Sen’s opinions about what alchemy actually was had changed over the years. Sometimes, those changes came in response to actual facts, such as those provided by Auntie Caihong. Like most mortals, his childhood understanding of alchemy amounted to something like, apply magic on one side and different magic comes out the other side. He supposed that was even true, in a way, but it wasn’t especially useful for anyone who intended to perform alchemy. It was a bit like looking at trees and looking at the ashes from a campfire and knowing they were related somehow.
Other times, his evolving opinion came about in reaction to the opinions expressed by others, such as Fu Ruolan. For all her skill, she ultimately saw alchemy as a kind of procedure. Follow certain steps, add certain ingredients, apply certain pressures at the right time, and you get a predictable result no matter what. It was a valid and even useful way to see alchemy. Most alchemists shared that view for reasons both obvious and subtle. On the obvious side, most alchemists were disciples of sects and received their training from their direct superiors. Those sects expected them to make pills that always performed the same way. In that context, it was legitimately beneficial for the disciples and the sects to treat alchemy that way.
On the more subtle side, that very training, no matter how valuable it might be, seemed to stunt alchemists’ thinking. They became orthodox. They took those procedures as the only right way, and even the only possible way to get to a result. Sen suspected some of those alchemists could have been more and done more, but they never would as long as they remained trapped by their own blindness. Then, there were those who lacked the talent and imagination to do anything else. They were often competent enough, based on what he’d seen of their work, but competency was the best they could ever hope to achieve.
Like many people who had strayed from any kind of orthodoxy, Sen had found the deepest changes to his opinion had come in the wake of direct experience. He’d learned his most important lesson about alchemy in the aftermath of the battle between the Order of the Celestial Flame and the Clear Spring Sect. The lesson had been that alchemy was less a set of procedures than an infinitely forking road. The adept could travel that road along countless paths to a staggeringly wide array of results from the exact same ingredients. The more potent those ingredients, the wider the number of results that were possible.
Yet, that very flexibility became a challenge in its own right. It expanded the variables that he needed to account for in how the ingredients expressed themselves in the final product. Something that was already going to be a challenge since he needed to make an elixir that explicitly wasn’t going to function the way other elixirs did. Those were swallowed and tended to travel through the body either by way of digestion or by way of the qi channels. Some of those effects might expand out into the flesh, if that was the intended goal, but that was frequently a helpful byproduct of the ingredients that an alchemist capitalized on.
He needed something that would saturate the Matriarch’s entire being. Yes, he would be there to help it achieve that end. But the less his qi needed to invade her body and adjust her qi, the more effective the elixir would be. It was for the same reason that most combat techniques needed to be so forceful. They didn’t just need to overcome physical resistance. They needed to overcome the way a living being resisted the intrusion of another person’s qi. It wasn’t an absolute block and proved mostly useless when facing off against a cultivator of a higher stage. It could, however, blunt the effectiveness of a technique from someone near the same stage.
It was a subject that had become an ongoing source of annoyance for Sen. In principle, bodies should resist the effects of elixirs, potions, and pills the same way. Those were full of foreign qi. Yet, for some reason, they didn’t meet the same resistance. He’d had more than one conversation with Auntie Caihong and Fu Ruolan about it, but none of those discussions had yielded a satisfactory answer. The best anyone had come up with was that the body didn’t treat things it had swallowed as innately hostile, but even that ran counter to Sen’s experience. He had vomited up plenty of rotten food that he’d eaten in desperation as a child. A pretty clear sign that bodies could and would treat some things as innately hostile.
Even as Sen’s mind wandered across these topics, his hands moved purposefully over a table that overflowed with alchemical ingredients. One moment, he’d pluck a tiny, lightning-attributed leaf and add it to the battered pot. The next, he snatched up a pebble with a heavy earth qi attribution. He’d crush the pebble between his inhumanly strong fingers, then pause as the lightning catalyzed a reaction. At exactly the right moment, the stone dust went into the post to suppress that reaction before it went too far. All the while, his qi was suffused through the reaction. Adding heat, reducing heat, compressing a portion of the liquid or the ingredients, all in an effort to reach a goal that he could feel farther down that forking road.
