Alchemy (2)
Cheon Woo-jin found himself momentarily at a loss for words, standing before the jet-black alchemy furnace that had appeared out of nowhere.
There was no denying it — this furnace looked to be quite high-performing.
"This must have cost a fair amount."
"I'm not giving it to you outright. I'll have it installed in your eastern chamber, and from there it's yours to use as you please," Jo Hyu said, arms crossed. "Better than having some shoddy furnace put in and your entire eastern wing burned to ashes."
"In that case, I'll accept it gratefully."
Cheon Woo-jin pressed his hands together in thanks. Since Jo Hyu was offering to install it himself, there was no reason to refuse.
"Of course, it won't be entirely free," Jo Hyu added in a measured voice. "If you want the smoke and heat to vent properly, the formation will need some work too."
"That's fair enough. How many extra spirit stones a month should I offer?"
Cheon Woo-jin had already resolved to accept a rent increase regardless. But Jo Hyu simply shook his head with a smile.
"Just bring me a packet of sweets now and then."
Somewhere along the way, a packet of sweets had already been emptied to the bottom.
Jo Hyu had the furnace installed in no time. It was fairly large, and Cheon Woo-jin had worried it would cramp the room, but the concern proved unnecessary. When Jo Hyu pressed a hand to one wall and chanted a spell, a doorway opened in the stone, connecting the room to the chamber next door. In an instant, the space had doubled.
"At this rate, I really ought to be paying you more rent."
"Don't bother. That room was sitting empty anyway."
Truthfully, Jo Hyu probably had calculations of his own. Befriending someone like Cheon Woo-jin — clearly no ordinary Qi Condensation cultivator — would prove useful in all manner of ways. And with a precious granddaughter to look after, Jo Hyu had every reason to keep the man close; it was thanks enough that Cheon Woo-jin dropped by to check in on her whenever he passed.
"Let's light it up, then."
Jo Hyu reached down toward the base of the furnace. There was no fuel of any kind, yet he ignited a flame with spiritual power.
"Do you have any spirit herbs on hand? I was thinking I'd show you how to make a pill."
"I have things like these..."
When Cheon Woo-jin laid out the spirit herbs he'd gathered as spoils, Jo Hyu nodded. "That's enough to make a few Blood-Stoking Stasis-Dispelling Pills for treating wounds."
Clunk!
Jo Hyu flicked his left hand and the furnace lid swung open of its own accord. Then, with a swirl of his right, the spirit herbs — restored red sage, ghost safflower, red chuanxiong, blood peony — went soaring through the air and dropped into the furnace one after another.
Watching the old man's dazzling sleight of hand, Cheon Woo-jin marveled inwardly.
"If you put them in by hand, you'll burn yourself, so you feed them in with spiritual power like this."
"Understood."
Another flick of Jo Hyu's left hand and the lid sealed shut.
"Next, you have to channel spiritual power into the furnace so that the refining follows the Eight Trigrams."
As Jo Hyu thrust both palms forward and released his spiritual power, the Eight Trigrams pattern etched into the furnace began to glow with a subtle, mystical light.
"For a simple pill, you can distribute the power evenly like this. But the deeper you go, the more you have to control each trigram individually."
As he explained, Jo Hyu breathed spiritual power into each of the Eight Trigrams in turn. With every infusion, the glow of a trigram would swell bright or dim accordingly.
"Qian holds the strongest yang energy — it can melt even metal. Kun, by contrast, is rich in yin, so it smothers the flame and steadies it evenly. Zhen is a fire like lightning, erupting in an instant — ideal when you need a hard, fast burn. Xun is like wind, best for gentle heating. Kan is water; it draws out an herb's essence the way you'd simmer a medicinal decoction. Li is pure flame — it boils away moisture and concentrates the essence. Gen stands like a mountain, unmoving, holding the center so the medicine coheres properly. And Dui smooths everything over, like the quiet ripple of a still pond."
It was a lecture worth its weight in gold. Cheon Woo-jin was especially grateful that Jo Hyu had demonstrated by pouring spiritual power directly into each trigram.
To be fair, all of this had appeared in the game as well. But in the game it was just a matter of clicking a mouse and letting things proceed automatically — so this process of learning by watching, hands-on, was something he genuinely needed.
"Hmm, about time to open the lid."
Jo Hyu flicked his left hand; the lid rose, and a great gush of heat and smoke billowed out — only to be swiftly drawn up and away through the vent in the ceiling. Then Jo Hyu extended his right hand, and from within the furnace, a crimson pill floated upward.
