Regressor Sect Master

“Are we supposed to be here?” Core Disciple Julia asked a little uncomfortably. There really were no rules on whether other people could be in the workshop, after all, all the princess wanted was the best possible pill for her problems, she didn’t care whether the alchemist had help or not. If a group won, then they’d have to share it among those that assisted. 

Tundra merely smiled, and Julia took it as yes. He didn’t have help the first time he was here. His core disciples were busy elsewhere, and were probably in some battle, or reinforcing their position in the Scarlet Lightning City.

Julia wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do just yet, so she waited while her Sect Master was in thought. After a while, he looked at her and pointed. “Julia, you will be my assistant alchemist for the next few days. Come, assist me with the materials.” 

That got her attention. She didn’t expect to be asked to assist at a competition. Still, she  nodded. She briefly glanced around the room, and looked at the other two guests in the fairly simple but well equipped workshop. There were hundreds of other such workshops along the corridor. Celestia and Edison sat on a set of lacquered wooden chairs, waiting. There was a well prepared pot of tea and enough white porcelain cups to serve ten. Occasionally, they’d hear the footsteps of the palace servants outside. All they needed to do was open the door, and the servants would rush over to serve their every need. 

The two didn’t look particularly comfortable, particularly the young master. Edison looked at his stepmother, but Celestia merely patted his shoulder. She whispered, but in the workshop, they could all hear it. “You should stay. Your father wants you to see this.”

Edison leaned closer. “Really, what for? I’m not an alchemist.”

“You should know what it involves.” Celestia answered. “Knowledge is never wasted.”

Edison hesitated, and but he’s seen enough to wise up, and so he nodded. Julia refocused her attention on the materials in front of her, and quickly picked up the carving knife. Her role was to clean the materials of unnecessary residue that could contaminate the end result, and then do preprocessing of the materials. 

“Alright, get started.” Tundra said. Watching. 

Julia looked a little surprised to find her master not doing anything else. His eyes were locked on her movements. 

She focused on the preserved spirit beast in front of her. It was some kind of Volcanic Dragon collected from an entire continent away, a creature not found on this continent. She overheard the Palace Treasury employees saying how they’ve got a stock of fifty such corpses, and she wondered what else they had in their store.

“Spirit beasts have similar underlying structures despite the differences.” Tundra lectured. “Have a feel of the corpse’s structure by passing through your energies. The materials from this creature will be the ‘base’, or as some call it, the ‘primer’. Some parts of the wider worlds even call them the ‘binding paste’. No matter what it is called, the base is the medium in which the functional elements of the pill are contained, and delivered.”

She knew this, but the audience of Tundra’s lecture included two others that probably didn’t. 

Julia focused. She touched the skin of the corpse, and felt it’s still warm heat. The creature was superbly well preserved, and likely was slaughtered no more than a few months ago. Her eyes then darted to the side as she glanced at the two pots encased in a preservation glass. The Elderwood and the Lavaflower both had a faint presence, most of it blocked by the glass. 

It’s been a while since she assisted her master directly in alchemy. Julia thought, and the pill was foreign to her. Most alchemists learn by assisting their masters, at first with preparation, and over time, they try more and more parts of the process. 

“So, have a feel for the three main components of the pill. The base, and the two functional active components. Get a sense of how their elemental energies emanate, how they react to the world around them, because that will guide you on how they will behave once they are inserted into the cauldron. Think about the nature of the energy, and what you want to achieve, and that guides how you should prepare the base. There are different sorts of base or primer. Some meant to slow down the process, some meant to accelerate, some meant to carry the effects of the pill to where it is supposed to go.”

Tundra lectured, as her hands moved. Her mind roughly had a sense of what he wanted her to do. 

“Each recipe usually has a few core ingredients. The Elderwood Lavaflower Fusion pill, as the name clearly implies, has two main functional components. The Elderwood Spirit Plant, and the Lavaflower Spirit Plant.” Tundra smiled as he joked. “Alchemists are not very creative with names. In the higher realms, a good pill is often named after its key ingredients, or its key effects. An unfortunate thing, for things like the [Mind Clarity Pill]. A poor choice of naming can usually mean it’s less popular with cultivators, and that affects how us alchemists make money.”

Julia ignored it, and focused. The spirit beast’s flesh, the Nuran Lake Volcanic Dragon, contained a fairly large core. It was likely a mature volcanic dragon of the high sixth realm when it was alive.

A cultivator’s body reflected its realm, and a pill consumed by a cultivator, therefore, had to be strong enough to survive the journey through its spiritual body and reach where it is meant to be. 

