While I wanted to return to my alchemical pursuits, I needed to ensure that my karmic income remained at an acceptable level. So, I instead went to deal with the issues that my ministers had raised in both this most recent meeting and the previous one.

The first issue was not only important to the city but also to my idea of creating a pill factory valuable enough to catch the attention of the Brilliant Sun Empire. We needed to set up a farm capable of producing a high quantity of low-level herbs. Since I didn’t know much about such matters, I delegated the task of designing these farms to my ministers. I would simply copy their work into my mental library.

There was one thing, however, that I wanted to investigate personally: Soil Enrichment Pills.

The Rank 4 Soil Enrichment Pills that I had been producing were, of course, a terrible idea for such farms. Instead, I needed a similar Rank 0 pill. Finding this recipe in my hoard of alchemy books took a bit of time, but when I did, I was happy to see that it was a basic pill that only required a single ingredient.

The herb in question was simply called a Grower Pod. Like kairaway pods, Grower Pods were long pods with several ‘beans’ of medicinal energy. Unlike the Rank 4 pod, though, the beans inside the Grower Pods were nearly pure medicinal energy, so purification mainly involved destroying the outer shell of toxins.

To get a feel for the process, I went to my alchemy workshop and performed a few experiments.

At first, I was confused as to why locating the recipe for this pill had been so difficult. A pill that increased the growth rate of mortal crops seemed like the kind of thing that would be both well-known and highly sought after. However, it didn’t take me long to figure out the explanation for this.

The toxic energy in these pods was far more robust than other Rank 0 herbs. Fully cleansing them took more energy than even an average Rank 1 herb, though not quite as much as a Rank 2 herb.

Because of this, any Disciple Alchemist who could cleanse these pods would also have enough energy to make high-level Rank 1 pills–maybe even low-level Rank 2 pills. For such a person, spending their days making Rank 0 pills that could only boost the growth of mortal crops was a waste of both time and money.

The advantage of this pill, however, was that, while cleansing it would take a significant amount of energy, its structure would make it easy to concoct Perfect pills with high efficacy. This made an ideal candidate for automation. Basic Rank 1 Qi Gathering Formations would still be enough to satisfy the high energy requirements of this pill, and the herb's simplistic structure would make it easy for us to design the necessary purification formations.

So, after concocting a couple of samples, I left to visit the Hu Clan.

When I arrived, one of the clan’s Grandmasters came out to greet me. “Lord Su, if I had known you were coming, I would have greeted you from afar. Welcome to the Hu Clan. How can we help you today?”

“I was told that there were new formation designs available, so I came to take a look. I apologize for taking so long to find time for this visit.”

“Not at all, Lord Su. Our formation specialists have simply taken the opportunity to further refine our initial designs. I think you will be happy with the results.”

The Grandmaster took me deep into the Hu’s compound, to where their formation specialists were hard at work, and showed me the two designs that they had come up with.

The first was for a Rank 0 Healing Pill. It only worked on mortals, and it could only heal simple injuries, so concocting such pills was usually considered extremely wasteful. Mortals were able to recover naturally from any injuries that this pill could heal, so why bother?

The second was for a Rank 0 Energy Pill that restored a person’s stamina. Again, it only worked on mortals. How much money was giving mortals a little extra stamina worth? It would let a farmer work longer, but you could always just hire a second person instead of feeding the first one pills.

I estimated that these two pills would produce significantly less karmic energy than the Nutrition Pills had, but they were just useful enough that I felt there should still be a solid return on investment.

The main difference between the designs for all these different pills was the purifying formation. It had to be specially calibrated to target impurities in a way that would create results with maximal efficacy. Creating a formation that could handle all the variations within a single type of herb without ruining any of them was extremely challenging.

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“Grandmaster Hu, these designs look excellent. What are your results?”

“Thank you, Lord Su.” He took out a pill bottle and handed it to me. “These are the pills we made with our prototypes.”

I appraised them and found them both to be excellent. They were both Perfect and had efficacies in the high 80s.

“Excellent job.” Smiling, I took out a bottle of Soil Enrichment Pills. “Here’s your next challenge.”

I spent the rest of that day working with Grandmasters from the Hu Clan. First, I described the process of refining the pill and the various difficulties I could foresee. Then, I concocted the pill as slowly as I could and allowed the Grandmasters to closely observe the entire process.

