Pursuing The Summit - Chapter 6 Louis

Before Louis could ever read the books, Laura once again picked him up and dragged him to the alchemy hall, walked past the attendants, straight up to the third floor before knocking on the farthest room in the hall five times. A girl a bit shorter than Laura, with dark brown hair and eyes came out. A strong medicinal smell covered her. Her hair was a mess and her simple dress had splotches on them. Her black dress barely covered her shoulders and knees, but she wore long black gloves that covered the remaining skin and stockings that covered her legs. Bags were under her eyes and she looked like she got neither sleep, rest nor cleaned herself in a fairly long amount of time.

“What’s up, Laura?” the girl asked. “I almost failed a batch because of you.”

“It’s been the fourth day already. You should get some food and rest.” Laura said, frowning.

“I did. I took a two hour nap a couple days ago? I ate some pills to mitigate hunger and sleepiness.” The girl said, about to close the door.

“Wait.” Laura said, walking into the room. “We have a new member, Louis Allyn, and I want you to verify his skills.” She looked at Louis. “This is Lydia Finch, our best alchemist.”

“Louis, huh? I’ll remember that if you do well.” Lydia said, walking out of the room and down the hall with a giant bag in her hand. “Let’s go to another room, he needs a different array.”

The alchemy room four doors down was much cleaner than Lydia’s room, but it was barren. It only had a single array inscribed onto the floor, though it was much bigger and complex than the one in Lydia’s room. Rather than removing a single element from one’s qi, the array in this room removed two elements from one’s qi.

“You know how a two element qi pocket array works, right? It removes the elements so people can use the neutral elemental qi to make a fire, almost like a pseudo-fire element adventurer.” Lydia said, sitting down. She placed a portable furnace within the array and grabbed out various materials, all of which were one star. “The test is merely to make an one star pill.”

“I thought you were making me concoct three and four star pills.” Louis said.

“You will probably fail, unless you reincarnated just recently. The ingredients here are much more delicate and worthless than the ingredients in the Cultivator World, so you might need some tries to adjust what you truly are working with. The books you read probably never assumed that you experienced a different set of alchemy with other ingredients, so there is bound to be some discrepancies.” Lydia said, taking out the last material and moving the bag outside of the array. “If you can concoct an one star pill in three tries, any grade, you pass.”

“That’s a low bar.” Louis said, looking at the materials and immediately recognized the Covalscene Pill ingredients and recipe.

“Once you can do that much, adjusting to the rest comes quickly.” Lydia said, shrugging. “Now craft the pill.”

Louis walked up to the array and grab each ingredient gently, feeling each for its texture and looking at each for their age and condition. “These are fine ingredients.” Louis said, after he looked at all twelves ingredients. Twelve ingredients was a lot for an one star pill, but all the healing pills required more ingredients than the average pill of their rank because they required more safety precautions.

“Of course.” Lydia said. “Nancy picked them out.”

Louis poured his qi into the two elemental qi pocket array. This type of array could remove two elements in one’s qi, keeping its purity and quality without the element. While he personally never used this array before, he understood the basic usage. The array was divided into three different sections: the inner pocket arrays, the outer layer where the elements would be removed and the array underneath the former two that could collect and direct the elementless qi to the user. The name came from the two pocket arrays for the water and wind, where a small amount of water and wind elemental qi would gather large amounts of water and wind qi from the air and purify it. Once the necessary amount of qi was collected, it would begin to overflow from the water and wind sections of the array and pour into the outer array, where the two elemental qi would be directed to form a circle of qi and meet halfway. The two elemental qi would then touch and react with each other, negating their element as it poured the array underneath the outer ring and and would be funneled to the user. With this elementless qi, Louis began to burn the qi and gathered fire elemental qi within the air and began concocting.

Creating a pill had its own stages: concocting stage, cleansing stage and marking stage – though only renowned alchemists would use the marking stage for pills outside of medicinal pills while medicinal pills all required the marking stage. Because of this, medicinal pills were one star higher than their stated difficulty.

The concocting stage itself had its own three stages: purification, minor fusion, and major fusion. The purification process occurs when the qi splits from its ingredient; the minor fusion occurs when fuses the qi from each group of ingredients – since each pill had multiple groups of ingredients – to form a few groups of qi, called a glow; and the major fusion stage occurs when the glows fuse to become the pill.

