Chapter 22: Life 50, Age 28, Martial Master Level 2

Without having concocted an Improved pill successfully, aiming to complete a Superior pill at high efficacy in eighteen months seemed implausible. I wasn’t going to let that stop me. I began to feel more and more that the other disciples here were being held back by their lack of drive. Most spent a lot of time just enjoying themselves. I couldn’t blame them though. This was a steady, safe life. People here had homes, food, entertainment, and steady work. It wouldn’t be wrong to come here and just... live. I needed to stay focused though. If this had been my only life, I might have been willing to just settle down here too, but I needed to prepare for the distant future. Bao didn’t have much advice for me. He could still only make Improved pills, and he told me I was doing everything he could think to do. Cao told me basically the same thing. She was good at teaching cultivation, but her pill refining was lacking. I wanted to find another private teacher, but the ones that could make High-Purity Superior pills spent their time concocting, not teaching. That’s when I began signing up for public lessons. I didn’t have another choice. My days were filled with lessons, pill practice, and a mad scramble for points to pay for everything. In time, I was able to concoct Improved pills to a high purity. After that, I started making High-Purity Improved pills to fund everything. Advancing to Martial Master was a boon. It helped provide me with more energy to keep pushing. I was always short on energy. I considered using alchemy to help me with the energy problem but decided it wouldn’t work. My basic reasoning was that Qi Gathering pills were great, but they were only really useful when cultivating and shouldn’t be used when making pills. They increased the speed I gathered qi too much over too short a period of time. I considered looking into whether there was a different pill I could potentially make to help me here, but I knew that every other Rank 1 pill was nearly useless. It wasn’t worth the effort. So, I did my best to power through, using my cultivation to supply what I needed. On the day of the preliminaries for the outer sect disciple exam, I was mentally and physically exhausted. I had pushed myself to the last moment and only afterward realized I should have rested. I would only need to concoct a single pill though. I had the mental fortitude to do that at least. We were to be tested in batches of one hundred with new groups cycling in throughout the day. Testing sites had been set up in a few areas across the city to make things quicker and easier. The place I arrived at looked like it was just a crossroads chosen at random because it was spacious enough. One hundred workbenches were evenly spread out across the area. There were a few people who came to watch, but this testing location, at least, didn’t seem to draw much of a crowd. We were given a short pill recipe describing the basic steps and a single set of ingredients sat atop our workbench. I had no idea what the pill was, and the recipe didn’t include the pill’s name. The sect had gathered a couple thousand sets of ingredients just for us to use in the test. Yes, we had to pay contribution points for ingredients used in the exam, but I could guess that the ingredients couldn’t be too important if the sect was willing to see most of them destroyed in the exam. This just showed how little value the pill had. The primary ingredient for this recipe was a strange mushroom. It had a white stalk and a pink cap. The odd part was that it had sacs of some kind of blue liquid attached to it. The supplementary ingredients were what looked like an ordinary stick of wood and some type of blue-green leaf. The process was the same as any other pill. Burn away the toxins, mix the energy together, compress it into a pill. Using qi vision to look at the ingredients revealed an abnormality. Usually, medicinal energy was green, but here it was a strange blue color. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I couldn’t worry too much about it in the moment. I followed the process in the recipe as best I could. The instructions for preparing the wood and the leaf were simple enough. Remove the thin layer of bark from the wood first, then grind the leaf into a fine paste. I did so and set the results to the side. Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. There was nothing special about this test. All I had to do was create five High-Purity Superior pills. I had already been able to do that. I was to make the medicinal efficacy as high as possible. I didn’t need to worry about anything else. Superior pills needed three ingredients: blue peonies, astragalus root, and schisandra berries. I had lifetimes of experience with blue peonies. Maximizing their potential was easy. I had less experience with astragalus root, and balancing its energy with the peony was difficult. However, over the last eighteen months, I had used them countless times in Improved pills. I might not have been as expert with them as I was with peonies, but that wouldn’t be a problem. The main difficulty lay in the schisandra berries. I watched as many of the competitors began to peel the berries. This reduced the initial pill toxins that would have to be dealt with, and it made the refining process easier, but it was a trap. I used the same strategy I had with the mushroom. The goal of the competition was not to reduce toxins as low as possible. It was to maximize efficacy. Peeling the berries severely impacted this. By leaving the skin on, I would be able to make a pill that barely qualified as High-Purity but had the most efficacy possible. I worked slowly and methodically. People began to finish and turn in their pills to be judged. I didn’t care. Speed didn’t matter. After each pill, I rested and cultivated. I wanted to be at my peak at all times. One hour stretched to two. Two stretched to four. Finally, I finished the last pill. I reflected on my memories of the first competition I watched. My alchemy was not even close to the people I had watched in previous exams. All I could hope was that it was good enough. I checked my pills: 91%, 86%, 84%, 89%, and 90%. I laughed. A total of 440. I did my best. Maybe it was time to live a normal life for a while. I knew my results, but I still stood with the other contestants waiting for the winners to be announced. First place had 492 points of efficacy. Second had 487. Then, they announced third place. “Su Fang, a combined efficacy of 486.” While the other winners cheered, I just stood there. I didn’t know what the others’ results were, but I knew mine definitely wasn’t 486. I had won though, that was good, right?