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He sighed. “Very well, let’s move on. Pill efficacy. What is pill efficacy? When you make a pill, there are two basic ways to judge the result, efficacy and purity. Purity limits the number of pills you can take, while efficacy controls how effective those pills are.”

I nodded. This information was familiar.

“You can make Perfect Rank 1 pills. This means the pill has zero toxins, which means you can take as many of them as you want without worry. Taking 10 pills is the same as taking 100. However, as you have seen, Perfect pills are extremely difficult to make, and very few alchemists can do so. There is a natural limit to how pure we can make pills. The best pills commonly sold are High-Purity, but even with these, you have to be careful about how many you take. Pill toxins will slowly build up over time, polluting your qi and meridians. Take too many and your strength will plummet.”

“So, when people can’t improve purity anymore, they focus on efficacy,” I said. “But how?”

“There are at least a few ways to improve the efficacy of pills. There are three that I know of. The first is the easiest. Use better herbs. A pill is considered 100% effective if it is equal to a pill made by extracting 100% of the energy from top-quality common herbs. Herbs have a natural maximum amount of energy they can hold. If you use herbs that are all at that maximum, then extract and use all that energy, you have made a 100% effective pill. However, herbalists are capable of pushing the energy in herbs above their natural maximum. If all your ingredients have 150% of their natural maximum energy, you can make 150% effective pills.”

“Is that what Wen Hao did? He used abnormally powerful herbs?”

“No,” the deacon scoffed. “This was an open competition. The hall wouldn’t have provided herbs of that quality and using them in such a way would be extremely wasteful. No, there is no question that Wen Hao went with the second method. He used his blessing.”

I dropped my jaw a bit in surprise. Of course this was possible, blessings could be anything, so there would certainly be people who had blessings to improve the quality of their pills.

“He can directly make his pills stronger? How does that work?”

“I don’t know how his particular blessing works, but based on the results, I would say he can somehow mimic the effects an herbalist would have when increasing the potency of herbs, but this is just a guess.”

“That seems incredibly powerful,” I muttered.

“Not really,” said the deacon. “It’s a nice ability to have, but it wouldn’t be too attractive to more powerful forces. If his blessing can simply be replaced by a good herbalist, it wouldn’t turn the heads of more powerful forces.”

I nodded in agreement, but in my head, I still wished for such an ability. I wanted to eventually learn herbalism so I could make better ingredients for myself, but doing so was a problem. Without cultivating wood qi, learning herbalism wouldn’t be possible, but if I did that, I would no longer have access to fire qi for alchemy. This kind of blessing would be a nice shortcut.

“Still,” I said, “it’s nice to have.”

“Yes, it is one of the reasons Wen Hao is considered a genius alchemist and so many people try to curry favor with him. In this sect, he can be considered a top-tier talent.”

“Better herbs or a better blessing,” I said, “neither is a great solution for me right now. Is there something else I can do to improve efficacy?”

“Yes, but it’s more limited. I have held off on this because you needed a good foundation first, but you should be ready. There is a skill in the elder’s technique hall that you can use to improve efficacy. The general idea is to use your qi to enhance the medicinal power of herbs. Your qi is fire-based, and you have an earth-attributed spirit fire. Have you tried using them to boost the power of pills before? Using your earth-based spirit fire to make metal energy more powerful perhaps?”

“Yes, deacon, but it doesn’t work. If I inject metal energy with the spirit fire, or earth energy with my qi, it seems to make the energy stronger, but the pills always collapse in the end.”

“That’s because there are limitations. You can only extract enough power to raise a pill to around 110% efficacy, 120% would be the absolute maximum. That is why I say Wen Hao must have used a blessing to get his pills so high. Aside from that, you should only try to enhance the first portion of medicinal energy in the pill’s energy cycle. So, if you are making a Meridian Builder, you can start by enhancing the earth energy with your fire qi before combining it with anything else.”

“If the pills don’t start with earth or metal energy, there is nothing I can do then?”

“It’s worse than that. You need to learn a skill from the technique hall to be able to do this at all. You won’t have enough control of your spirit fire, so you can only use it with your fire qi, which means you will only be able to enhance pills that start with earth energy.”

I had hoped for a skill to easily push myself further, but pies wouldn’t fall from the sky.

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“Is there anything I can do to improve the efficacy of other pills?”

“Nothing I know of,” said Deacon Liu. “Really, if you could make Perfect Rank 2 pills it would be far better than pushing efficacy 10 to 15% higher. The ability to consume countless pills is of far, far more value.”

Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to happen. I would need seven-star affinity in all five basic elements to completely cleanse the toxins from the herbs, and I couldn’t get that in this lifetime.

“I understand, deacon. I will go to the technique hall to see what I can learn.”

I turned to leave, but the deacon stopped me.

“One moment,” he said, pulling me back over. “You need to start working on cultivation again. Reaching Grandmaster before thirty is out of reach, I believe. You would need to advance at least twice every year, and that would lead to an unstable foundation and mental state. Instead, try to advance once every year. You should be able to break through before 35 at that rate.”

The deacon put a small box on the counter. “Here is a set of ingredients for the Meridian Builder pill. Your pills are of sufficient quality now that they are worth taking. Only use a single pill per meridian though. The pill will add toxins to the meridian you use it on, so you want to use them as sparingly as possible. A single High-Purity pill per meridian is not enough to worry about though.”