When I concocted this first pill, my movements were all organic. I sent qi wherever I deemed appropriate, using whatever means I felt best at the time. This resulted in complex qi movements that needed to conform to the curvatures of the various energies within the herb.

Next, the Hu Clan Grandmasters gave me instructions on how to simplify the process and make it easier for formations to replicate. I followed their guidance and concocted a second pill, but this resulted in a steep drop in efficacy. The simple movements they requested made it impossible to attack certain toxins without hitting large swaths of medicinal energy.

After this, we spent a long time going through an iterative process. At each step, I would demonstrate what they wanted, and we would discuss how to make improvements for the next attempt.

By the time we were done, we had the outline of a formation that should

be able to concoct a Perfect pill with decent efficacy. However, the Hu Clan had a lot of work ahead of them to turn this outline into a complete formation diagram.

As far as I was concerned, though, the situation was well in hand, so I left the Hu Clan to attend to the final matter of importance. I needed to teach some students.

Minister Bei had done as I had asked of him and assembled a list of fifteen cultivators for me to personally instruct in alchemy. Five were Disciples who wanted to learn the basics, five were Masters who wanted to improve, and five were Grandmasters who wanted to refine their skills before the next King Selection.

Initially, I was hesitant to teach others alchemy since, when I died, everything would be reset, and the knowledge that I had imparted would vanish. Only my own skills would persist. Since I had to do it anyway, however, I would just have to find a way to turn my time teaching into a way of practicing and improving my abilities.

Teaching the Disciples turned out to be the most rewarding part of this process. They knew nothing about how to concoct pills, and I had a clean slate to work from.

During my classes on nurturing talents, I had studied how the Eight Flower Kingdom expected me to do this job, but I didn’t feel bound by their expectations. I wanted to experiment with different strategies to see how well they worked. If I found a valuable teaching technique, it could be another bargaining chip for the future.

I created a teaching plan that catered to several different learning styles. I prepared reference books, lectures, visual demonstrations, and kinesthetic exercises that would help my students absorb what I wanted them to learn in a variety of different ways.

To me, the most interesting of these were the visual demonstrations. The Disciples wouldn’t have a well-developed qi vision yet, so they wouldn’t be able to see what they needed to do. However, I remembered a technique that I used to teach SuYin back in the Pavilion, and I felt that would work well here. I increased the intensity of my fire qi and manipulated it to emit light as I worked. The Disciples might not be able to see medicinal energy very well, but this let them see what kind of qi movements they would need to employ.

For the Master Alchemists, classes were much simpler. They didn’t need any help with concocting pills. They understood that well enough to not need my assistance. Instead, they needed help learning to control their spirit fires.

Since I had focused so much on my fire seed, I was by no means a master of using spirit fires, but I was close. The fire seed mastery I had purchased had included a significant amount of information concerning the use of spirit fires, so teaching a few of the basics went smoothly. However, because I was just conveying purchased knowledge by rote, I didn’t gain too much from the teaching process.

The Grandmaster, in contrast, class was the only one that was… ‘challenging.’ My five students were all skilled alchemists, and most of them seemed to believe that they were my equal–or at least close to it. They saw me as a fellow competitor for the position of Eight Flower King, and treated me as their opponent, not their teacher.

We were all close to the same age, and some of them were even older than me. I had only recently advanced to Lord, so our skills shouldn’t be too far apart, right?

I had to field a barrage of questions about why I chose to employ one specific technique over another, or why I spun my qi clockwise instead of counterclockwise. The class was a lesson in torture.

I felt that many of the questions they asked were inane. Like, why does it matter what direction I spin the qi? Spin it in the direction that works. It almost seemed like they were asking random questions to trip me up. They wanted to prove that I should bow out of the race and support their bid for King instead.

However, while the constant questions were annoying, they did make me think more deeply about the reasons I did what I did. Over the years, I had formed several habits without realizing it. Some of them were good, and some were bad, but I didn’t have a solid rationale for any of them. The process of being grilled by young, arrogant Grandmasters helped me develop a deeper understanding of my actions.

That said, I didn’t enjoy teaching. It helped, and I learned from it, but it wasn’t… fun, and it did little to advance my goals. So, I had no plans to seek out opportunities to do any more of it than necessary. The fact that I learned from the process only meant that I wouldn’t fight Minister Bei when he suggested that I do my duty as Water Groom and nurture the Kingdom’s talents.