Unintended Cultivator

While Sen had felt a little uncertainty about asking for help, Fu Ruolan’s reaction had caught him off guard. Her face lit up like he’d just given her the best gift of her life. The woman seemed almost giddy at the prospect of helping Sen figure out what he’d been doing wrong. She’d looked ready to get started immediately but had ultimately told Sen to get some sleep.

“Better to start fresh,” she said.

Sen had almost objected with a reference to the time limit that she had imposed on him. A moment or two of reflection told him that was the path of foolishness. He was in no fit state of mind to learn. Aside from his brief adventure in rock kicking, he wasn’t even sure when he’d last taken a break, let alone slept. With a nod to her, he’d retreated to the galehouse, eaten something, and made himself go to bed. When he woke up in the morning after having dreamed about failing at pill refining over, and over, and over, he knew he’d made the right choice. While he didn’t consider himself an expert on the mind, it didn’t take an expert to recognize that those kinds of dreams were a bad sign. When the waking mind was so fixated on something that it became the fixation of your dreams, Sen figured it was a short step to some kind of a breakdown. He'd made his way over to her house and found her waiting. He did his best not to give her sidelong looks as the woman almost bounced on her toes. She took him to a room he didn’t remember from his previous visit. Inside, she’d set up an alchemy lab.

She beamed around at the room before turning a more serious eye on him. “Alright, I need to know what you already know so we don’t waste time. So, take a seat and tell me what you know about alchemy.”

Sen looked around and found a small stool. He glanced over at Fu Ruolan who waved an impatient hand at him. Dropping onto the stool, Sen gathered his thoughts. What did he know about alchemy? He rarely considered the total information he had at his disposal on the topic. Most of the time, he only needed little slivers of that information to finish whatever he was working on at any given moment. Only after being asked to sum it all up did he start to understand exactly how much he’d learned. Realizing that there probably wasn’t a right answer to the problem, he picked a spot and started talking. He talked, and talked, stopping occasionally to summon water from a storage ring and take a few sips. For the first three hours, Fu Ruolan stood there in near-total silence, neither interrupting nor even reacting. That came to an abrupt stop when he started talking about some of his personal insights into alchemy. Then, the questions came fast and furious. It was nearly nightfall before Fu Ruolan waved him to a stop, her eyes glassy and her expression a little slack.

“I’m not going to pretend that I understood everything you were talking about. Ma Caihong might,” she said with a bitterness that Sen could hear, “but I don’t think that’s your problem. You clearly grasp the fundamentals of alchemy itself and then some. Your problem must be somewhere in the pill-refining process itself. What have you been trying to make?”

“A basic healing pill,” said Sen, trying to mask his own bitterness.

She frowned at that. “What ingredients and reagents are you using?”

He had to stop and consider that question. He used the same ingredients for it every time, but it had been a while since he named them to himself while using them. Closing his eyes, Sen took himself back to his countless repetitions over the damn cauldron.

“Ginseng, angelica root, Eucommia…” Sen listed off ingredients and reagents as he mentally watched himself throwing them into the cauldron.

Fu Ruolan nodded, only raising an eyebrow once or twice. “Those are all fairly standard. Nothing too exotic. A few atypical choices, but I don’t see how those would interfere with the refining process.”

“That’s what I thought, but many, many failures tell me otherwise.”

“You’ve followed the instructions and advice in the primer regarding preparation and heat?” she asked him pointedly.

“I have.”

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“There’s nothing for it,” said Fu Ruolan. “We aren’t going to solve this by talking it through. I need to see what’s happening.”

She gestured at the cauldron that had been placed on a heavy table nearby. Sen checked the stove to ensure that there was a bed of hot coals sufficient to heat the cauldron. He could do it himself if he needed to but preferred not to complicate the process with more interference than necessary. He wanted to replicate his process as precisely as possible in the hopes that the more experienced cultivator would see what he had missed. He entertained the idea of pulling out the manual to reference the instructions. That notion was dismissed almost immediately. He’d committed those words to memory at this point. Instead, he got to work. It seemed that Fu Ruolan was taking the same approach that he was and made no suggestions as he placed the cauldron over the heat, prepared ingredients, and added them to the cauldron. The only thing she did was keep an eye on what was happening in the cauldron with her spiritual sense as Sen worked. A part of him hoped with a kind of raw desperation that this time he would succeed.

