Alchemist's Tower

Today after breakfast, Collin was going to head to the guild tower to study up on what pills, elixirs, and teas he should learn to make to help with his and his cousins cultivation progress. There were many recipes that he could learn that would have various results when used.

Pills could be categorized as standard type, elemental type, strengthening type, and breakthrough type. The standard type of pill would release a certain amount of Qi for the cultivator to refine to improve their cultivation in a short time. Elemental type pills are designed to do the same thing but for a certain element, for example, Collin would get more use from a wood element pill than any other pill, including a standard pill. Strengthening pills are used to strengthen the body, blood, and in rare recipes, the soul. Breakthrough pills are needed by most cultivators when breaking through to a new cultivation realm. To breakthrough from the Qi Condensation realm to the Foundation Establishment realm requires a massive amount of Qi, this Qi can be provided by cultivation in an area with a very large amount of dense Qi, the use of one of several techniques that seal Qi inside the cultivator's body over a long time and releasing that Qi to breakthrough, but if there is a mistake and the amount is not enough to breakthrough or the Qi exceeds the amount the seal can hold it can damage the cultivator's meridians. But breakthrough pills could be used to help the cultivator breakthrough in a short amount of time and without risk of injury. 

Elixirs were mostly used to heal injuries and restore Qi. And while they are far more effective than healing pills, they are far more expensive than healing pills. They required more ingredients and a lot of extra care to make sure the ingredients mixed properly. Some elixirs even required the ingredients to be of a certain age for the recipe to work, but to get around this, alchemists figured out how to make additives that enhance certain properties of ingredients to make up for the lack of age of a needed spirit herb. This works for most recipes but not all, it would be a long time before Collin was strong enough to make those very few recipes and even then, just finding the ingredients themselves would be just as hard as finding them at the right age.

Teas, the first known alchemy. To make a simple alchemic tea all you need to do is mix crushed spirit herbs with clean water and allow to steep. But just throwing random spirit herbs into a jug with water will not make an alchemist tea, it will make something similar to a poison that will do far more harm than good. To make a tea that can be refined by cultivators, one would need a good recipe that explains the ratio of what spirit herbs are needed and can range from one spirit herb to several hundred. Teas can also be tailored to individual cultivators, similar to the alchemic tea Elder Orta gave Collin, it had enough normal and fire energy to be very helpful for Collin's cultivation.

These were several of things that Collin wished to look into while he was at the tower, he also planned to make some pills to earn some spirit stones and some contribution points. Some of the knowledge and recipes he wished to learn about could be bought with spirit stones, but the better the recipe the more it required to be purchased with contribution points.

When Collin arrived at the tower there were many people entering and exiting the tower in a steady stream. He mixed in with the crowd to enter the tower, but when he entered, the crowd he had entered with went to the counters to buy and sell while he walked to the back. Once in the back the sound of the hundreds of people doing business disappeared and only silence remained. 

Along the back wall were the commission boards, here alchemists of the guild could accept jobs to make pills for the guild or private parties. Most commissions from the guild end up being sold to the public from the sales counters, while commissions from private parties are from large clans that want or needed stronger pills and elixirs that the public couldn't afford to buy. The jobs from the guild were large order jobs that had lower spirit stone pay but included contribution points. While private jobs offered more spirit stones but no contribution points and less orders.

Collin started to look through the guild commissions, the private jobs required pills that Collin hadn't practiced enough to turn in a good quality product or required recipes that Collin didn't currently have. He could still make a good amount of spirit stones if he only made the top ten pills that he had practiced making over and over again, the only downside is that he wouldn't get fair market value for the pills like he did during the test, that was only available during the guild test. But getting seven spirits stones instead of twenty wasn't as bad as it seemed considering the guild would buy all he would offer to sell.

There was a commission board for Qi Condensation, Foundation Establishment, Core Formation, and Nascent Soul realm alchemists, and while Collin did check out all the boards, he couldn't take on anything other than Qi Condensation jobs. He had decided to make fifty spirit gathering pills and fifty healing pills, he already knew the recipes and had ample practice making them. This would take several hours to do, and he planned to take a break later and study up in the guild's library to get an understanding of which direction his alchemy skills should progress. 

He had spent most of the night thinking of the specialization he wished to take, the thought of using alchemy to help himself and his cousins to grow stronger was appealing to him, but only making pills and elixirs in massive amounts didn't seem right to him. He had used poisons to fight and kill people and he wasn't averse to learning more. And he had a slight interest in healing, learning to heal wasn't the highest on the list of things to learn but he thought it might be useful to learn for the future. Making a profit from his alchemy was the lowest on his list, he didn't mind the thought of making some spirit stones but had absolutely no wish to devote his entire future to sitting around thinking of how to make the most spirit stones. 

After an entire night thinking about what he wanted to do, he still couldn't narrow it down. He found himself wanting to do all of them and none of them. He decided that even if he did learn various aspects of each specialization now, he could choose later to continue learning in a broad approach or to narrow it down to what he found he liked. He had to remind himself that he wasn't even eleven years old yet, and he still had time to learn and grow. He really didn't like thinking like that, even if it was the truth, it felt wrong to him. But for right now it was time to tell the attendant at the counter what jobs he had chosen and get the materials to make them.