“Thank you, deacon.”

After leaving the pill hall, I went straight to the elder’s technique hall.

While I had been looking forward to visiting this place, I wasn’t allowed to go inside without permission. Today, Deacon Liu had finally allowed it.

The elder’s technique hall was also inside the mountain, so it was still basically a cave, but some effort had been put in to make the place feel welcoming. Instead of bare rock, wood flooring had been installed, and there was even a red-painted wooden wainscoting around the room.

Near the entrance, an elderly woman with iron-gray hair sat behind a desk. She wore plain deacon’s robes and was reading a book. In the middle of the room were several desks where disciples could study. These desks separated bookshelves which stood on the left and right sides of the room. The shelves on the left held the Rank 1 techniques, while those on the right held Rank 2 techniques.

When I entered, I approached the deacon.

“Name?” she asked with a clipped tone.

“Su Fang.”

The deacon looked at a scroll at the side of the desk. “You are permitted to read one Rank 2 manual each month. Unlimited access to Rank 1 manuals. You are not allowed to take anything out of this room.”

I waited for her to say more, but nothing else was forthcoming. That being the case, I walked away to begin looking through the books.

My pretense for coming here was to study the Rank 2 technique for improving pill efficacy, so that was where I started. I could only look at a single Rank 2 manual each month, so that would have to be it.

The number of techniques in the library was limited, only a few dozen, and they were neatly sorted into fighting techniques, alchemy techniques, and cultivation techniques, so it wasn’t hard to find the one I was looking for.

Reading the manual was the simplest part of learning a technique. After that, I would need to practice it countless times until it became second nature. For me, though, just reading a technique had the far more important effect of adding it to my mental library.

I had already learned that this mental library I purchased was not nearly as powerful as I had hoped. The main problem was that it did not record techniques I knew, it only recorded what I read. If I read a manual but skipped over a few words, the words I skipped over would not appear in my copy. If I was reading too quickly and read a word wrong, then the wrong word would appear in my copy. Thus, it was imperative that I carefully read each word.

The manual I was interested in was the Rank 2 Pill Empowering Technique. It would allow me to infuse earth medicinal energy with fire qi. This had to be done carefully, in a controlled way, to ensure that every part of the earth energy was raised evenly. Essentially, my fire qi would act as a sixth herb at the start of the chain. If everything was done perfectly, it would add up to an extra 20% to the final efficacy, but that assumed no losses at any stage of pill production.

I carefully read the manual three times to try and ensure everything was copied over correctly. After that, I returned the manual and began to look through the Rank 1 techniques.

I wanted to copy everything, but that would take time. I would focus on what gave me the most benefits first. I skipped the fighting manuals for now. Learning to fight would eventually be necessary, but I didn’t need them immediately, and I had no real desire to pursue that path. Every time I thought about fighting, the memories of my previous deaths flashed through my mind.

I also skipped over the pill techniques. They might be helpful, but I could easily make any Rank 1 pill with what I already knew. I would still copy them when I had time in the future, though.

Instead, my first focus was on the cultivation techniques. To be fair, these also wouldn’t provide me with any immediate benefit, but they held the most importance for my next life. The library had a complete set of Peak-Yellow Rank 1 techniques. There was at least one for every basic element. The mental effects on some of them might be suspect, but simply having the option to use them would be extremely nice.

I did not jump to copy those techniques, though. Instead, I focused on three others. There were two Low-Profound techniques and a single Mid-Profound one.

The two Low-Profound techniques were both for cultivating fire qi, and they had rather simple effects. They maintained the perfect qi purity of a Peak-Yellow technique while adding a single extra benefit. The first made the qi denser, increasing its overall power. The second made the qi easier to control. As Low-Profound techniques, these additional benefits were minor but definite improvements.

The Mid-Profound technique was something completely different. When cultivated, the qi purity would be roughly the same as a Mid-Yellow technique, and it provided no benefits to the qi itself. Instead, this technique allowed one to cultivate both fire and wood qi simultaneously. The total qi in the body would be the same, so a cultivator of this technique would only have half the fire qi that someone who cultivated a pure fire technique did.

This technique had very clear drawbacks in both purity and amount of qi, but the benefits were equally clear. It would allow me to use wood qi. This would help with my alchemy, allowing me to enhance more pills and cleanse a wider variety of toxins more easily. One of my biggest problems was isolating my spirit fire so that it didn’t harm the medicinal efficacy of pills. Wood depletes earth, so wood qi would help me form a perfect isolation layer against the Cold Mountain Fire.

It also gave me a starting point to begin learning herbalism. I wasn’t willing to commit lifetimes to that pursuit yet, but setting up a small garden on the side wasn’t out of the question.

The most valuable benefit, though, was that through the elemental cycle, I should be able to use the wood qi to significantly boost the effectiveness of my fire qi. That would need time and effort to accomplish, but it should be doable.

Importantly, after checking, I found that the technique hall had the Rank 2 versions of each technique. They were of the same low and mid ranks, but after this life, I might have enough credits to upgrade one of them to Peak-Profound.

I sat down and got to work copying the valuable Rank 1 techniques.