Lord Yong had said that he wanted me to attempt to concoct at least five Qi Gathering Pills a day, spending 100 days to use up all 500 sets of herbs that he had given me. This felt a little slow to me, so to ‘show my enthusiasm,’ I decided to increase my pace to seven a day.

I would have liked to go even faster, but I didn’t want to come off as being too suspicious. And, by limiting my output, I had the time I needed to carefully craft each pill, while looking for new ways to improve their quality. Additionally, spending less time producing pills gave me more time to advance my cultivation base and study the effects that the Writ of Pill Fire was having on my body.

During the first few days of this schedule, I did my best to follow the instructions in Lord Yong’s manual, with only minor modifications. At best, such a rudimentary technique was only able to concoct a Mid-Purity pill, but this didn’t mean that I couldn’t learn anything from it.

With each attempt, I focused on how the initial energy structures of the herbs affected the process of melding them together and condensing them into a pill. Then, after each pill was complete, I made note of its theoretical maximum quality and anything that I thought might have contributed to this.

My alchemy affinity had started providing me with a sense of which herbs might work well together, but I didn’t want to blindly rely on this. I wanted to understand the ‘why’ behind it. So, I occasionally went against my affinity and chose herbs that it suggested were a horrible match. This inevitably caused the concoction process to fail, but in these failures, I was able to learn as much, if not more, than when I succeeded.

After a week of this, I abandoned Lord Yong’s method entirely and began pushing to make pills of a higher quality. Even without my affinity guiding me by the nose, I was starting to get a sense of which herbs might work well together, but I still only occasionally stumbled upon combinations that could yield one-patterned pills by random chance.

By the end of my first month in that third-floor workshop, I had hit a wall. No matter what I did, concocting anything better than a High-Purity pill at 90% efficacy seemed impossible. When I tried using the techniques that I had learned on Nine Rivers to push this higher, the herbs’ energies became unstable and exploded.

After several days passed without any further progress, I knew that something needed to change. Either I needed to gain new knowledge, or I needed to radically improve my skills in some way.

My purported mentor, Lord Yong, had already made it clear that he wasn’t going to help me until I could make a patterned pill. So, I instead chose to visit the Hall of the Herb Lord’s library, where I was able to purchase several foundational texts on Rank 1 alchemy at an exorbitant price. Unfortunately, though, most of the information in these books was stuff that I already knew, and the few snippets that I didn’t know seemed rather dubious. The information on how to properly match herbs was meager, and they didn’t mention anything about how to concoct patterned pills.

The lack of details on how to concoct patterned pills could be explained away by this not being considered ‘foundational’ knowledge. Such information could likely be found in the library’s more advanced books, but to gain access to these books, I would need to show off more of my alchemy skills than I was comfortable with. So, I set this task aside for the moment.

I could explain away the lack of information on patterned pills, but why was there so little information on how to properly match herbs? This had to be foundational knowledge. Without using properly matched herbs, concocting pills on this continent was nearly impossible.

After a bit of thought, the answer came to me.

The Hall of the Herb Lord sold herbs in sets. I couldn’t just buy a blue peony. I had to buy complete, pre-selected sets of herbs for Qi Gathering Pills. Why was this common practice? Why didn’t alchemists balk at not being about to select their own herbs?

Because matching herbs wasn’t the job of an alchemist.

Racing back to the library, I bought all of the foundational texts on herbalism.

A lot of the information in these books was stuff that I already knew, and most of what I didn’t know wouldn’t become relevant until I was ready to set up my own herb farm. But, one of these books was exactly what I was looking for. Its title? Basic Sympathetic Herbalism.

In short, according to this book, the way that herbs were traditionally grown on the Nine Rivers Continent was entirely incorrect. One shouldn’t grow a field of peonies, a field of astragalus, and a field of schisandra. Instead, the three plants should be grown in close proximity to each other so that they can feed off each other during their entire life cycle.

The Hall of the Herb Lord wasn’t selling sets of ingredients that some herbalist had grouped together at random. It was selling sets of plants that had been in contact with each other since they were seedlings.

I couldn’t help but think back to Bao’s semi-magical plant arrays. His blessing must have allowed him to tap into this sympathetic herbalism without knowing it, allowing him to grow herbs of much higher potency than normal. On the Nine Rivers Continent, such increases were rarely worth the time and effort they required. With the Laws of the Central Continent, however, this form of herbalism was a necessity.

For the moment, I didn’t plan to delve too deeply into the realm of herbalism, but this information was still invaluable. It told me exactly what I would need if I wanted to improve my ability to sort and group herbs into the best combinations possible.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“System, give me a permanent peak nine-star affinity for herbalism.”

Purchase confirmed. Cost 15,926 credits.

Seeing this cost made me smile. It was a few dozen credits lower than what it should have been. This had to be because all the time that I had spent sorting through herbs had given me a small boost to my affinity.

Using this new affinity to focus on a set of herbs that I had purchased from the Hall, not only was I better able to sense that they would work well together, but I was also about to sense a slight connection between them, showing that they had been grown in sympathy with each other.

After laying out a blanket to cover the floor of my workshop, I dumped out all the herbs from Lord Yong’s storage bag and started sorting through them, looking for sympathetic connections.

What I found almost made me laugh. There wasn’t a single complete set of three connected herbs in the bunch. Had Lord Yong intentionally removed one herb from each set just to spite me?

