“Not even close,” Sun Wukong muttered. “You can’t even conceptualize how fast alchemists burn through money. Fortunately, those Grandmist pills are in high demand. For now. You have a backlog of orders, while many alchemists would be hard-pressed to fill up even a quarter of their time concocting high-level pills. You can attempt to craft about four mid-grade pills per day at a fifty-percent success rate. Since your Grandmist pills sell at triple the list price, that means you can net about 15,000 top-grade spirit stones for a dedicated month of hard labor. But that’s only if you waste your time making them instead of improving your skills.”
Cha Ming groaned. His ability to make money was impressive, but he had much more to do than craft pills. Moreover, a single batch of high-grade alchemy ingredients costed roughly 250 top-grade spirit stones, and he would need one batch every single day to improve his skill, regardless of success or failure. The successes would be so few that a whole month of training would set him back by 7,500 spirit stones.
“It’s a good thing we have time contraction,” Cha Ming muttered.
“It is,” Sun Wukong said. “Though your advancement might seem frightening on the outside, only you will know the truth. Expect to spend a decade or two practicing in solitude.”
It was a long time to Cha Ming, but if it was the only way to see Yu Wen again, he’d do it even if it took a thousand times longer.
“Let’s get started,” he said, summoning his alchemical cauldron.
Large lengths of time passed on the outside as Cha Ming trained. During the first year, the membership in the Alabaster Group grew significantly. Cha Ming only came out occasionally to replenish his herbs, teach, and take pill orders. His skills grew by leaps and bounds, and to everyone’s amazement, it only took him a single year to become a high-grade grandmaster alchemist.
Their faction celebrated, but only he knew how much time he’d spent. He wasn’t a genius, only someone with a lot of time, funding, and knowledge captured by Yu Wen’s Space-Time Camera. His knowledge of herbology helped him greatly as well. Flames interacted with herbs in strange and mysterious ways, and crafting pills slowly became an art rather than a science. Sun Wukong still insisted it was a science, however. It was only due to his limited knowledge and perspective that he thought otherwise. Disagreeing with him only brought pain, so he let it go as he crafted.
A year later, Ling Dong broke through to the middle of core formation, following in the steps of Cha Ming’s other disciples. From then on, it would take an exponential amount of effort for them to improve their cultivation. Seeing their master hard at work, however, no one dared relax.
Meanwhile, they had not heard even a whisper from Zhou Li’s faction. It was as though they’d vanished and never existed in the first place. In Cha Ming’s experience, that was bad news. The eerie quiet was just the calm before the storm, but until he fixed his cultivation, there wasn’t much he could do about it.
Finally, three years after he secluded himself—a total of fifteen years for him—Cha Ming finally created his first peak-core-grade pill. It was a healing pill with a Grandmist seal, something that could fully heal almost anyone, even their birth defects. He thought of the man who’d taught him medicine, Li Yin, and resolved to give it to him. Becoming a spirit doctor was, after all, his teacher’s dream. He yearned to give him that opportunity.
A few more weeks passed, and soon he could confidently craft every recipe he knew save the Nirvana Pill. A total of three years and three months had come and gone in the outside world. As Cha Ming was sitting in a meadow, enjoying the peaceful contentment that came with success, a small rainbow fish snuggled up to him.
“Yu Gen,” Cha Ming said, scratching the small fish. He noticed Yu Gen was missing a few more scales than normal. “Did something happen?”
“We finally finished!” Yu Gen said excitedly, practically pulling Cha Ming over. They zipped through the woods, passed the river, and flew up to the peak of a bare mountain. Or at least, it used to be bare. Now, on the middle of the plateau, at the peak, was a mountain of glittering scales.
Cha Ming gasped when he saw these. He’d known they were up to something for the past decade and a half, but he’d never imagined it was something so huge. Back on Jade Moon Planet, cultivators had fought tooth and nail for only a scale or two. Here, there were millions.
“It took a bit of coaxing, but not too much,” Sun Wukong said. “They really like you, and when I told them you wanted to find your girlfriend, they were only too happy to help.”
“So many scales,” Cha Ming whispered. “But for what?”
“They aren’t worth so much in transcendent realms, but in mortal realms, they’re a godsend,” Sun Wukong said. “Not only can they serve as a catalyzing agent, greatly increasing your chances of crafting any pill, but they can also supplement pills with transcendent heaven and earth qi. In practice, this usually means an alchemist can promote a peak-grade pill to a half-step transcendent pill. But with such a huge amount…” He shrugged. “It should be easy to craft quite a few transcendent pills in the mortal realm.”
Cha Ming bit his lip and asked the question he’d been dreading. “How certain are we of succeeding?”
Sun Wukong remained silent for a moment. He used his staff as a toothpick to remove something from his sharp teeth. “With my soul assisting you in crafting the pill, thirty-three percent per try,” he said. “But we’ll need to practice, and it will be very harsh on your soul because I’ll effectively be possessing you
