Good news? And not so good news.
The first difference between alchemy and treasure refining was that the refining furnace needed to be warmed up for close to ten minutes before it could be used. The second difference was that using one's divine sense inside the furnace felt weird, this was due to the crude spatial inscriptions that made the inside of the furnace larger than the outside. Even though Collin knew about it and was expecting the odd feeling described in the manual, it felt like if he tried to move his right thumb then his left leg would kick out, but the feeling did go away after some time.
The first step of treasure refining was to melt an iron ingot and then shape it into a ball, which Collin was about to do with ease. But most of the other shapes that he tried, were misshaped and in the wrong thickness in sections. An hour later, he was getting better at making the shape correct, but he was feeling truly tired for the first time in months, this cleared up for the most part with a round of cultivation.
Collin sat on his bed for a few moments wondering if he should still train fire arts or just go to bed and sleep. But he decided to do some training, but he wouldn't make the same mistake of over training in a skill he was unfamiliar with. He was going to just do the beginner exercises and only the beginner exercises for tonight.
Ten minutes was all it took to complete the first cycle of the beginner exercises; he had the feeling that if he concentrated his Qi to the palm of his hand, he might be able to light a small fire the size of a candles flame. But he wasn't going to, he was still feeling drained from overexerting himself earlier. Collin fell into a deep asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow, when he woke, he vaguely remembered dreaming of being chased by glob like creatures that changed shapes.
Shaking off his odd dream Collin proceeded to start his day as usual, but after breakfast he left the villa. He was heading to the alchemy shop; he was hoping that the shop would be open, and Valeria would be there to discuss alchemy. The final four pills he needed to learn to make were far harder to learn than any of the other pills or poisons that he had made before. He was hoping that he could get advice to make getting to low-grade for the four pills easier, then all he would have to do is get his skill to mid-grade before he takes the Alchemist's Guild entrance test.
Collin walked around the market a week ago, and it was crammed full of people wandering around the massive number of stalls looking for deals. Today there were only around a dozen people in the market and most of them were selling snacks the very few stalls remaining in the market. Instead of wasting so much time and energy trying to get to the other end of the market, all Collin had to do was calmly walk to the alchemy shop.
Collin was happy to find the shop was open and Valeria inside, but soon that happy feeling disappeared. The usual indifferent Valeria was acting happy, to the point that maybe Collin should classify her mood as giddy. She was also speaking a lot more than before, in the first minute he stepped into the shop she had spoken more words to him than all the other times he had seen her.
She had been guarding the Alchemist's Guilds auction items like he had thought, but while she was there, she spoke to the branch manager about her mentoring Collin and his progress. And the reason for her giddiness was because she was correct, her act of mentoring was seen in a positive way and would end her punishment if Collin passed his test. The only thing that Collin was concerned about was that now, the branch manager had taken an interest in him. And he wasn't sure if that was or was not a good thing.
Many of the stories he heard as bedtime stories were cultivator stories, and in a lot of those stories people taking an interest in other people would allow them to grow far beyond what they could do on their own. But there were an equal number of stories where they would be sabotaged, framed, or even outright murdered. While Collin wasn't really expecting the branch manager of the Alchemist's Guild to try and harm him, but his paranoid mind would just ignore this situation.
It wasn't hard for Collin to notice that he had some paranoid tendencies, he started to notice them even before he left his clan. He was hoping that it was the kind of paranoia that would keep him from getting into bad situations and not the kid where he would be paralyzed by it. Ethier way it was something he was keeping an eye on.
For the next two and a half hours every question Collin had about making the final pills was not only answered by Valeria, but she also even demonstrated by making each pill while letting Collin watch. He was also able to stock up on materials and buy a black cauldron for making poisons at a great discount. As he left the shop, he felt that he had everything he needed to make the final four pills, all he would have to do is actually make them.
As he was loading up on snacks on his way back to the villa, he noticed everyone around him start to act weird. When he turned around, he saw why, devil hunters. They were a group of cultivators that hunted devil worshippers, and most would say they were more terrifying than the devil worshippers they hunted. Each empire had their own devil hunters and they granted them the authority to do so. Other than the territorial lord, everyone else could be accused of aiding devil worshippers and executed. Sometimes just looking at them in an unfriendly way was enough to be accused and be put to death.
The worst part of their arrival was that Collin recognized three of the seven devil hunters. Jake Parker and his lover Spicer, as for the third person he didn't know his name, but he remembered how creepy the man was. When Collin was six, he asked why Jake Parker had three horns on his head and Jake Parker crushed him to the ground with a fraction of his cultivation base, almost causing Collin's father to attack the man. The man seemed to hate anyone with the name Monten attached to them, and even though Collin no longer saw himself as a member of the Monten clan, he didn't think that would matter to Jake Parker. But luckily the squad of devil hunters left the market towards the city's main gate, letting everyone breathe a sigh of relief.
The moment the devil hunters were out of sight everyone began discussing why they were here. Apparently green skins had been seen in the area during the trade fair. This meant that there was a manipulator type devil worshipper near the city and since they use their zombie like familiars to scout cities before attacking, that would explain why the devil hunters were in Camis. Collin had already decided that he and the others would be staying inside the villa for the next week or two, that way they could avoid any trouble with the devil hunters.