The base component had to be close to the cultivator’s level. Too weak, the pill would disintegrate too early, too powerful, and it could overwhelm the cultivator’s ability to absorb it. Unless if that was the intention.

In pure ‘energy’ pills, the primer or base is part of the functional component, and often a pill is almost made from a single condensed material. For pills meant for specific function, a blend of the different types of materials. 

Julia reached for her carving knife, and made a cut. She could feel Tundra’s approving nod as she kept cutting. There was a fairly decent margin for error here, since the material itself wasn’t fragile. 

She worked slowly, as she channeled some of her energy into the carving knife. She was a fourth realm cultivator, trying to process a sixth realm spirit beast’s corpse. It was a little tougher than she expected once her knife reached the organs. 

Her arm thrummed with power slightly, as her blade reached deeper. Her knife cut the flesh where it was weak and now she was close to the Core of the spirit beast. 

This was where it got a little sensitive. She sent another pulse of energy through the corpse to get her bearing. She couldn’t see her hands inside the beast’s corpse. 

Tundra nodded a second time. “We usually use the spiritual beast cores as base ingredients, as it contains the highest levels of energy, and thus we could stretch the effectiveness of the pill to even those of a higher realm. A pill made with the spiritual core of a creature in the fifth realm could still deliver its ingredients for someone in the seventh realm. But, it is not mandatory. The base ingredients could even be made with the flesh of the beast, but because of its lower energy density, a pill made would not work for those stronger. It is for this reason that the value of spirit beasts of a higher realm is exponentially more valuable than those below.”

Edison couldn’t help but ask. “Then, why bother with lower realm spirit beasts? Why don’t just find spirit beasts of a higher realm?”

“Many reasons. First, an alchemist must be able to handle it. Too strong, and the alchemist cannot suppress or amplify the qualities they desire. Certain attributes and qualities of the ingredients are also only found in lower realm spirit beasts. Healing and regeneration is one of the great unusual qualities only found in the lower realm spirit beasts. Higher realm spirit beasts are often so strong that they don’t have inherent healing or regeneration abilities.”

“They don’t?” Edison asked in a moment of genuine interest. “But they are so strong and they still heal so quickly!”

“A product of their higher realm, not a product of any unique qualities of their nature.” Tundra explained.  

“What if such a creature existed?” Edison wondered.

Tundra laughed. “If it did, I can assure you we will want to capture it and breed it like chickens.” 

Julia carved out the spiritual core of the Nuran Lake Volcanic Dragon. It was a large, melon-sized maroon object that seemed like a rock. There were still pieces of flesh attached to it. She quickly reached for her cleaning knife, and cleaned out what she missed. 

Once that was done, she exchanged a momentary nod with Tundra, and placed the spiritual core into the large Dragonbronze Cauldron provided by the palace. 

Tundra tapped it, and the bronze cauldron hummed as the core of the Volcanic Dragon began to melt. 

“This will now melt into a paste. This will take a while.” 

Tundra’s energies flowed into the cauldron, and it began to heat up. It also hummed, as the energies began spinning inside.

“A 3rd realm cultivator who wants to handle this core would have to procure burnable materials of the 5th or 6th realm, so that there’s sufficient energy within the cauldron to do the necessary processes. That’s why you see some alchemists use fires, or energy crystals, and even formations. Occasionally, say, I want to supply water element energy into the cauldron, I may procure some kind of Wetwood or Water Gems to supply them to the cauldron.”

The two guests looked as if something clicked in their head. 

“Julia, you can start with the Elderwood. I want you to remove the bark.” 

The disciple looked at her master, her hesitation momentary. 

“It is similar to other Greatwood family of spirit plants. You can use a sharp knife to make a cut along the sides. The inner structure is similar.”

She nodded, her mind briefly recalled her studies and writing on spirit plants, and opened a drawer that contained a large selection of fine knives and tools. It would’ve cost a fortune to equip so many workshops, but such is the wealth of the Imperial Palace. She picked one, and then gently removed the Elderwood from its container.

The Core Disciple felt the thrum of the Elderwood’s wood energy. It was a sixth realm spirit plant, and she could feel it had a strong ‘controlling’ aspect that was inherent to the plant’s nature. She felt the wood energy attempt to exert its inanimate will over its environment.

But there was nothing for it to control, so that energy just radiated into its surroundings and faded away.  

She cleaned the bark easily, and what was left under the Elderwood was a mostly light beige wooden flesh, filled with little purple and blue veins that wrapped around the flesh as if it were blood vessels. 