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The primary ingredient in the elixir was that impossible mushroom he’d found. That was the greatest challenge of all. He needed to distill some of that natural fire qi to replace the vital qi the Matriarch had used. However, he needed to do it without losing the secondary benefits of the mushroom itself. Benefits that his intuition told him were crucial to the final results he wanted. That meant keeping some of the mushroom intact to absorb what the rest of the elixir was becoming, while allowing the rest of it to be reduced entirely. He was so deep into the process that he never even registered it when Falling Leaf and the Order members peeked into the room. All he missed from Falling Leaf was a knowing nod. The Order members, on the other hand, stared in open-mouthed awe at the literal pile of alchemical treasures until the ghost panther ordered them away.
As Sen slipped deeper into his trance and the process neared its completion, he found himself adjusting the elixir at a deeper level. He enhanced the wood qi to promote faster healing but also faster absorption. Metal qi, on the other hand, was redirected to bolster the structure of the elixir while being suppressed elsewhere. If anyone had seen this part of the process, it would have looked as though Sen was merely staring at the mixture as it bubbled. In truth, Sen was intuitively making hundreds of adjustments at a speed that would have made most other alchemists cough blood. At least, they would have if they understood what he was doing.
As all alchemical processes must, though, this one reached the point of completion. With great care, Sen reached over and plucked a lone petal from the hibiscus flower and dropped it into the mixture. The petal appeared to vanish on contact with the surface, but that final addition brought an all-important balance to what had been an intensely volatile process. Sen extinguished the flame beneath the pot and bled heat from the mixture. He found himself staring down at the liquid and wondering if he’d made some terrible mistake. The elixir was a deep red. It wasn’t the color of blood, but the color of hot coals. It even emitted a glow that Sen found vaguely ominous. His mind felt unsure about giving this elixir to anyone, ever. His intuition and his soul told him that, of all the possible elixirs he could have made, this one was the right one.
With nothing else left to do, he filtered the elixir through cheesecloth into a stone vial. He set it aside for the moment. All of the alchemical ingredients he’d pulled out of storage rings went back into those rings. They would lose potency if he left them out for too long. The time it took for that to have a meaningful effect was much longer than most alchemists liked to pretend. Still, it was a problem that he needed to remain mindful of when handling ingredients. Finally, he cleaned out his battered, old pot. He idly noted that it was radiating a complex mixture of qi.
A closer examination revealed that, somewhere along the line, the pot had become something of a cultivation treasure or at least an alchemy treasure in its own right. Its basic structure had been altered, reinforced, and Sen doubted anyone short of a nascent soul cultivator would be able to put another dent in it. Sen frowned as he thought, I’ll probably need to take this thing with me when I ascend. Otherwise, cultivators will probably try to fight over this thing. He found a little amusement in the idea of sect cultivators battling each other over what had been nothing but an inexpensive, mortal-grade pot. It still wasn’t something he wanted people shedding blood over.
Summoning a chair, he let himself sit and think of nothing for a time. He would need to give the Matriarch the elixir soon, but he expected that to prove as taxing as making the elixir had been. Better to give himself at least a short break before he attempted that. Staring at one of the blank walls, a thought struck him. He reshaped the wall to get a look outside. It was daytime. That was good enough. Removing the communication core from a pocket, he contacted his own sect. A few minutes later, an ecstatic voice came through.
“Hi, Papa!” shouted Ai.
About a month’s worth of accumulated stress evaporated from Sen at hearing his daughter’s voice.
“Hello, Ai. How is my beautiful orchid today?”
“I have a new bird, Papa! It’s really big!”
Sen sat bolt upright in naked alarm. Considering how big the sky monster was, he couldn’t quite imagine what kind of beast his daughter would consider a really big bird. Given how far away they were, though, even he couldn’t get back there fast enough to justify a visit. Plus, Auntie Caihong was there. If anyone can impose good behavior on some savage sky beast that only Ai would see as a friend, Auntie Caihong can, thought Sen. Feeling slightly less panicked, Sen let himself breathe again.
“Why don’t you tell me some more about this really big bird?”