Chapter 42 - Senior Brother’s Guidance

The next five days felt somewhat surreal to Ao Wen. Much of her body had been covered in medicinal paste and wrapped in bandages. She'd been brought to a room that felt almost opulent to her sensibilities as a stonecutter's daughter in Turning Leaf town and were much more impressive than anything she'd experienced since waking as an orphan in the midst of a plague. The attendant who brought her to this room apologized repeatedly that it only offered "essential amenities" and asked that she forgive the limitations imposed by their current circumstances.

Limited, in this case, meant a luxurious if narrow bed with soft sheets and a cozy blanket embroidered with a pattern of alchemy flames. A writing desk had been provided which was separate from a "working table" intended for use by alchemists. A third small table existed with exquisite chairs for receiving guests, complete with a delicate porcelain tea service and a collection of teas to suit different taste. The wardrobe contained several sets of initiates robes, dressing gowns and other necessities. She had even been provided with one large and one small mirror, a limited but high quality selection of makeup and a collection of polished and intricately carved hair pins. This, to her new hosts, was their idea of "roughing it." When she thought about how Feng Xi was suffering in the den of a Blood Rage Cougar in the middle of a thunderstorm, she couldn't help but feel that she had entered a different world in more ways than one.

During her first five days, Alchemist Huang Yuze brought her box after box of herbs salvaged from the city. At first, Ao Wen felt surprised that the only herbs she was provided were of very high quality, but then she reflected on her surroundings and decided that the sect likely didn't bother to collect anything that wasn't in suitable condition to meet their standards. Her job was made infinitely easier by the high quality tools she was provided to do sorting - precise scales, delicate tweezers, even a lens to magnify the herbs and see details up close! The tools were of much higher quality than the ones she found in Master Dongfang's clinic. She wasn't surprised that the Medical Saintess had access to better tools, only that better tools were common enough for a simple initiate like herself to be provided with them.

Just having a task to do helped her to keep her mind off the events at the orphanage, but there were other things that happened as well. Cheng Chuntao stopped by every morning or evening to have tea and to talk to her about life in the sect, other places she'd visited, it seemed like any topic was up for discussion as long as it didn't touch on the sect's current mission in the city. Ao Wen had felt being provided a tea set to entertain with was extravagant but it turned out that she used it regularly!

Alchemist Huang Yuze also visited frequently. He brought each day's box of herbs early in the morning and generally took his morning breakfast with her. He also brought dinner in the evenings when he came to check on her work. On the third day, her arrangement of herbs prompted a question from the Independent Alchemist. "What's this? It doesn't look like part of what you were asked to do."

"That's a list of common medicines that could be made from the herbs there. I don't have a reference book of recipes with me, those are just ones that I remembered looking at in Master Dongfang's clinic," she explained. "I may have gotten some of the amounts wrong, I made a notation where I wasn't certain. Without a recipe to reference, I wouldn't dare to try to refine anything, but this gave me something to do after I finished the sorting."

"How long did it take you to finish the sorting?" Huang Yuze asked. Sifting through two hundred random herbs should take most of the day, so how much time had this little girl had to do more?

"I finished a bit after Senior Sister Cheng Chuntao visited for lunch. When I was at Master Dongfang's clinic I had to do this a lot and I found out that if I just separated everything first, it was pretty easy to get things to be separate, then to figure out what they were. Mostly I was looking for specific things but it happened too often that I'd sift all of the first thing out of the pile and then the next day I'd need to find something else in the pile. It was better to just separate everything and then figure it out," she said. "Honestly, the fact that I only need two books to identify everything in the box makes it so much easier than working with Master's library. I spent too much time back then just looking for the right book."

"Hmm," Huang Yuze furrowed his brows in thought. For now, she was just supposed to sort herbs, but Master had given him the mission to pass an Alchemy Novice exam, she'd have to know a few hundred medicines and dozens of elixirs by then anyway. It didn't hurt to have her learn if she had extra time. "I'm going to give you something special," he said, pulling a thin manual out of his spacial ring. "This manual was written by Master, it's a field guide written for alchemists in impoverished places or places where skilled alchemists or rare ingredients are in short supply. Many of these recipes are inferior versions of recipes that require more skilled techniques or more expensive ingredients to produce. They shouldn't be considered medicines to make in situations where you can make something better, you understand?" Receiving a nod from Ao Wen, he continued. "Starting from tomorrow, I want you to use this manual to write a plan for the best use you can make of the herbs you find. Consider it an activity where you're limited to the resources available. It may be best to make fewer of one medicine so you can save an ingredient that overlaps with another recipe. It might help if you consider this from the perspective of the orphanage in times before the Yin Poison outbreak. If you could only visit them once every two months to make medicines to have on hand, what would you produce for them?"

"I understand," Ao Wen said. "May I concoct a few batches of those medicines? I don't want to waste any herbs, but I want to understand the success rate of the refinement process so I can budget for wasted herbs when preparing my list."

"Success rate?" Huang Yuze was genuinely confused. "Oh, right, you probably failed more than a few times since you were just learning. It's fine to assume one hundred percent success and keep it as a mathematical exercise. An Alchemy Novice with an appropriate grasp of flame control and reasonable resources shouldn't fail at any of these recipes. If they do, their talent is clearly trash," he said dismissively.

"I see, I'm sorry," Ao Wen said with downcast eyes. Clearly trash. That described how she felt about the treatments she provided to the orphans during her days at the clinic. Desperate floundering, but clearly trash. "Thank you Alchemist Huang for the reminder. Initiate Yu knows that her skills are unacceptably poor and shouldn't be used as a benchmark for true alchemists. I apologize for any insult," she said, tears sliding down her face. She knew she couldn't have cured the children, but how much less would they have suffered if she wasn't inept and fumbling? She'd been distracting herself from her failure but… just like choosing to fight the Rage Queen had been a disastrous overestimation of her skills that left Tang Jin badly injured, she'd been letting her success at simple tasks cloud her perception of her own skill.

"I think you're misunderstanding," Huang Yuze said. Feeling she wasn't meeting expectations could motivate her to work harder and he didn't intend to let her know how impossible of a bar his Master had set for this young little alchemist. At the same time, he didn't want to crush her. "I've seen the Butterfly Dreams you produced, it was among the things retrieved from the clinic. Truthfully, when Master showed it to me, I asked which of our Alchemy Novices had produced Impure grade Butterfly Dreams. That's not an easy recipe to follow," he explained. The use of Sapphire Night Butterfly wings alone brought the level of difficulty close to that of a basic Elixir! Very few pure mortal medicines were so difficult.

"For an Alchemy Initiate to produce Butterfly Dreams at all is exceptional, to produce one that was above Unrefined, even more so. You did that without proper tools, without proper training, without the countless hours of practice most Alchemy Novices would have. Your talent isn't lacking at all. Your skills are lacking but only in the sense that you've had too little practice, too little guidance, too little… too little care from a real mentor," he said, feeling genuine hurt for the heavy burden this little girl had taken on herself when she began to care for those orphans. Her senior sister had been cruel indeed to set such expectations on her. "I cannot take you as a disciple," he said, not adding the fact that it was because his Master had already claimed the little girl. "But, if you wish, you can call me Senior Brother Huang, and I will help you practice your skills. I know you haven't taken the proper Alchemy Initiate exam, but if you keep practicing, I'll let you take it in a few weeks, once your meridians have healed enough to learn a proper flame control technique and to do some practice. What do you say?"

Ao Wen stared at Huang Yuze with misty eyes. "I… I'd be very grateful to receive Senior Brother Huang's guidance," she finally said.