Without a second thought, he painted a portal and entered the Clear Sky World. He had a plan, but this plan required a lot of study, thinking, and trial and error. What he needed now was the scarcest resource: time.
Chapter 22: The Scarcest Resource
One week later, as promised, he began teaching Gong Shuren. She was a middle-grandmaster talisman and formation artist, which gave Cha Ming something to work with. Many core-formation cultivators would struggle for hundreds of years to reach such heights, so the young woman’s progress was impressive. Still, she advanced by leaps and bounds under his instruction.
Following their half-day session, he busied himself studying runic alchemy. He didn’t have to reinvent the wheel, since Jin Huang had properly documented everything. The basics took one week to memorize, after which he confirmed everything using his own experiments for the next three weeks. In total, it took him eighteen time-accelerated weeks to catch up. After making his own corrections to their shared knowledge base, he dove straight into forging his own path.
He followed the same routine every week: one half day he spent with Gong Shuren, and another with Jin Huang. He spent the rest of his time in the Clear Sky World. One month later, he and Jin Huang completed the framework for mid-grade grandmaster runic alchemy. Their progress slowed afterward. It took them a full year to build a high-grade framework. Gong Shuren also advanced one grade in her formation arts and talisman arts.
Time was a river. Time was water. He followed the stream where it took him, and soon a full two and a half years had passed since his failure. He finished runic alchemy’s peak grandmaster framework in that time, meaning that he could finally focus on the most important part—reworking the Nirvana Pill recipe.
Cha Ming coughed up blood as he recovered from a powerful blast from his transcendent pill cauldron. Not in a metaphorical sense either, as damage to one’s lungs was harsh that way. Tweaking the Nirvana Pill was a dangerous process, he’d discovered. His clothes were tattered, and his bones showed, but he recovered in only a second. He held the remnants of a runic component in his hand. “If this one was wrong, the other must be correct.”
“Try it, but don’t be too stubborn,” Sun Wukong said. “You almost died the time before last, and I’d hate to be stuck here all alone. Even with the pleasant company of rainbow fish and dryads. Besides, the smell in here when you get smashed to a bloody pulp is unbearable.”
“Can you even smell anything in your spirit form?” Cha Ming grumbled. He did some brief calculations in his mind and got back to work. His transcendent soul reentered the transcendent-grade cauldron and summoned dozens of ingredients. At lower grades, runic alchemy was all about creating runes out of reagents. At higher grades, it was about crafting elaborate three-dimensional formations.
His surroundings lit up with gray flames, and each region heated, sliced, separated, broke, and grew as he willed it. Simultaneously, the reagents were reduced to liquids, their various impurities removed at the requisite temperatures. They formed runic circles instead of formations. Then Cha Ming joined the runic circles with lines of elemental essence, creating the complicated web of a grand formation.
Reactions occurred within the web, which he supervised and interfered with as required. Runic alchemy was less hands-on than normal alchemy, with most of the work being done in the beginning by setting up the problem. In a sense, it was like a giant mathematical puzzle; once the right equations, assumptions, and laws were in place, the problem solved itself.
The runes morphed together, and the web collapsed little by little. It shrank and shrank until finally, only a single sigil remained. The sigil was hard and stable, one of the four key reagents he needed to form the final pill. While it was much weaker than the original he’d created, it was exactly what he needed. At most, it would be capable of supporting a half-step transcendent pill, just skirting the limits set by the plane.
He stored the sigil in a jade vial right next to another two vials. One of them contained a sigil made of peak-core-grade bone relic. Now that he was able to melt and remold the bone relic, the resulting one was a tenth of the original size. Which was fortunate, given that he’d failed seven times in creating it. The bone sigil was the second piece of the four-piece puzzle.
Right beside it was a disappointingly small sigil which Sun Wukong insisted was as much as the pill could handle. It was tiny, the size of Cha Ming’s thumb. The sigil contained the concentrated power of rainbow-fish scales. The iridescent sigil shimmered through the jade vial, distorting the air around it. It was a catalyst, something that sped up reactions. He now knew it contained the essence of time, something a mortal plane could only accommodate so much of. If it contained any more, the pill would break through the shackles of half-transcendence and become a transcendent pill. All he was missing now was Waters of Life.
“Let’s go pay the lady a visit,” Cha Ming said. He changed his robes, opting for something a little more ceremonial, with violet, blue, and gold runes covering the otherwise gray cloth. He liked gray now. It was plain, simple, and all-encompassing. After dressing, he walked out of Haijing Academy, receiving quite a few courteous nods in the process. He was, after all, the only grand elder in the academy. His runic alchemy had also done loads to bolster his reputation, not to mention his failed but rather impressive attempt at pill concoction on the Heaven Ascension Platform.
