as others did it, the time after he figured out the trick followed a path of meteoric mastery that even he wouldn’t have credited if he hadn’t experienced it personally. He flew through the primer. The early recipes seemed laughably easy to him when he let his instincts guide the process. There were days when he completed half a dozen new pills even when intentionally maintained a leisurely pace. That wasn’t to say it was entirely smooth sailing. While his pills would generate the right kinds of results, they were routinely much more potent than they should be.
At first, he simply shrugged it off. It was possible that he was working with better or more potent ingredients. He had collected many of his plants from far deeper into the wilds than most people ventured. The harvesting in those areas was much less common and the qi was often denser, which allowed plants to grow longer and absorb more qi. It was also possible that he was simply enjoying better results because his process was more efficient in some inscrutable way. He couldn’t really test that because his process diverged so much from the process other alchemists used to make their pills. The kind of one-to-one comparison that would have provided answers to that question simply wasn’t possible under those conditions.
As the results piled up around him, though, it became harder to ignore. He’d never lost sight of the end goal of learning pill refining. It was so he could make the pills for the Five-Five Body Transformation and save his own life. The persistently much-higher-than-average potency of his pill refining jeopardized that end goal. He didn’t want to kill himself in the bid to save himself, and a twice as powerful pill for that body refining could kill him. Granted, he was much healthier than he had been when he’d first arrived on Fu Ruolan’s doorstep, and surviving that kind of body refinement depended a great deal on personal willpower. Still, the body itself had to be able to withstand the pressures of the change. He might be willing to stack his will up against the demands of more powerful versions of those pills, but he was less certain that his body could hold up. It was a concern that Fu Ruolan shared.
“Part of me is ecstatic with these results,” said Fu Ruolan, waving at Sen’s most recent batch of pills. “I’ve been meaning to ask. What you’re failure rate with these?”
Sen glanced at the pills on the work table. “Zero.”
Fu Ruolan closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “You aren’t just saying that to get under my skin, are you?”
“Why would I do that?”
“That’s what I thought. Don’t ever let that bit of information slip to another alchemist. They might well try to murder you.”
“Why?” asked Sen.
“Because no one has a failure rate of zero. No one. It’s half the reason that pills and elixirs are so expensive. A thirty percent failure rate is considered outstanding, exceptional even, especially with more complex pills and elixirs. I imagine that someone like Ma Caihong has a better success rate, but I doubt even she gets it right every time.”
Sen thought back about that. It was true that Auntie Caihong’s pills and elixirs usually came out fine but not always. He could remember times when she would throw something away out of a cauldron in disgust.
“That’s true. I saw some of her attempts fail. I just assumed she was trying to make something especially difficult.”
“Ha! She probably was trying to make something difficult. I don’t know why she’d waste her time on anything that wasn’t difficult. There’s no point in making simple things when you have that kind of skill. It’s literally a waste of time. The point is that your freakish success rate is the kind of thing that will make other alchemists hateful and vengeful. Everything you make costs you less and, judging by these, is worth more. People have killed for a lot less than that.”
“I will bear that in mind,” said Sen, offering Fu Ruolan a bow.
“You do that. Still, as happy as your results make me, it’s still troubling. If you can’t figure out a way to tone this down, I can’t even begin to guess what kind of pills you’ll get for your body cultivation. Have you tried to tone it down? To make something less potent on purpose?”
Sen shook his head. “I wouldn’t really know where to start. I think I know, in a vague, general sort of way, why they’re better. But I don’t understand the details nearly well enough to be able to say, oh yeah, if I just don’t do this, I’ll get weaker pills.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“That’s one problem with intuitive genius. Well, I suggest that you start experimenting. I doubt that you’ll be able to get them notched all the way back to what a normal alchemist does. If you can reduce the improvement by even twenty-five percent, though, it will make a big difference when it comes time to make your body cultivation pills. If you can get it down by fifty percent, that might even let us make some predictions about what will happen with those pills.”
“Any suggestions about where to start?”
Fu Ruolan's brows lowered into a scowl. “I can make suggestions, but they’d be guesses. I can only see part of what you’re doing and the how of it is lost on me completely. My best bit of guesswork advice is to not aim for perfect fixes. When you adjust temperatures and qi inside the cauldron, it looks like you always aim for a perfect result. Stop doing that. Aim for a less-than-perfect adjustment. See what happens.”
