Book 5: Chapter 38: Final Test
For Sen, the following week was nothing but a blur of alchemy. While the primer only provided the most tangential guidance in terms of method, it did force him to manage increasingly complex assortments of ingredients and reagents. He rarely struggled with the early recipes. As the reactions and interactions inside of the cauldron grew increasingly complicated, though, he found that even his intuitive abilities were hard-pressed to keep pace. When he very nearly failed to complete a pill, he forced himself to stop, eat something, and rest. He didnt want to, but he could feel the various pains accumulating in his body. Its happening so fast, he thought. Im dying again. and its happening so much faster. As he drifted in a place between the waking and sleeping world, he relived his last year or so in fits and starts. He kept wondering if he had truly wasted time somewhere along the way that might have given him even a day or two more.
Yet, try as he might, he didnt see how he could have spent his time better. No one, not even Fu Ruolan, had known how much time her stabilization would give him. Under those conditions of uncertainty, Sen had spent his time as well as he could. There had been the long days of fruitlessly trying to make pill refining work the way it did for other people. Yet, he couldnt say they were truly wasted. If he hadnt spent that time the way he did, he wouldnt have had the confidence to abandon that path and try something else. He would have wondered if hed just stuck with it a little longer if it would have worked. There were those months spent retrieving the dusk mushroom. He had long thought of those as wasted months, but they hadnt been. He might not have benefited directly, but Falling Leaf had benefited. Shed used many of the cores they collected to advance her cultivation level past his. He couldnt make himself view that as a waste, as much as his bitterness might want him to see it that way.
When he did sleep, it was restless and marked with dreams of a terrible darkness closing in on him, relentlessly pursuing him. He fled from that darkness. It was ravenous, all-consuming, and it wanted to enfold him in its savage embrace. While Sen might not always recognize a losing battle when he saw one, he did recognize an utterly hopeless battle when it threatened to destroy him utterly. That darkness wasnt something he could stand against. It wasnt even an enemy in the strictest sense. It was something far too primitive and primal to be an enemy. Much as that vast and terrible consciousness that hed felt at the edges of the world, that darkness simply was. So, in the endless expanses of his own dreams, Sen fled before that darkness as all other things fled before it. He fled to escape the terror. He fled to preserve his life. When hed exhausted his strength and could no longer run, he would wake in cold sweat, shivering in fear.
Hed let himself sit with that fear for a few seconds and let his waking mind get a true taste of it. Then, hed use that fear as fuel and return to the cauldron. He didnt return with more strength. He always returned with more focus and determination to succeed. He knew what was waiting for him if he failed. He had no wish to meet that darkness in truth, in the waking world, where he couldnt hope that waking up would provide him a swift and easy escape. As terrifying as those thoughts were for him, he also knew that they werent literal. Oh, there was something waiting for him if he died. Of that much, he was sure. He had a sense that whatever it was, it wouldnt be as obviously oppressive as all-consuming darkness. He feared that it would be equally terrifying in some other way that his mind couldnt process. So, he worked feverishly, driving himself forward at a pace that would have been wildly reckless under literally any other circumstance.
Falling Leaf and Fu Ruolan were ghostly presences in his awareness. He knew that they had come into the lab at times. Falling Leaf brought food. Hed found it sitting off to the side and waiting for him. Fu Ruolan observed. He was dimly aware of her gaze on him, or her spiritual sense observing his work. Yet, neither spoke to him or tried to interrupt. They knew as well as he did that the price of failure was death. When he completed the last recipe in the book, if only just, he was left at a loss. He just held the book in his hand for a long time, although he couldnt ever rightly remember how long. He knew that it was important that there were no more recipes, no more guidance. It was only after staring at that primer for far, far too long that he remembered he wasnt really done yet. There had been one more recipe. One more pill to make. He summoned that recipe that Fu Ruolan had given him in what felt like a different life.