The cleansing stage removed any impurities remaining within the pill before the final shape of the pill will be formed, normally a sphere. Then the pill will be checked for any final problems and concerns before being cooled. Normally this would be the end, but medicinal pills also required the marking stage, which generally took the shape of an alchemist’s personal emblem – if they were skilled enough to make one without damaging the pill or a generic mark if they couldn’t – that would imbue the pill with extra qi that could supplement its user, for the user of medicinal pills would not always have enough qi to cure their wounds alone, without the energy supplementing by the mark.

As Louis created his fire and threw in the first group of ingredients, the temperature of his flame was too low, for he was worried that the ingredients could not withstand the heat. Lo and behold, the ingredients nearly burst into flames, burning a bit before Louis used his own flame to eat the fire burning the ingredients and immediately reduced the overall temperature. During the minor and major fusions stage, Louis guided the qi to form glows on their own, then guided the glows to fuse together. In the cleansing stage, the pills were purified the best he could, but the initial mistake with the first group of ingredients caused a lot of impurities and reduced the overall size by half. However, Louis created the alchemist mark perfectly, so a white marble sized pill remained in his hand after everything was said and done. Louis frowned. The pill at best scored a grade 1 out of 15.

Lydia sat on her heels as she looked at the pill Louis had created for a few moments before looking at Louis himself. “Why didn’t you imbue qi into the ingredients during the minor and major fusions? The quality and quantity of qi as well as the size of the pill would have all improved if you have done that. The rest of it was acceptable, save for your initial mistake.” Lydia asked, tilting her head.

Louis shook his head and he placed the pill into a pill bottle. “In my time, the ingredients were already good enough so we didn’t have to imbue qi in the minor and major fusion stages. It would have only worsen the pill. That’s good to know though.”

“Well, you passed, though you will need more time to adjust. Ask me if you have any other questions.” Lydia grabbed the bottle and smiled. She stood up and grabbed a giant box in the bag. “Here’s an alchemy cauldron. I’m surprised you never used it.”

“An alchemy cauldron? What does that do?” Louis said, opening the box.

“You never used one before? It frees up your left hand if you use it, so you don’t have to hold up you pills and flame in one hand. Instead the cauldron has legs that hold it up from the ground and has a small fire pit so the fire can be light underneath it.”

Louis grabbed the black, clay cauldron. To be entirely honest, if there were not arrays inscribed into the sides of the cauldron and the legs with a small sheet of clay below it, it would look little different from a pot rather than something used for alchemy.

“Seems convenient. Can I can keep it?” Louis asked.

“Yep.” Lydia said, leaving the room.

As soon as Lydia left, Laura sat in front of him. “Welcome to the Second Generation Club. Every member is a reincarnator and as long as you concoct pills for the group, you can get any material and recipe you want. You can also collaborate with other alchemists to create your recipes that you don’t currently have. And, if you are willing to teach others in the club about alchemy, another profession or even give valuable knowledge, other club members can teach and give you valuable information.”

“What is the catch?” Louis said, putting away the alchemy materials for the first time, as he devoted his full attention to her.

“You have to skip all your classes to join the club, since our club functions during normal class hours. You cannot join any school tournaments and have to keep a generally low profile, in any other club you decide to join – both for your safety and the privacy of the group, since there is an implicit trust between all the members. Most of your school life may be taken up by club activities. Family names mean nothing here and regardless of any conflicts that the families of any two members may have are irrelevant. Personal grudges between club members will be dealt with trial by all members, depending on the situation.”

“Can my family members join?” Louis asked.

“If you are really close to them and trust that they won’t spread information about our club. However, I wouldn’t advise it and you will have to pay their membership fees on their behalf, since if they are not reincarnators, they likely lack any useful information or connections.” Laura said. “Furthermore, you can introduce at most two, since all the other members have basically removed themselves their family and are all reincarnators themselves.” Laura stood up, smiling. “If that is all, you are free to use this room as much as you want. There is a personal library for the club – which has all the knowledge we have aggregated from our club over the past few years – in my house, if you would like to visit and review any material there. And this year will be relatively lax for you, since you are a new member, but if you bring new members, you will have to either contribute information or concoct many more pills.” Then she left, closing the door behind her.