Chapter 1461 — Learning Alchemy
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 3
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.