He followed every instruction to the letter. He didn’t interfere with the process at all, at any level, despite his instincts to do so. He was so intent on the task that he was startled when Fu Ruolan stormed over the cauldron and yanked the cover off. She glared down at the contents of the cauldron which were, as Sen saw when he peered down into it, decidedly not anything like a pill. It was the same mass of wasted ingredients and reagents it had been every time before. Fu Ruolan’s face went from anger to disbelief. It took Sen a second to realize that he hadn’t made any mistakes. What she saw in that cauldron was not what she had expected to see.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “You did everything right. This should have worked.”

Something in Sen’s chest unclenched. He had been certain that it was him, that he had failed in some way to follow the instructions he’d been provided. The fear that he had been burning time he couldn’t afford to lose through some fundamental failing of his own was erased. It was only in that abrupt loss of fear that Sen saw how deeply it had infected him and how heavy that fear had been. He took a deep breath, feeling free for the first time since he’d agreed to Fu Ruolan’s bargain. He’d either kept most of that off his face or the nascent soul cultivator hadn’t been paying much attention to him. She just flicked a glance at him before staring with disbelief down into the cauldron. With a technique that felt a lot like auric imposition to Sen, Fu Ruolan scoured the inside of the cauldron clean and threw the discolored blob of unfused ingredients into a nearby pail. She pointed at the cauldron imperiously.

“Again!” she demanded.

With a far lighter heart but no less exacting attention to detail, Sen repeated the process with similar results. Fu Ruolan had him do it four more times. She grew increasingly agitated with each failure, muttering under her breath. When the final attempt generated nothing but a gooey, half-charred mass in the cauldron, the woman threw her hands up in the air.

“This is infuriating. The ingredients are fine. The heat is fine. You’re putting everything in when you should. This,” she said through clenched teeth and gesturing into the cauldron, “should not be happening. It’s a basic pill. Students with two months of experience can make this pill with a little guidance.”

Sen thought that last might be overstating things a little, but what did he know? Maybe for students who started out working with cauldrons, this was an achievable pill after a couple of months. The part that he cared about was that something strange was going on. Something that wasn’t his fault, and something he couldn’t have expected or bypassed was happening.

“So, it’s not me?” he asked, needing a bit of reassurance.

She looked over at him. “I’m quite confident that it is you, but it’s not a failure of technique. If anyone else had done the things that you did, they would have five minor healing pills sitting on this counter. No, whatever is happening here, it’s stranger than that. I’m just not sure what it is.”

Sen felt a fresh tightness take root in his chest.

“If that’s the case,” said Sen, “I’m not sure that I can reasonably deliver the pill you want by the deadline you’ve given me.”

Fu Ruolan blinked at him with a complete lack of comprehension on her face. He saw her mouth the word deadline. When understanding did dawn in her eyes, she just waved a hand like it was nothing.

“There’s no point in giving you a deadline until we sort this mess out. I can’t rightly expect you to make anything if following precise instructions generates only failure for you. We’ll revisit that after we solve this mystery.”

It wasn’t exactly the reprieve that Sen had hoped for, but it was a reprieve nonetheless. While they tried to figure out why it wasn’t working for him, he’d have time to study the primer. Even if he couldn’t make any of the pills in the primer, he could at least study the techniques he’d need to use for making the more advanced pills. It felt a little bit like cheating to him, but the pragmatic self that had helped him survive on the streets ruthlessly murdered that feeling. In the end, getting the manual she’d promised him was all that mattered. If that took a bit of cheating, he was comfortable with it. It was his life on the line, after all.

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