Eternal Cultivation Of Alchemy

Aethersage didn’t know how good his opponent was, so he had to go big right from the start.

He had refined the recipe as well as it could be. His master had taught him the best way to refine these recipes, so there was nothing else left for him to do but make the pill.

He had made the pill too by now—three of them, in fact. Each one had come out above 90%, slowly increasing with each turn. He wasn’t satisfied with them, so he wanted to make more.

He would have continued doing so, but he didn’t have the time to practice. The final hour had come, and so he needed to hand over the recipe and a pill to the Divinity before him.

Because he had made no pills during this hour, he had the opportunity—should he choose to— to make the pill once again. Aethersage had no idea how good his opponent’s pills would be, so there was no way he was going to leave anything up to chance.

He prepared his ingredients for the recipe and lit a fire under Moonshard, his cauldron.

“Shall we connect, master?” The male voice that spoke in his mind belonged to the cauldron spirit that was Moonshard.

“I can’t afford to make any mistakes, Moonshard. Let us connect,” Aethersage said and let his spiritual sense mesh into the cauldron. Then, he began making his pill again.

Like every cauldron spirit, Moonshard too could do something that was not meant for it to do when the cauldron was first created.

Moonshard had the power to delay commands.

When they engaged the connection that was their bond, Aethersage could start refining the ingredients to make the pill. Each refinement would, of course, be a command given by him to the ingredient on what to do.

It was, in a way, his Intent during the process. If there was an ingredient that needed to spin around the cauldron four times, Aethersage could use his Qi to do that, the entirety of which would be a command.

And that command would always have to go through Moonshard, who would delay it by just a few seconds.

In essence, nothing would change inside the cauldron, as all that Aethersage wanted to happen would still happen, only it would be delayed by a few seconds.

That few seconds of delay allowed him to recognize any mistakes he might make along the way, any errors along the way. When he caught that mistake, he could rectify it immediately.

That delay allowed the mistakes to be discarded and the rectified command to slip in its place without messing up anything for real.

And the fact that Moonshard gave Aethersage complete control over which commands to delay and which ones to follow immediately let Aethersage have a level of control over his pill-making process that no other alchemist could likely have.

Aethersage placed in the ingredients one after another and made his pill as well as he could. There were no mistakes made along the way that he could rectify. If there were any, he was not the cause of them.

Upon completing the refinement process, he began gathering the powder and energy into one. This was where his issue was mostly. He had no way to guarantee forming a perfect pill each time.

He made the best pill he could in the end, using what pill-forming technique he had. When the lid opened and the pill flew into his hand, he could see the numbers written above the pill.

98%.

‘So close,’ Aethersage thought. It was so damn close, and yet it wasn’t perfect. How could he make a perfect pill? How could he call the Pill Clouds each time?

He knew there had to be a way, and he had even asked his master for it. But his master had said that there was no way to guarantee that all energy would flow into the pill— not unless he had some way to add more energy into the cauldron and force it into the pill at the end.

‘Master only gave me three Immortal World Defying Mushrooms. I have to keep those for later, right?’ he thought. If he used all three even before he got into the top 16, there would be no victory at all. The ones after that would be even bigger monsters.

‘I have to keep it as late as I can,’ Aethersage thought. ‘At least until I come up against one of those five.’

He had a clear idea of who he needed to fear.

The Divinity stepped forward and took his pill and recipe. Aethersage patiently waited for the woman to be done with it. Meanwhile, he stared at the sky, watching all of the people that began passing one after another.

Next to their names in the brackets, pill harmonies began popping up one after another, notifying just how great a pill many had made.

There were only two dozen or so numbers up there at the moment, but each one had made pills with over 80% harmony—high at that too.

His name suddenly had a number next to it too. 98%. It was the biggest number up there at the moment.

Although, considering how most of the people who had passed right now were the ones who hadn’t had any opposition to do well against, it made sense that theirs would only be so much.

“Your pill and recipe are accepted,” the female Divinity said. “Now let us wait for your opponent to be done. It should take no more time.”

Aethersage nodded and continued looking at his opponent’s name, waiting for a number to pop up next to it. While he waited, he looked at his own number and tried to think if there was some way to improve it even further.

As he did, a curious thought came to his mind.

“Senior, could I ask you to clarify a rule for me, please?” he asked.

The female Divinity raised an eyebrow. “Go ahead.”

“Is there any punishment for wasting ingredients?”

The woman paused for a moment. “There is. Disqualification,” she said. “But as long as you have the tiniest bit of explanation on why you are doing what you are doing, we will consider the ingredients not wasted.”

Aethersage’s eyes shined with an idea. “If I were to use twice the amount of ingredients in the recipe when making the pill, would that count as wasteful or not?” he asked.

“Twice the amount? Hmm…” the woman thought for a moment. “So long as the pill that is made is no different from what the recipe mentions, no matter how many ingredients you use, it won’t be considered a waste.”

Aethersage smiled. He had an idea now.

“Thank you, senior.”

At the same time, he noticed that his opponent’s results were out as well.

92%.

Aethersage had won.

“Congratulations on passing to the round of 64,” the woman said. “You may continue on to your second round.”

After the woman walked out, Aethersage sat back, having finally come up with a great idea.

“If I were to use the energy of two sets of ingredients to form a single pill, that should up my chances a lot, shouldn’t it?” Aethersage asked with a gleeful face.

His future in this competition suddenly got so much better.