Unintended Cultivator

Time is a cultivator’s ally. Sen had heard Master Feng, Uncle Kho, and Ma Caihong all say something similar at one time or another. However, as often as not, time seemed to work against Sen. He always felt under pressure to accomplish an advancement, reach a goal, or simply be somewhere. He had felt the same way about the two-month deadline that Fu Ruolan had given him to make that pill. The addition of just one month had changed everything for him. Instead of feeling like he needed to claw his way to the right frame of mind as fast as possible, he felt liberated to spend the time he needed to get there. The irony was not lost on him that by granting him extra time, Fu Ruolan had made that task easier. He was able to shove aside the sense that he couldn’t do it, that no one could do it, and let his mind and heart find an equilibrium. Instead of taking some uncertain amount of time, it took him three days.

Instead of opening the manual with a sense of howling urgency and the need to consume it as fast as he could, Sen opened it prepared to learn. That wasn’t to say that there were no problems. The manual assumed that the reader had a true alchemist cauldron. While Sen certainly had the resources to acquire one and likely could have gotten one with ease in the capital, he was nowhere near the capital. In fact, he was nowhere near anywhere that he could realistically acquire one. The reality was that sects were the primary source for alchemist cauldrons. They weren’t just heavy pots. If they were, any blacksmith in the world could make them.

A true alchemist cauldron needed to be forged under special conditions and with the right balance of qi. They needed to be treated with special alchemical sealants to ensure that everything washed away completely after every use. Otherwise, the alchemist risked contaminating their pills with everything that had been made in the cauldron before. Granted, that could yield a net gain to the potency and usefulness of the pills. There was no guarantee of that, though, and the wrong kind of contamination could turn a healing pill into a health-destroying poison. It was a chance that, according to Auntie Caihong, some lesser alchemists were willing to take. While Sen hadn’t been interested in using a cauldron, Auntie Caihong insisted on explaining the basics to him. If nothing else, she contended, it would help him distinguish between alchemists that he could trust and those he couldn’t.

Sen used his own methods to ensure that the pot he used for elixirs remained free of contamination. Yet, after reading through the initial section of the alchemy primer, he was confident that he couldn’t substitute his pot for a cauldron. Among other things, cauldrons could be sealed in such a way that they remained both airtight and rejected environmental qi, another way that pills could be contaminated. While Sen thought that he could, in theory, replicate those effects using his qi and the right formations, it would add complications to a process he didn’t understand. Every complication brought with it an added risk of failure. If he had years to perfect his techniques, he might have even gone that way. He didn’t have boundless time. That meant he needed to simplify the process as much as possible. So, with more than a little reluctance, he visited Fu Ruolan. He found her tending to a small vegetable garden outside her home. He patiently stood at the edge of the garden as there was no chance she had missed his presence. She didn’t make him wait long before she cast a curious glance his way.

“Is there something I can help you with?” she asked.

Sen had considered various ways he might broach the subject of a cauldron, but anything other than a direct inquiry seemed deceptive to him. Steeling himself for the possibility that he might well need to make another journey and at the absolute fastest he could manage, Sen took the straightforward path.

“I’ve been reviewing the primer you gave me,” he said.

Fu Ruolan nodded at his words. “Faster than I expected, but I trust you waited until you were ready.”

“I did,” he confirmed. “The primer makes it clear that pill refining requires a cauldron.”

“Yes. What of it? Every alchemist has a cauldron.”

“Almost every alchemist. I’m afraid that I don’t, which brings me to the point of this visit. I wanted to ask if you have one that I can use for the next three months.”

For the first time since he’d met her, Fu Ruolon seemed positively flabbergasted. She struggled to find her voice for several seconds before she finally managed to say something.

“You don’t have a cauldron? I was under the impression that you had fashioned numerous elixirs of near-miraculous quality.”

“The miraculous nature of the elixirs is a matter of debate, but I have made a substantial number of elixirs.”

“And how, pray tell, did you accomplish this elixir-making without the services of a cauldron?”

“I used a pot,” said Sen.

“A pot? Just a pot? What kind of pot?” demanded Fu Ruolan.

Lifting a shoulder in a semi-shrug, Sen summoned the pot he used from a storage ring and held it out.

“This pot,” he said.

Narrowing her eyes at him, she took the pot from his hand. He felt her qi briefly invade the pot and her spiritual sense bear down on it. She frowned and did both things again. The nascent soul cultivator hefted the pot a few times before returning her unhappy gaze to Sen.

“Is this meant to be some kind of ill-conceived joke?”

Sen looked from her to the pot and back again. “No. It’s not a joke.”

“You expect me to believe that you made elixirs in this,” she almost shouted at him. “There’s nothing remarkable about this pot at all. It’s just plain metal. It hasn’t been infused or treated in any way.”

Sen nodded along. “Yes, that’s all true. I’m not sure why you’re upset with me.”

“Because you’re lying to me or you’re deluded. No one could make an elixir that could do anything useful in this pot.”

Sen felt his expression go hard. “Well, I did. If you return my pot, I’ll prove it to you.”

Fu Ruolan thrust the pot back at him. “Oh, I cannot wait to see this.”

Seizing the pot from her hand, Sen stormed back to the galehouse and made a beeline for the kitchen. Fu Ruolan walked right behind him, clearly expecting him to fail. Sen stoked the fire in the stove, dumped some water into the pot, and got to work. He summoned ingredients almost by reflex. He was halfway through making a superior healing potion before he even realized that was what he was doing. The familiar activity did serve to calm him, though. He could maybe understand her skepticism, but the utter denial of the possibility that he could make elixirs in that pot still rankled him. He had helped a lot of people with products that came out of that humble pot. Who was she to say that he’d made that up? Why would he make something like that up? He didn’t need to impress anyone. And if he was going to try to impress someone, he’d just tell them about fighting a dragon, not make up stories about how he did alchemy.

As time passed, though, Sen had to stop fuming and concentrate on the task at hand. Making the superior healing potions required a lot of attention from him in terms of managing the reactions inside the pot, to say nothing of keeping the heat at a stable temperature. He blotted everything else out of his sphere of attention and gave the elixir his full attention. He could feel the elixir coming together properly, the discrete ingredients fusing to make something more, something better. For Sen, this was alchemy at its purest. There was a part of him that wanted to experiment. He’d had some ideas about improving this elixir into something even more potent. He thought that there was even the possibility of making a version that might help restore qi, but that wasn’t the point of this exercise. This was just a demonstration.

Sen ignored those distracting thoughts and monitored the contents of the pot until they’d reached the perfect moment of fusion. Then, with a wave of his hand, he cooled the potion. He summoned a glass vial and a piece of cheesecloth from his storage ring. A moment or two of effort and he’d filled the much rarer glass vial with the elixir. In most cases, he used stone vials because they were sturdier. For this, he wanted her to be able to see the elixir and its faint blue glow, not just feel it. Keeping his expression neutral, he turned and handed the vial to Fu Ruolan. She just stared at the vial for several long moments before giving herself a slight shake. She reached out and took the vial. Sen felt her examining it, no doubt assessing its strength and nature. Her expression was complicated and difficult for Sen to read when she finally found something to say.

“I stand corrected,” she offered in a soft voice.

Sen squashed the desire to gloat or anything else that didn’t directly involve his goal. “So, about that cauldron.”

“Cauldron?” she asked, her mind clearly not on the question. “Oh, yes. Of course.”

She waved a hand and a cauldron appeared on the stove. Fu Ruolan didn’t say anything else. She turned and walked out of the galehouse with her eyes still fixed on the elixir in her hand.

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