I shook my head. That didn’t feel right. Instead, he probably bought these herbs at a discount. Herbs were easily damaged, especially at Rank 1. If pests or disease destroyed the third herb in a set, what was an herbalist supposed to do? The market was probably flooded with these kinds of broken herbs.

Hell, it was possible that giving me these herbs hadn’t even been malicious. Why waste the good stuff on someone who was still learning the basics? Loath as I was to give Lord Yong the benefit of the doubt, giving new apprentices discount herbs from damaged sets made a lot of sense.

Still, malicious or not, Lord Yong had handed me a mess.

Using my herbalism affinity, I sorted the herbs into their existing pairs. Then, using a combination of my alchemy and herbalism affinities, I did my best to fill in the missing herb of each pair.

After several hours of this, I finally had to admit that I wasn’t good enough to do what I was trying to do. I needed more. So, I reached into my inner world, pulled out an assortment of Rank 2 herbs, and got to work making pills to raise my alchemy affinity.

I could have just paid the System to raise my affinity for me, but I wanted to use this opportunity to gain more insights into how many credits of affinity each pill was worth. So, not only did I spend several days on this effort, but I also spent 1.2 million credits on constant queries to the System.

This gave me both a peak eight-star alchemy affinity and a much better idea of how the process of raising one’s affinity worked. Each pill had a base value that was slightly different depending on how difficult it was to concoct. This value was then adjusted based on the quality of the pill. There didn’t seem to be any penalty for repeatedly concocting the same pill, but each time my affinity increased, the value of every pill decreased. If concocting a pill was ‘trivial,’ such as concocting a low-level Rank 2 pill with a high eight-star affinity, then it was worth almost nothing.

After completing all the experiments that I could think of, I focused on raising my affinity as quickly as possible.

With a functionally unlimited number of Nine Rivers herbs at my disposal, three-star affinities in every element, and an inscribed pill furnace to provide power, concocting even the most difficult of Rank 3 pills was child’s play. I wanted to go even further and concoct Rank 4 and 5 pills, but that would have to wait until after I advanced my cultivation base. My affinities would let me get around the issue of needing a will-lock, but the low-level furnace I was using wasn’t powerful enough to purify high-Rank herbs, and the seed of the Expanding Realms Fire was less than ideal for performing alchemy.

Still, in less than a day, I was able to push my alchemy affinity all the way to peak seven-star.

While I wanted to experiment with the idea of planting herbs in my inner world to raise my herbalism affinity, growing herbs took more time than I was willing to spend at the moment, so I decided to skip straight to the end.

“System, raise my herbalism affinity to a permanent peak seven-star.”

Purchase confirmed. Cost 1.76 million credits. 237,955,109,199,347 credits remaining.

With seven-star affinities in both herbalism and alchemy, sorting through Rank 1 herbs was child’s play.

Instead of only being able to notice the existence of sympathetic connections, I could now also sense the strength of these connections. For many of the herbs, their connections were rather weak, negatively affecting the quality of the pills they could produce. So, I focused on the pairs with the strongest connections and used my new senses to fill in the third herb as best I could, breaking apart several of the weaker pairs in the process.

When I was done, I had several dozen sets of highly compatible herbs.

Using the weakest of these, I quickly concocted a pill.

Estimated Maximum for Pill’s Starting Ingredients: High-Purity, 139% Medicinal Efficacy, 2 Patterns.

The upper limit was less than I might have hoped for, but it at least proved that these herbs were capable of producing two-patterned pills. So, using the remaining sets of high-quality herbs, I began working to break the one-pattern barrier.

Keeping what Lord Yong had shown me in mind, I didn’t try to perfectly cleanse the herbs. My focus was only on making them fit together as naturally as possible.

Set after set burned away in my furnace, and after going through half my herbs, I only had a pile of weak High-Purity pills to show for it. However, I was beginning to feel something during the melding process.

With only about 20% of my herbs remaining, I felt a sharp tug while trying to meld a set of herbs together. Upon feeling this tug, I suddenly understood what I was doing wrong. Startled, I lost my concentration and had to vent the energies in the furnace to prevent them from exploding.

That pill had been a failure, but that failure held the key to my future success.

I immediately grabbed a new set of herbs and tossed them into the furnace.

Upon pulling the energies of the three herbs together, I didn’t just tie the toxic energies into a knot. I used my absurdly high wood and alchemy affinities to reconstruct them into a form that somewhat resembled the organized structure of proper medicinal energy.

The energy clicked into place, and I felt success near at hand, but when I exerted my will to compress the ball of medicinal energy into a pill, a surge of additional energy appeared as if from nowhere and began fighting me.

As Martial Disciple 2, I didn’t have the qi needed to suppress this surging power, so I tapped into my soul and allowed it to fight alongside me.

Against the full force of my soul, the surging pill energies didn’t stand a chance. I beat them down without effort and forced them to crystallize.

After hearing the light tink of a pill dropping to the bottom of my furnace, I vented the excess heat and opened the door. Inside, I saw the beautiful sight of a light blue pill that was encircled by a single band of white.

High-Purity Rank 1 Qi Gathering Pill, 78% Medicinal Efficacy, 1 Pattern. Value: 65 gold.

Estimated Maximum for Pill’s Starting Ingredients: High-Purity, 158% Medicinal Efficacy, 2 Patterns.

I only allowed myself to bask in my success for a moment. I still had a long way to go.