Everything inside of Sen railed against doing that. It felt fundamentally wrong not to do his best. On the flip side, he’d done a lot of things he didn’t like when his life was on the line. He’d just add trying this approach to the list. Besides, even if it didn’t work, it might give him a better idea of what to try. He’d done enough healer work to understand that extra potency wasn’t always the best thing for the person receiving the elixir. Of course, in those days, his best efforts were generally something that people’s bodies could tolerate. When he’d been helping after the battle between the fire cultivators and the water cultivators, he remembered in a misty, dreamlike way that he had tailored elixirs to the needs and physical capacities of the injured. He just couldn’t remember how he’d done it. He’d been in a trance-like state for most of that time, and it only came back to him in patchy flashes.
“I guess it’s worth a try,” said Sen, still feeling a little doubtful.
Fu Ruolan shrugged. “Like I said, I’m guessing as much as anything else. I have no idea if that approach will work or not. I just know that you’re going to want better control over the outcome with your body cultivation pills than you’re getting right now.”
“Fair enough.”
“Since you already know you can make these, you can always experiment with them. You’ll have a good frame of reference with the original pills. Obviously, there’s no way to know exactly how much weaker any given pill is, but you should be able to make a decent estimate.”
“That makes sense. I may pick one of the earlier pills, though. Maybe even that first healing pill. The ingredients are more common and less expensive. No point wasting valuable resources on things I may end up having to throw away. If I figure out a way to reliably make less potent healing pills, then it might make more sense to try it on recipes like those,” said Sen, gesturing at the pills on the table.
“As you think is best,” said Fu Ruolan.
Sen hesitated to bring up his next point, but he’d already been putting it off for a while. “There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Oh?”
“Falling Leaf.”
Fu Ruolan tilted her head slightly as if she’d expected something else. “What about her?”
“You made a big deal about getting her to stay. I always assumed you had a plan for her as well. But, at this point, it seems like you don’t. Am I wrong about that?”
Fu Ruolan heaved a little breath. “I wanted her to stay as an incentive for you to stay. As willful as you are, it seemed entirely likely that you’d just up and disappear one day if you got fed up with me.”
“Is that why you never gave me the manual?”
“It was a consideration, but it was mostly because of the reason I originally gave you. You can’t be trusted with it. Well, maybe you could be now that you have a clearer picture of what’s at stake, but certainly not before. You’d have killed yourself with it, for sure.”
Sen grumbled something under his breath, but it was mostly for show. He probably would have killed himself with the manual if she’d given it to him. Impatience and fear would have driven him to a rash decision. Even now, he wasn’t confident that he wouldn’t make a bad choice if he had free access to the manual.
“Fine. There might be something to what you’re saying. Back to the topic at hand. Falling Leaf?”
“I had some vague notion that I might teach her something while she was here, but I don’t know that she’s really suited to learn anything that I have to teach.”
“She’s not stupid,” said Sen, feeling very defensive on Falling Leaf’s behalf.
“I know she isn’t stupid, but she’d not inclined to this kind of work, is she?”
“Well,” Sen paused, “no. I guess she’s not.”
“I don’t think you recognize it, but she’s still far more panther than human and probably always will be. She’s very oriented on physical action or things that complement physical action. My areas of expertise are, for lack of a better term, more academic.”
Sen gave a begrudging nod. “I expect that’s all true, but you’ve still bound her to this place. You let her come and go as she pleases, for which I’m very grateful, but she’s bored. She has been for a good long while now. I try to do my part, but I think she feels left out. Mostly because she is being left out. Thankfully, she’s not resentful by nature, but give it another four years and she might get there.”
Fu Ruolan frowned. “What is it that you’re asking for?”
“Can you please try to find something to teach her? I can’t imagine you’ve gotten this far without mastering some kind of weapon. She hasn’t shown a lot of interest in them so far, but she might get interested if a nascent soul cultivator offers to teach her.”
Fu Ruolan drummed her fingers on the table for several long moments before she nodded. “I suppose you have a point. If I’m going to insist that she remain bound to this place for several years, the least I can do is offer to teach her something.”
With a palpable sense of relief, Sen offered a deep, formal bow. “Thank you, Fu Ruolan.”