Chapter 1461 — Learning Alchemy
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 3
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 Lifeng'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?