All he had done was load the herbs and apply heat, yet through the workings of the Eight Trigrams, the pill had already been molded into a perfect sphere, its shaping complete.
"A Blood-Stoking Stasis-Dispelling Pill. That puts it at Grade 3."
"Ah...!"
Honestly, a Grade 3 Blood-Stoking Stasis-Dispelling Pill was nothing remarkable — in the game it was an early-game health potion and nothing more. But watching a healing pill be crafted before his very eyes, Cheon Woo-jin couldn't help but be impressed.
"That's everything I can teach you. The rest you'll have to study on your own."
Jo Hyu said it as if it were nothing, and Cheon Woo-jin pressed his hands together in thanks. What had begun as an offer to merely install the furnace had turned into nothing short of a complete primer on the fundamentals of pill refinement.
"Thank you. I knew you were versed in formations, but your mastery of alchemy runs deep as well."
"Heh heh. I'm just a half-baked failure who couldn't even attempt Foundation Establishment and fled his sect — that's all I amount to."
Cheon Woo-jin suddenly recalled what Jo Hyu had told him before.
"You mentioned you came out of the demonic path, I believe."
"Mm, that's right."
"What made you turn your back on it?"
Betrayal was met with cruelty in every faction of the cultivation world — but none so ruthlessly as the demonic sects. Walking out of the demonic path meant walking out prepared to die.
"Do you know why they call it the demonic path?"
"Because it uses people as cultivation resources, no?"
"Mm, that's right."
Even among the Orthodox sects and the Dark Gate, cultivators were sometimes sacrificed for power. But only the demonic factions officially sanctioned such methods. The courtesans of Changhwa Pavilion, for instance, had been cultivators who learned dual cultivation arts from the Harmonious Union Sect — and that sect, too, was classed among the demonic. In the end, they were beings who stole the vital essence of others to grow strong.
"In the sect I belonged to, they used living humans as ingredients when they refined Foundation Establishment Pills."
"..."
"They'd stuff several living people into a great furnace and slowly render them down into a pill over forty-nine days."
Jo Hyu stared at the furnace with shadowed eyes. The one standing before him now was far too small to hold a person. The furnace of his old demonic sect would have been several times larger. But in Jo Hyu's eyes at that moment, the image of a massive furnace stained with blood surely flickered and shimmered.
"It was something I simply could not stomach. Not while my mind was still my own."
"So you gave up on Foundation Establishment for that?"
"That's right."
And with that, Cheon Woo-jin realized how badly he had misjudged the old man. Jo Hyu could have attempted Foundation Establishment — and had chosen, of his own will, to abandon it. To preserve what humanity he had left.
"I trained in nothing but demonic arts my whole life, so there's no ordinary road to Foundation Establishment left for me now. I'll remain in Qi Condensation until my lifespan runs out, I suppose." Jo Hyu looked at Cheon Woo-jin as he said it. "Don't end up like me."
"..."
"The path of cultivation does demand you climb over the corpses of countless rivals, that much is true. But the ones who climb wearing a skin soaked head to toe in blood — they always slip and fall somewhere along the way."
Cheon Woo-jin resolved to take those words to heart. In a way, it was a teaching more precious than any lesson in alchemy.
In the days that followed, Cheon Woo-jin shut himself away in his eastern chamber, practicing alchemy alone. The basic principles of herb combinations and trigram configuration were already etched in his mind. Working from his memories of the game while folding in everything Jo Hyu had taught him, his skill improved rapidly.
Time to attempt a real pill, I think.
Cheon Woo-jin drew several spirit herbs from his storage pouch — the ones he had gathered in the small secret realm alongside the White Leaf Autumn Spirit Grass. The autumn grass itself would have to be saved as a Foundation Establishment material, but the rest he was free to use now.
White nodding snowroot, white solitary lovage, broad duzhong, Changbai achyranthes, true teasel root...
With each motion of his hand, another herb drifted into the furnace. All of them acted upon the muscles and bones. Once every ingredient was in and the lid sealed, Cheon Woo-jin channeled his spiritual power into the furnace, and the Eight Trigrams scattered across its eight directions began to shimmer with mystical light.
Minimize the high-heat trigrams, Qian and Zhen, so the herbs don't scorch. Pour extra power into Kun, Kan, Gen, and Dui for a steady, even extraction — and balance Xun and Li against each other just so...
