Taking the tests.
Entering the room, the first thing Collin noticed was the very bright white walls. Along the side walls were three brown wooden table with twelve matching chairs. Every step they took inside the room produced an echo, every word produced an echo, Collin could hear his breathing echoing in this room. After being handed a packet of papers and told to take a seat in one of the center tables on the right side of the room. As he sorted through the papers he had been given, it caused a rachet of echos. But he was expecting it to do so, he figured that the reason the room was set up like this was because it was part of the test.
The bright white walls, being as bright as they were, made them uncomfortable to look at. And with every little sound making such a racket, this room was made to disturb people's concentration. To preform alchemy, Collin needs to remove outside thoughts and disruptions and to ignore everything but what he needs to concentrate on. Since the written portion of the test only requires the test taker to have read and memorized the different Qi Condensation rank spirit herbs and what they do, it should be a no brainer for people to pass. But this room, it wasn't hard for Collin to imagine people becoming self-conscious of the noise they and other make they either nervous or annoyed, which in time would make they flustered or angry to the point where they would lose their concentration and miss answers they knew. He wondered how many people walked into the room being sure to pass only to walk out as failures because they couldn't ignore their surroundings.
The written portion of the test was easy, Collin had read the section he needed for this test well over a hundred times. The test only needed him to identify some drawings of several spirit herbs and list out the uses of a few other spirit herbs. He could have answered questions about where they grew in nature, how to harvest them, and how to plant and raise them in a garden, but none of those questions were on the test. When he finished the test he handed it to Haley, after looking at the papers she congratulated Collin on passing the written portion of the test and began to lead him to the place where the practical test would be held.
The entire second floor was an alchemy lab, there were around a hundred alchemy stations. Several dozen had people refining pills, there were dozens of people watching them make pills, and around sixty people walking all around the room. Unlike the room where the written portion of the test was held, there was almost no noise. Collin was sure if he clapped his hands together, he would instantly draw the ire of everyone in this room. He was led to a station away from everyone else and handed a space bag with everything he needed to make the pills for the test.
The station he was sitting at was of a higher grade then the one he had at his villa, but what caught his eye was the station next to his. It was a multi-station; it allowed an alchemist to use four cauldrons at once and create four batches of pills, if they were skilled enough, if they weren't they would only ruin four batches of ingredients. It required a lot of training to use correctly, but luckily Collin only had to use a standard one cauldron alchemy table.
Spirit gathering pill, a beast pill, a poison detox pill, and a healing pill were the four pills he needed to make to pass this test. He was familiar with these four pills, he had all of them in his space ring. The spirit gathering pills and beast pills were all high-grade, his healing pills came out high-grade 60% of the time, but while he had made some poison detox pills that were high-grade, he wasn't expecting it to happen for this test.
The space bag contained a cauldron and enough ingredients to make two tries of each pill. Collin only had to turn in one of each pill that reaches the standard to be called low-grade. Any pill that was made and turned in beyond the test pill, would be graded and purchased by the guild at fair market value. Most of the people on this floor currently using the alchemy tables were refining pills to sell to the guild either as practice or on commission from the guild. It was the main way the younger guild members made their money, and a way Collin planned to earn some money.
The first pill made was the spirit gathering pill, it was a full batch of twelve high-grade pills, but he was only able to make eleven pills with the second set of ingredients. Collin had needed to make one pill but instead made twenty-three, one would be used for the test and the other twenty-two would be sold to the guild for around ten spirit stones each. This was just the first of the four pills he needed to make, and he had already made a profit of over two-hundred spirit stones. He was looking forward to the profits he was going to make with the other three pills.
This test seemed odd to Collin, it required one low-grade pill to pass, which made it seem like it was designed for alchemist just starting out that could only extract and refine the medicinal essences from the ingredients to form one pill. But if that were true, why would they use the pills like the final four Collin learned in this test, they were very hard to make and would eliminate any novice alchemist that had to make them. Collin decided to ignore it for now and focus on making the three other pills.
Th next pill he made was the healing pill and like the sprit gathering pill, he made a total of twenty-three pills and sold the extras for eight spirit stone each. Then came the beast pill, which he was able to make two perfect batches of high-grade beast pills for a total of twenty-four pills, but they only sold for five spirit stones each. It was the difference between pills used by cultivators and pills only used by beast tamers. After refining six batches of pills in a row Collin took a fifteen-minute break to cultivate and restore some of his Qi. When his break ended, he immediately began to make the final two batches of the last pill. The only disappointing thing about this test happened here, he failed to refine high-grade pills from either batch. He was only offered four spirit stone for each of his sixteen mid-grade poison detox pills.
After handing over all the pills he had just made to Haley, he was led to an office on the first floor of the tower. After handing Collin a green space bag with the Alchemist's Guild emblem on it, she congratulated Collin on passing his tests and becoming a fellow member of the Alchemist's Guild before leaving. A few moments later Collin scanned the contents of the space bag. Inside he found a guild badge indicating he was a Qi Condensation rank alchemist, a green outer jacket with the guild's emblem on the back, some books on alchemy, and the spirit stones he had been offered for the pills he made.
At this moment Collin was having trouble trying to figure out how he should be feeling. He was feeling relived that he passed the tests but disappointed with how easy they were, happy that he made some money and the prospect of making more instead of just spending what he had. And he was confused, he had built up the Alchemist's Guild in his head so much that he was already expecting to fail the first two times he took the test. As these thoughts filled his mind, he failed to notice Valeria and an older man enter the room.
"You look confused, did it not strike you odd that if the test was so hard that it was near impossible to pass, then why are there so many alchemists in the guild?" Asked the older man.