25 New Apprentices (1)

The full moon had just set, and with it, the coldest part of the night had finally warmed by the long sought yet harsh rays of the sun. Silva had already gotten up and moved around for her morning chores, completing them to the letter no matter how absurd the request. Unfortunately, this professional decorum did not exist for her cousin Louis, for he was violently shaken awake.

"Wake up, sleepy head," Silva said.

"The sun is not even up yet." Louis said, grumpily. "I need more sleep."

"Your apprentices are coming in a few hours."

"Correction, they are students, not apprentices."

"Aren't they the same?"

"I did not know nor did I choose them. They most likely won't stay for very long."

"Well, either way, you have to get up. Your fiancee and sister went all out yesterday, so all your pills are now gone."

Louis groaned and pulled a pillow over his head and smothered himself. Only time will tell if he would get up and concoct pills. While he liked concocting pills, he liked the research portion, when he can find the mysteries of the universe, glimpse something new and use his mind to find strategies to improve, not the brainless process where he constantly produced pills like eating a meal or other mundane activities.

Silva simply dragged him leg first out of the bed, letting his head drop straight to the ground, the soft pillows around him cushioning his fall, if only just when he threw the ones over his head under him. Things got no better on the ground, for she dragged across the floor, then across every single step of the stairs, each threatening to start an intimate relationship with his head. When he reached the alchemy room, he called it at this point - he had never seen the room used for anything else, Silva dropped his feet, hurting his tender bottom.

"Where's my breakfast?" Louis said, resigned.

"No breakfast for those who skip work, maybe there will be lunch when you finish."

"More like dinner, if I even can get that." Louis muttered under his breath.

"What was that?" Silva asked, leaning right over him. "Is that the wonderful sound of dissent I hear?"

"Of course not." Louis said, beating his chest. "I only commented on how beautiful you are."

"Ist that so?" Silva asked, chuckling. Her eyes portrayed a far more chilling coldness perfectly juxtaposed the warm and large smile on her face. "I'll keep that in mind and plan dinner accordingly."

As she left, Louis walked into the alchemy room with thousands of pounds weighing on his back, feeling more than before he had even gone to sleep. A new set of freshly unopened boxes were stacked four high with nearly eight of such stacks around. Beside his array were three glass containers completely empty, the glass shining a pristine sparkle with nary a speck of dust from his pills remaining anywhere near it.

The only saving grace he had was the one couch he had next to the glass containers and the row of notebooks he had beneath it. Most of them held data about the pills he had concocted and his ideas of what he did poorly and correctly. Some of the words were incoherent, even to him, while others held ideas he had not fully recorded and could not use to find just what he was thinking when he recorded them. These books were some of his earlier works when he trusted too much of his memory, only to pay the price of forgetting and losing valuable ideas - and, even worse, time and knowledge - so the rest of the books recorded his ideas far more completely.

Louis opened the most recent book, there were still a couple of empty pages left, but he was more interested in the words he had written yesterday. Having a night to sleep on the matter, he had his own opinions on just what had happened and potentially how to move forward, but he wanted to review the ideas he had before. The biggest problem with the elemental qi replenishing pills were the amount of qi were inversely proportionally to the purity of the qi. Hence, it was best used when replenishing qi that would be used up instantly, compared to a spirit stone whose qi was pure yet plentiful, allowing it to be used in many more situations, even arrays. The only upsides to the elemental qi replenishing pills were its manufacturing cost being both cheap and its materials replenishable, unlike spirit stones which required almost a decade to create in batches at a time.

While all pills has their own uses and composition, most of them had the outer layer which contained the qi and the essence of the pill within it. While this could be done to increase the volume of a pill to improve the quality or quantity of qi within, the volume increased much quicker than the surface area of the pill, creating a never ending arms race that would never succeed. Instead of that, each pill had their own optimal size, by factoring in both material cost and alchemical feasibility.