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Part of him thought he should sleep, or eat, or even just go outside and see the sun. He ignored that part of him. Its clearly the part of me that wants to die, he thought. He pushed aside the mounting pains in his body. That ever-rising crescendo of pain had convinced him as much as anything else that he should move forward with this last recipe. Once he completed it, there would be nothing left for him to do but make the pill for his body cultivation. One final test, he thought. Hed complete this last recipe. Then, hed let himself sleep for a little while. Long enough to prepare his mind for making the pill for the Five-Fold Body Transformation. Even he wouldnt dare make something that important when he was as tired as he was at that moment. He did let himself sit down, though. Hed fashioned a chair of stone in his alchemy lab and sank into it, shuddering as his joints and back formed a coalition of anger that made him bite his tongue to keep from crying out.
He sat there in a stupor for a time, his vision fading in and out of darkness. Or maybe he was just blinking. He couldnt tell anymore. He didnt sleep. He was too tired to sleep, but he did just sit for a time while his overtaxed mind skittered from thought to thought without ever really landing on one thing to focus on. Hed been maintaining nearly undivided focus for long enough that it felt like his head might explode if he didnt let his mind go and look at all those things hed been ignoring. After a few minutes or hours of that, he forced himself back onto his feet. His mind was, well, happy was probably the wrong word for it, but it was less unhappy after its mad scramble to look at all of those distractions hed denied it. His head felt less stuffed full of distractions. Sen rubbed his face with his hands, took a deep breath, and picked up the recipe.
It looked simple at a casual glance, but he knew better. Hed worked with nearly every ingredient on that list at some point in the last week. He knew what they were, what they did, and that anyone versed in traditional pill refining would say that most of them had no business being in a cauldron at the same time. Still, he could sense that there was something underlying that apparent madness. He began summoning ingredients from his storage ring. He started with dusk mushroom. It took an effort not to glare at the thing. He couldnt see it without thinking about that horde of spiders that hed fought and driven off. Nor could he avoid the memory of the carnage hed seen the next day. It might have been truly avoidable, but he still loathed that hed had to do it. Sen very intentionally turned to the next ingredient, a fire-attributed phoenix shard. It was likely the rarest reagent hed ever personally worked with, and he had no idea where Fu Ruolan had acquired a chest full of the crystals. After that came an air-attributed sky rose and a water-attributed serpents root coil. He stopped thinking about the ingredients and simply summoned the rest.
He just stood there with them for a time, feeling their energy, and letting his intuitions guide him. Although he didnt know it, he stood that way for nearly ten hours. He wore an abstracted expression as his spiritual sense and qi blanketing the ingredients and reagents. Then, as though some silent signal was given, he went to work. He casually tossed things into the cauldron. That those ingredients and reagents should have exploded when in proximity and exposed to heat meant nothing to Sen. He was too deep into the moment, too deep inside the process, and he simply made the things in the cauldron behave as his intuition told him they needed to behave. The minutes dragged out into hours as he scorched, simmered, and browbeat the ingredients to do as he willed them to. Yet, even his indomitable will and preternatural insight couldnt wholly account for the uncertainties of the refining process.
There were moments when the reactions got away from him in ways that would level the galehouse if he didnt get them back under control. He spent frantic moments cutting off paths to destruction a dozen at a time and driving the concoction toward that one nebulous path of success. There were other moments when the fusing process threatened to stall and die, and he had to drive them along with his own qi and sheer force of will. It was as harrowing as a true battle and just as exhausting. Toward the end, it was only his will to endure that let him push the pill to completion. He felt it when the ingredients finally gave up the struggle and coalesced into the pill he wanted to them to become. He absently doused the fire in the stove and bled the heat from the cauldron without any real awareness that hed done it. He picked up the cauldron and moved it to a work counter. He lifted the lid with a trembling hand and stared down at an oval-shaped pill that gave off a dull red glow.
Well, thats done, he said to no one.
As he collapsed to the floor, he had a chilling thought. If this pill was such a struggle to make, it would likely take a miracle to finish the one for his body cultivation. Fortunately, that thought and the fear that would have come with it were snuffed out by Sens precipitous descent into unconsciousness.
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