Resuming training and a disappointment.

After a Good night's sleep, Collin began training until breakfast. He suggested that the trio spend their time studying their cultivation methods and offered to answer any questions they had about cultivation during breakfast and dinner. Collin didn't mind helping them learn from his experiences in cultivating so far, but he had no plans to hold their hands as they walked their own paths. He also said he would prepare anything they needed to begin cultivating when they felt that they were ready.

With breakfast done and no one asking him any questions so far, Collin began to practice alchemy. He still had to learn to make four pills and get them and his spirit gathering pills to the mid-grade stage before he was confident enough to take the Alchemist's Guild test. In the past few days Collin had succeeded in getting his spirit gathering pills to the low-grade stage without even the slightest hint of brown in them.

He had tried some of the burnt spirit gathering pills he had made and found them to be far more powerful than the minor Qi gathering pills he had been taking, but the first unburnt one he tried was several times stronger. It hadn't been too long since he broke through to the 5th layer and was already showing signs of breaking through to the 6th layer. The only ones that could compare with Collin's speed of progress were those from very powerful sects that use supreme-grade cultivation methods.

He would like to think that his progress was always going to be this smooth, but as an Alchemic Cultivator, he knew that even if he broke through to the peak of the 10th layer tomorrow, he was still far from being able to advance to Foundation Establishment. He still needed to ingest many more spirit herbs and store them into his alchemic pill dantian, or he wouldn't be able to upgrade to the next layer and he would die.

The new pill he was trying to make was a healing pill for Qi Condensation rank cultivators. It could help heal most major injuries but couldn't regrow limbs or organs. It was a very popular pill that most cultivators would have in their space bags for emergencies. The thing that made this pill harder to make than most other pills was its stepped integration process, it required the spirit herb essences to be added in four steps. This increased the chances of the pill failing and wasting time and materials, making this pill the least favorite of new alchemists to learn.

The first several tries to make this pill ended up as complete failures, and the first pill he was able to create was not only a deep brown color, but also had flecks of pure black in it. Collin felt a sense of amusement looking at the pill he had created, mostly because calling it a pill wasn't right, it was more like pill shaped charcoal. With a flick of his wrist the burnt pill abomination flew into the waste basket, and he prepared to try and make more pills, but stopped.

The Cocoon within his beast orb was showing signs of movement, so Collin placed it on to the floor in front of him to watch it either be reborn into a new being or become a failure. It only took a few minutes before the creature's head broke through the cocoon, it had a log graceful neck and was covered with pure black scales with the same disturbingly green color around the edges of each scale as the pill that it was forced to swallow. When the creature pulled its left winged leg out, Collin was happy that he had succeed. But when the creature fell to its right due to the fact it did not have a second winged leg, he knew that the process had failed.

The little creature moved its head back and forth as it looked around the alchemy room, curious as to where it was until it felt its body being lifted into the air. Its curiosity ended when it felt a crushing force around its neck become tighter and tighter, it began to thrash its body around trying to break free from whatever was holding it, but that ended when its head was violently jerked to one side and a popping sound echoed in the room. After a few more spasms, the little creatures body became still and fell to the floor, dead.

Collin released a disappointed sigh as he looked at the little creature's dead body. If it had failed and became a pure serpent, then Collin would have let it live, but instead it became an abomination. It would live normally for a few weeks or months, but then its body would begin to go to war with itself. Most mutants like this die long slow deaths either covered in hundreds of tumors the size of Collins fist or his head, or their internal organs begin to slowly stop working. Whichever way the creature would have died, it would have been long, and it would have been extremely painful, it was better for the creature to die quicker at Collin's hands then suffer.

Tomorrow Collin was planning to get more supplies from the alchemist shop and speak to Valeria. Now that the trade fair and auction were over, the shop should be open again with his mentor manning the counter, or so he hoped. If even Collin was prepared to fail at making a pill a thousand times in order to learn how to make it right, it still didn't mean he liked failing or wasting time, ingredients, and money.

Collin calmed his mind and began trying to make healing pills again, but like before they turned out to be complete failures or pill shaped charcoal. Many failures later he sat down with his cousins for dinner and listened to them talk amongst themselves, the only thing that he found interesting was that when his other cousins came back to Camis city, they would be housed in an inn outside the clan compound. He was curious how he would make contact with them when they returned, he definitely did not plan to walk through the clan compound to make them his offer.

In a month he would have the trio take turns checking the inn and inform him when they arrive. Until they returned the only things Collin was going to focus on were the day or two, he would need to spend helping the trio become cultivators and his own training. And today his training was going to have two more parts to it, first was going to be short bit of treasure refining, and the second was training fire arts.

He had always planned to learn treasure refining to some degree, like he had with inscription, but like inscription he still didn't know where he was going to draw the line where his cut off was. As for fire arts, he also always had plans to learn them, but he was going to wait until he reached Foundation Establishment and had a fire spiritual root. But since he learned he always had a fire spiritual root, he decided to train the skills now so he could learn to use alchemy without an array table.

Of these two new skills he would be starting he was only worried about treasure refining, as the flame arts he was going to practice were very simple and were part of the skills taught in the alchemy book he got on his second day away from the clan. They were created for precision and stability rather than combat power, were supposed to be very easy to learn and master. On the other hand, there were many people that tried to learn treasure refining and after spending a lot of time and money had nothing to show for their hard work. Collin was looking forward to seeing if he had any skill at treasure refining.