Thanks to Jo Hyu's teaching and all his practice, he was able to translate his game knowledge into reality. After roughly half a day of refining, he opened the lid once more with spiritual power — and along with a wash of searing heat, the sharp smell of hot iron burst forth. That metallic reek was the scent of the Metal element among the Five Phases; these herbs had absorbed Metal-natured spiritual energy as they grew, and so it was iron they breathed.
Cheon Woo-jin reached out, and from the furnace's lingering heat, five snow-white pills rose into the air.
A success.
Gathering the white pills into his palm, Cheon Woo-jin felt a quiet satisfaction.
A Grade 4 Sinew-Soothing Bone-Forging Pill.
The Sinew-Soothing Bone-Forging Pill strengthened the body. Drawing on the nature of Metal — the element that converges the qi of all things into a single point — it focused spiritual power into the muscles and bones, drawing out strength beyond their natural limits. One could lift heavier loads, run at greater speeds, and withstand harder impacts. It did nothing for spiritual power or spellwork — and yet, in real combat, it could prove the decisive edge.
Those days of nothing but refining practice were worth it.
Cheon Woo-jin slipped the pills inside his robe. These were pills that might need to be swallowed in a heartbeat — they could not be relegated to the storage pouch.
About time I went to see Seo Seol-ryeong.
By now she would surely have the next commission prepared. He tidied up around the furnace and stepped out of his eastern chamber.
Layer 1, after days of absence, was as boisterous as ever. Loose cultivators swarming in from every direction, desperate to seize some opportunity; opportunists hawking their wares to those same crowds; and even the sect disciples dispatched to Ghost Head City under orders to claim the legacy of the Yin Soul Ghost Bone Palace. All manner of people, tangled together and living their lives — a picture no different from any other day.
But one thing had changed since he'd first set foot here. More and more people recognized Cheon Woo-jin now.
He had killed a rogue cultivator on the spot the very day he arrived in Ghost Head City — a man who'd tried to rob him — and had lived unafraid ever since. That made him one of the most conspicuous figures in Layer 1. The fact that he was the one who had raided the Dokgeum Sect and Dongryu Trade House remained unknown, but word had already spread that he took on various small jobs and settled problems as a fixer of sorts.
Because of that, not a single soul dared pick a fight with him. If anything, people went out of their way to avoid him — afraid trouble might find them through him.
Though all of that holds true only in Layer 1.
The moment one climbed to Layer 2, the atmosphere shifted. Everyone there was late-stage Qi Condensation or better, so even those who recognized him didn't regard him with much wariness. Up on Layer 3, there would hardly be anyone who knew his face at all. Ghost Head City was a place where the gaps between layers ran deep: a power nobody dared touch in Layer 1 was merely an ordinary cultivator in Layer 2, and by Layer 3 he became an unknown nobody. It mirrored the structure of the cultivation world itself. A Great Perfection Qi Condensation cultivator was the mightiest of his realm — but step beyond Qi Condensation into the world of Foundation Establishment, and he was instantly the greenest novice there was. In that sense, Ghost Head City was the architecture of the cultivation world made flesh.
Naturally, Cheon Woo-jin had no intention of growing complacent in these lower layers. He meant to climb, without pause, to a realm where no one could threaten him.
"Welcome back, Taoist Cheon."
Stepping into the tent tucked into a corner of the Layer 2 market, Cheon Woo-jin was greeted by Seo Seol-ryeong. She was, above all others, the partner he needed most if he was to climb to the heights.
"Before we discuss the commission, there's something I should tell you first."
"What is it?"
"You asked to be informed of the Taiyi Inverse Principle Sect's movements, did you not?"
Given the enmity between them, he had asked her to pass along any intelligence that surfaced.
"Are they pushing forward with an entry into Ghost Head City again?"
"Nothing of the sort has reached my ears yet," Seo Seol-ryeong said, shaking her head. "But another faction has been moving suspiciously of late."
"Which faction?"
"Care to guess?"
"..."
Cheon Woo-jin sank briefly into thought, sifting through his memories of the game, imagining how the board must be arranged by this point.
"Last time, the Taiyi Inverse Principle Sect tried to use Dongryu Trade House to push its way in. Before that, the Moonlit Thirteen League moved against the Dokgeum Sect." The Taiyi Inverse Principle Sect of the Orthodox path, the Moonlit Thirteen League of the Dark Gate. With those two already showing their hands, the next player was obvious. "This time it's the demonic factions eyeing Ghost Head City. Am I right?"
"...!"
Just what in the world are you?
That was the look on Seo Seol-ryeong's face as her lips parted.