Sunrise Alchemist, Ch 8: First Steps in Alchemy (Patreon)

Three days later, Verse wiped the sweat away from his forehead as he examined the new circle on the floor of the formation chamber. He’d had to carve the channels with pure spiritual energy and then fill them with carefully balanced elemental aspects, which required a very fine control of elemental power.

Formations were no joke, even ones of this level. They required a fine touch. The main thing, however, was that he didn’t have much practice with them. It would have been a lot easier if he’d been used to manipulating elemental energy like this.

Formations were basically patterns that channeled elemental energy. They could be used for more complex types of energy too, but elemental ones were the most common.

Technically, the original Rank 2 formation here was called a “Flowing Water Seal”, while the one he’d built around it was a Rank 3 “Stoneguard Seal.” The first one was primarily Water based, and to make it more efficient here on the stone foundation of the house, he’d used a more powerful Stone-based one to ground it. A little bit of Wind, for whatever reason, had also been necessary to balance the energy between the other two elements.

There was one point of pride for him in this creation, at least, which was that he hadn’t used any tools, just pure focus. If a formation master had seen that, they would have been stunned by his potential.

“Good work, hatchling,” the shrine approved. “Now you’re on a dragon’s path. The elements shine through your scales. Tools are for weaklings who can’t do it themselves.”

Verse just shook his head, holding back a laugh. Tools would have made it a lot easier.

“It’s good it only needed Wind, Stone, and Water for this one,” he said. “Those are all part of jade essence and my elemental affinities. If it needed Shadow or something, it would have been a lot more difficult.”

The reason a formation master would have been shocked was that everyone knew formations required tools. That was how they were able to balance the elemental lines for their formations. They needed to prepare in advance and have the right spirit stones and focal artifacts to allow them to manipulate different elements, which they then built up into the correct structure.

Most people only had one or two elemental affinities of their own, but a formation master needed to use dozens, depending on what exactly they were working on. It was said that an alchemist needed herbs and time, but a formation master needed a thousand arms.

They relied on tools to make up for their limits, and on more tools to balance out their energy so they didn’t make a mistake.

He didn’t have any of those tools, and he hadn’t wanted to spend even more money to get them, so he hadn’t bothered. He’d gone with pure force of will. The shrine’s estimate on the time had been accurate, but it hadn’t been easy work, even with a guide telling him exactly what to do.

“This change has upgraded the wards here to the middle of the Aligned Realm,” the shrine announced. “The expenditure of spirit stones will be about the same though. The efficiency went up with the Stoneguard Seal, but the expenditure for a Rank 3 formation is higher than a Rank 2.”

“At least that puts everything in order and we’ve cut off the city’s ability to spy,” Verse said as he wiped the sweat away. He summoned a strong current of air to cool himself off as he walked toward the courtyard. “Now it’s time to focus on the real reason I came to Boreas.”

“Finally!” the shrine said approvingly. “You’ve studied all the concepts, so let’s see what you can do, hatchling.”

Without answering, Verse settled down in the center of the courtyard. The sky was layered with sunlight and silver clouds, and he could smell the dense spice of dozens of herbs across the area.

Even in just three days, the herbs he’d planted were larger and the Wood energy had increased by another twenty percent. It wouldn’t be long before the density of spiritual energy in the courtyard was multiple times higher than the surrounding area.

Leaf really had done something special here.

The original gathering formation here was still functioning, creating a current that gathered the energy toward the center, but the amount that it was dealing with was much stronger than it had been designed to handle. Before long, he would have to enhance it too. Carving the stabilizing lines deeper so they could handle more energy would be a good start.

Just this alone was a good reason to improve the wards on the house, since the higher the energy here, the more desirable this location would be, but that wasn’t the main reason he’d fixed up the formation before starting alchemy.

Dragons didn’t do alchemy the same way as humans.

He concentrated on the emerald energy of his bloodline, gathering it slowly from his veins as he began to cycle it around his soul space. A low and resonant roar sounded through the courtyard, making Leaf lift his head as he stared at Verse with bright eyes.

Wood energy from the courtyard and Stone from the earth below him gathered toward Verse in response to the roar, turning into a spiral of energy that merged with his own. It felt like his soul space inverted for a moment and then a sphere of emerald energy formed between Verse’s hands.

Under his careful control, the energy swiftly took on the shape he wanted, coalescing into a small emerald cauldron. It was a foot across with a fat belly, four legs, a lid that covered the top, and carvings of dragons and clouds around the outside. The lid was slightly off-kilter and the carvings were still rough, but it was clearly an alchemy cauldron.

He studied the result, and then he dismissed it before he began the summoning process again. This was a technique the shrine had taught him to create a soul-linked cauldron. In fact, it was an inversion of his soul space. He drew in natural energy from the environment with his bloodline, cycled it through his soul space, and then projected it into reality.

This was a soul cauldron.

Dragon alchemy was a reflection of the natural world. As his understanding of his dao improved, so would his cauldron. When he was strong enough, his cauldron could be the size of a mountain or woven from starlight and moonlight.

Its qualities would always reflect his own path.

