Book 5: Chapter 38: Final Test

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.This essence is securely nested within the heart of Nøv€lß¡n★

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.

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.