Chapter 1461 — Learning Alchemy

What is called storing up richly and releasing sparingly, Wei Zhao did not put into practice at once. Instead he weighed the incantation for cultivating pill fire carefully, phrase by phrase. Short as it was, the formula was terse and hard to fathom; until he had worked out what it meant, Wei Zhao had no intention of cultivating it blindly.

Hasty people, upon getting hold of a secret manual, invariably plunge into cultivation on the spot, only to discover halfway through that they have been heading the wrong way, or practicing something incorrectly, or simply going the long way round...

Such people are not scarce; they are far, far too many. In the mild case they must start all over again; in the severe case they suffer qi deviation and go mad. In short, Wei Zhao had no wish to be one of them.

It reminded him of a joke he had once read. Yue Buqun came into possession of the Bixie Sword Manual and was beside himself with joy. He opened it to the first page, and there, in bold characters, stood the words: "To master this art, one must first castrate oneself." Yue Buqun thought for a long while, and at last, for the sake of becoming number one under heaven, he bore the pain and cut off his "beloved parts." The agony was so great that he fainted. When he came to, he happily turned to the second page, and what he saw made him cough blood with fury: the second page read, "Even if you castrate yourself, success is not guaranteed!" Swallowing both the pain and the heartache, he abruptly turned to the third page, took one look, and dropped dead on the spot vomiting blood — for the third page said: "You need not castrate yourself; success is still possible."

Of course, this is only a joke, somewhat on the exaggerated side. Wei Zhao had no idea whether anyone that foolish and that miserable existed in real life — but people who ruin things through sheer impatience? Certainly they did. That is what they mean by you cannot eat hot tofu in a hurry.

At that very moment Zhang Naipao was laboring away in his cultivation amid the poisonous bees. The scorching sunlight had soaked him in sweat from head to foot, yet he did not feel the hardship... Suddenly, Zhang Naipao let out a tremendous sneeze.

"?" Zhang Naipao rubbed his nose and lifted his head to the blazing sun overhead, vaguely perplexed. On a day this hot he could still sneeze? Could it be that someone was talking about him behind his back?

He puzzled over it for a long while without getting anywhere, so he shook his head and went back to his training with redoubled effort. And in his heart he swore an oath: I am going to become a top-notch expert. I am going to beat Wei Zhao to death!

The first thing Wei Zhao studied was the mental incantation for cultivating fire-attribute pill fire — the method every alchemist chooses at the very beginning, for it is by far the most universal. Once mastered, it allows one to refine a great many ordinary pills. True, the true qi circulating in one's body according to one's own mental formula can act as a constraint: some people come into conflict with fire-attribute pill fire — those who cultivate frost-and-cold attribute formulas, for instance. Practitioners of that kind will almost never succeed with fire-attribute pill fire, though their chances would be somewhat higher with the water attribute.

To cultivate pill fire, one needs not only true qi but also powerful spiritual perception.

Spiritual perception is a rather mystical thing. To put it plainly, it means using the force of the spirit to perceive the state of the pills inside the furnace, and thereby adjusting the size and heat of the pill fire. After all, the congealing process differs from one pill to the next. If the pill fire burns too fiercely, or the refining runs too long, the final quality of the pills may be spoiled — or the whole furnace may turn to waste, for all one knows.

Of course, the old adage that diligence makes up for clumsiness and practice breeds skill needs no spiritual perception at all. Refine the same pill a few hundred or a thousand times, and even without spiritual perception one can find the pattern in one's failures and raise the success rate.

For low-grade pills made from commonplace ingredients, that hardly matters — raw materials are always plentiful and can be wasted freely. But with high-grade pills, assembling enough materials for a single dose may not be easy. Where would you find the chance to squander them on experiments?

And so it was settled: alchemists without powerful spiritual perception could only ever remain at the beginner's stage. Even if they cultivated their pill fire as far as Yellow-rank seventh grade, they could never successfully refine a Yellow-rank seventh-grade pill.

The profession of alchemist therefore became exceedingly illustrious, more honored even than that of the cultivator. The Sun family, a clan that practiced a healing-type mental formula, had already risen to a transcendent standing — let alone an alchemist, who could refine pills of the very same effect.

Yet because pill fire is so hard to cultivate, because it devours true qi in such staggering quantities, and because spiritual perception imposes its own limits, the number of alchemists is confined: they are destined to be a rare breed.

Alchemists accordingly became the object of every faction's keenest wooing. For a family or a sect that possessed an alchemist might, who knows, soar to new heights on the strength of it.

Wei Zhao's purpose in learning alchemy, of course, was simple enough. There was nothing else for him to do while he stayed put, so he might as well find something to keep himself occupied — otherwise, waiting for the heavy snow to stop would prove unbearably boring.

Once he had committed the incantation for catalyzing pill fire to memory completely, Wei Zhao prepared to make his first attempt. Pill fire does not come out of thin air: it is produced by using the incantation to convert the practitioner's own true qi into flame. Unless one is a high-level cultivator, one simply cannot bear such a prodigious drain on one's true qi. This is precisely why a Yellow-rank cultivator cannot become a Yellow-rank seventh-grade alchemist — the true qi cannot keep pace, and the refining is likely to be abandoned halfway through, ruining the pills or blowing up the furnace.

But even if you are a Heaven-rank expert with vast stores of true qi at your beck and call, the incantation for catalyzing pill fire is not something every cultivator can wield with ease. Some cultivators, even when they do manage to bring forth pill fire, find that the speed at which they catalyze it is of paramount importance.

If the true qi is catalyzed quickly, the pill fire naturally burns vigorous; if it is catalyzed slowly, the flame naturally falls small. And when it comes to refining pills, the management of the heat cannot be ignored. The flame must be adjusted at every moment to suit the different requirements of each pill — there may come a sudden need to intensify the pill fire to congeal the medicine. If you possess a body full of true qi but cannot draw out the fire at all, you can only watch in helpless frustration, and the entire furnace of pills will be ruined for it.

Because of this restriction, countless people never managed to go on along the road of alchemy. Those who truly became alchemists could honestly be described as pitifully few — though, of course, "pitifully few" here is measured against the sheer numbers of cultivators at large.

All the more for that, the identity and standing of an alchemist could not be overlooked. It was just such a reality that accounted for Zhang Liju's host of friends across the world in days gone by: what faction would not want to be on good terms with a supreme-rank alchemist?