“Good job. Now this part is for me.” Tundra said, as he picked up another set of cutting knives, and held the now exposed Elderwood plant. 

Julia watched curiously, as his knife made an incision into a specific part of the plant, and somehow pulled out a part of the flesh that seemed absolutely normal. Yet, she knew something was weird. Tundra tossed it into the cauldron, and it hummed.

“Good. Keep going.” 

“Can I-”

“That’s the essence of the Elderwood plant. A slightly condensed, higher quality segment of the plant.”

“Wouldn’t that be insufficient to balance out the Lavaflower?” Julia asked, as she observed the far smaller quantity in the pot. 

“Not if we do the same with the Lavaflower. A higher quality pill would serve the purpose just as well, if not more.” 

***

Celestia watched with great interest as Tundra gave the three lectures on alchemical concepts. Julia now shifted to the Lavaflower, a bright orange flower found in areas that experienced volcanic eruptions and later calmed down. 

She was slightly informed about alchemy, since she did meet Tundra at an alchemical competition, but she was just in the 3rd realm then. The alchemy she knew would be considered child’s play for greater sects. 

Still, she was a wanderer once, and as a wandering cultivator, she had to step her toes in everything. 

Alchemy wasn’t easy. It was time consuming, was highly theoretical, involved a lot of steps and a lot of resources. In many ways, it is harder than actual cultivation. It is for this reason that alchemists were fairly rare even in big sects. Only about one in thirty cultivators dabble in the art of alchemy, and even fewer still succeed. 

Alchemists build their careers supported by hunters, collectors, and merchants. 

The first human alchemists were healers, back in the ancient, primordial era. Alchemy existed as a subset of healers, and the original alchemists made rudimentary healing pills to restore the energies of those who were weakened or injured. 

There was even a time when alchemists were hunted as practicing demonic arts, because during the primordial eras, it were the demonic cultivators that transformed living cultivators into living cauldrons. Humans were livestock to be fed and grown, in order to empower the demons. 

Those days were long gone, and alchemy managed to clear its name. 

She didn’t realize how quickly the time passed. They were both mesmerized by Julia’s movements. Cleaning, slicing, and processing all the various parts for the cauldron. 

Maybe it was the hum of the cauldron, lulling them into some kind of trance. 

Or maybe the deft movements of a skilled apprentice. 

Somehow, a week just passed by. 

***

“Good.” Tundra said, proud. Julia did well, and all the materials were ready for the final step. They were now in the cauldron, floating among the now molten paste. 

There was a faint glow. 

Tundra looked around, and then at Edison. “Now, this is arguably sometimes the simplest, or the hardest part of the alchemy. Have you ever wondered why some pills lose effectiveness in the higher realms? I said it before.”

Edison paused, and scrambled to recall a factoid he was supposed to remember. He was like a student experiencing a sudden test. “Uh, because the stronger cultivator’s energies resist the effects of a weaker pill.”

“Correct!” The Sect Master smiled. “Now, have you ever wondered why pills made with the same ingredients can come out so wildly different?”

His son answered. “Because the materials were prepared differently?”

“That is one of the reasons, so I’ll rate you as correct. But also, some materials have multiple qualities. Like the Elderwood. It has a controlling aspect, a growth aspect and a weaker healing aspect. Which effect emerges in the final pill?”

Edison and Celestia both looked at Tundra like a student waiting for the answer. He decided he wouldn’t be too harsh, he was in a good mood, since Julia did so well. 

“An alchemist, through the process of refining pills, would modify the characteristics of the materials, enhancing certain aspects of the material, and suppressing certain other aspects. Amplification and suppression was the part of the task that consumed spiritual energy, and why alchemists won’t handle materials that were too far above their respective realms.”

Tundra then nodded, and redirected his attention at his assistant. 

“Touch the cauldron, Julia. I want you to feel what will happen within the cauldron over the next few days. Remember that sensation.”

Core Disciple Julia gulped, and both her hands touched the Dragonbronze Cauldron.

Tundra got to work, as his own energy flowed into the cauldron, and began to disassemble the components to its component aspects. He destroyed the parts he didn’t want, and for those that he did, he gently added his energy to it, and reshaped it such that it is more dense, more effective. 

It was a slow process. Each component was removed slowly, and then gently put back together. He could probably do it faster, but his disciple would’ve missed it.

Then, the components were combined into a single pill. 

A blood red pill with streaks of golden brown. A Perfect Elderwood Lavaflower Fusion Pill. A pill fit for a princess. 

It wouldn’t win, but it should do quite well.