It was here Louis had the greatest trouble. He had spent most of his time fixing the two inner layers of the pill, but increasing the purity within only created a hollow space between the inner layers and the outer layer - in other words, a pill of air with a few drops of pure qi. Perhaps he had been too optimistic with the outer layer.

There were three main theories for creating the outer layer of a pill: the two forces four element harmony theory, specialization one or two elements to the extreme or simply not using elements altogether. The two forces four element harmony theory was by no means a new theory, even when cultivators generally had elementless qi, people knew that combining the four elements together had the greatest harmony and balance. The two forces referred to yin and yang - although they can't be accessed directly, by using a positive and negative of each of the four elements, it can be reproduced enough to be effective. Specialization of one or two elements - generally two, unless one made an extreme pill, which only used one element and was much harder to concoct without exploding - only used one or two elements in the pill to focus on one element above all others, mainly used for elemental qi replenishing pills and other pills to aid a person with a specific element. The Fire Qi Replenishing Pill, for example, only used fire and earth ingredients. The last one, elementless, was the broadest category which contained anything that did not belong to the former two. The outer layer of these pills could use elementless ingredients, ingredients with low elemental qi or even ingredients with extraordinary elemental qi but cancel it out with another elemental qi of the same grade.

Although the outer and inner layers of each elemental qi replenishing pill was made from different materials, they all functioned under the same principle, so they all missed the same thing: a weak outer layer that could not contain the qi within. The outer layer was perfectly fine for its lower grade counterparts, the most common iteration of the pill, but it was sorely lacking for unique grade that Louis sought to achieve. The alchemical process far too simple and the ingredients using only the cheapest to form just enough of a container for the rest of the pill. He had to change something and he was only recently figuring out just what that was: making a two force, four element harmony outer layer. The inner specialization of the fire qi was perfectly fine as it was, for now at least. While this would increase the difficulty of the concoction and cleansing process, Louis had confidence he could carry it out. The material cost may increase, but only by a few silver since the other elemental ingredients for the outer layer would be cheap, as the inner layer ingredients made the bulk of the price. The most important thing was that the pill now had a chance of reaching unique grade.

With that in mind, Louis created a draft for the first iteration for an unique grade Fire Qi Replenishing Pill. Louis removed the Red Ginseng from the outer layer, since a third fire ingredient was simply too much. The other three ingredients were alright and he would need five other elemental ingredients to complete the outer layer. Louis walked into another room that was filled with a random assortment of all the one and two star ingredients, since they were cheap and he had ordered them for his apprentices to use as practice materials. Mother's Touch was a two star earth flower; Pink Water Lily and Peace Lily Flower were aquatic plants and had water qi; and, finally, Dandelion and Milk Thistle were wind type weeds.

For the first few attempts with these materials, Louis did not even bother crafting the rest of the pill. He simply worked with these eight materials to better understand their characteristics that were too subtle to be written a book. After understanding these characteristics, Louis experimented with combinations of these ingredients to form an outer layer, changing its form to find its strength at different widths and sizes.

Four hours had passed when Louis finally figured out the optimal shape he wanted, something a bit smaller than the original pill but could hold a lot more purer qi without breaking. But, Louis had crafted not a single pill. And, best of all, his apprentices were coming in a couple of hours. Louis immediately went to work on the Fire Qi Replenishing Pill.

The first two batches were a bust, but on his third try, Louis finally created a pseudo unique grade Fire Qi Replenishing Pill. It was a pill that could have been an unique grade pill but the compatibility within a part of the pill worsen the grade just enough to make it better than a great grade pill but worse than an unique grade pill.

Louis sighed. He was close, so close too. He must have messed up the final fusing or the cleansing process. They were the hardest part when experimenting with a new variation of a pill. Right when he started to get back to work, he heard a voice. Silva's voice.

"Louis dear, your apprentices are here." She said sweetly and loudly. "I hope you made enough pills for everyone around, otherwise you won't get dinner."

Louis groaned as he cleaned up his workplace and recorded his notes before getting up. The day was long already but he felt it had not even started yet.