Regular alchemists spent a vast amount of resources to get the best cauldron possible to support their work, seeing it as a necessary investment. If they could get one that was a higher tier than the herbs they were using, it would give a lot of advantages to their success rate and the strength of the medicines they made.

He didn’t have the advantage of using a cauldron above his realm, but the natural advantages of a soul cauldron more than made up for it. Alchemists needed to have fine control over the process happening inside the cauldron, and there was no better way to do that than by using a soul cauldron.

Everything that happened inside was within his grasp. Even now, he could sense the Wood and Stone energy he’d gathered flowing through the material, making the cauldron stronger by the moment. The dao could be infused into the material more easily than by any other method, and the waste from the process was minimal.

Theoretically, if he let a soul cauldron improve for long enough, it would turn into a real physical object in the world. Then, even if he removed his soul energy, it would still be there. The shrine had told him legends of an entire volcano being shaped from that method once.

A dragon had used a natural magma flow to heat the bottom of a soul cauldron and worked in the area for centuries. By the time he left, the entire land had turned into a volcanic caldera. The lip of the cauldron had turned into the surrounding mountains.

The shrine might have been teasing him, but given the levels of strength he knew were in the world, he didn’t doubt that it was possible. He wasn’t planning to create a volcano anytime soon, but the story helped him to get into the right mindset.

On top of that, alchemy was a type of cultivation. The more he used this soul cauldron, the stronger his soul would become. Soul strength was a core foundation for advancing through cultivation realms and there were few good ways to train it.

As it improved, so would his speed of thought, spiritual sense, awareness of the world, ability to sense the dao, resistance to illusions, and more.

A new emerald cauldron formed between his hands. This one had a lid that fit slightly better, but the carvings were still rough. After he examined it, it shattered into shards of emerald light that sparkled like dew in the courtyard.

He focused his spirit and let out a long breath as he shaped another one. A bit more effort should be enough to get the lid to fit, and then he could get started. The carvings would take more time, but they weren’t as essential at the beginning.

In fact, they weren’t really carvings. They were reflections of his understanding of the dao of alchemy and of his soul space, altered somewhat by his inner vision of those concepts. That was why they were dragons and clouds. A dragon for alchemy and a cloud for the soul space.

As his understanding improved, they would change.

He was in search of perfection and wasn’t willing to create a subpar cauldron, so it ended up taking him five more tries to get the cauldron lid to fit. By the time it was done, there was a strange fatigue in his spirit, one that made him want to take a nap.

He pushed the feeling aside as he held the cauldron between his hands and closed his eyes to meditate. This was just the beginning of training alchemy. There was no way he was going to let a cauldron exhaust him before he even got started.

It was helpful that his soul was already strong. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to try making a cauldron more than once every day or two.

“New alchemists sometimes take weeks to form their first cauldron,” the shrine said as he watched. “You’re just starting, but you have good discipline, which is an advantage. For all their strength, dragons often lack that quality. It comes with being one of the most powerful beings on the planet.”

Verse looked down at the cauldron between his hands. The carvings were still rough, but the lid fit seamlessly now. It was a deep emerald and solid to anyone else who might be looking at it, but to him it was transparent. A flow of Wood energy was swirling through the carvings and making the surface glow, while Stone from the ground below him was slowly hardening the material.

He still needed to heat it up, but Fire was his strongest element. The only difference for this one was that he wasn’t going to use pure Fire, but rather Emerald Flame. The soul cauldron and Emerald Flame were the basis for all of the recipes that the shrine had taught him.

Alchemy required Wood and Fire as its major daos.

Wood was needed to manipulate the herbs as materials and bring them to their peak state. Then Fire was necessary to enhance and combine them. As the most energetic element, it was capable of improving their quality and burning away impurities, but too much would destroy them instead.

Some people thought those were the only two important elements, but he knew the others had their place as well, like Water for balancing innate properties and supporting combinations, and Earth to lend stability and endurance to an effect.

The other elements weren’t as essential in every recipe as Wood and Fire, but they were required for specific pills. If used well, they made alchemy more effective. Alchemy was a reflection of the world. Ignoring any of its aspects would lower your success rate.

Many of the shrine’s lessons had been on foundational theories.

With a shift of palm, he created a layer of emerald flame beneath the cauldron, which began to raise the temperature inside. Before long, the cauldron reached the required threshold and released waves of heat that radiated outward, like a Wood-fired sun at the center of the courtyard.

“That should be right,” he said. “Now for the first part.”

He’d already chosen his first recipe. It was the simplest one he had for Woodbalm Paste. It was also the one that was the cheapest to fail. With a wave of his hand, two herbs appeared in front of him from the pile that he’d purchased.

One was Verdant Leaf. The other was Spiritual Dew.

The leaf was nearly the size of the cauldron at full growth, about a foot across. When he held it up to the sunlight, it glowed with a translucent green sheen. Veins of spiritual energy ran through it like a spiderweb, filling it with a small amount of Wood energy and natural vitality.

The Spiritual Dew was a smaller plant about the size of his hand. Its small flowers looked like white bells as they glowed in the sunlight. Around each of them, a mist of water hovered like a raindrop.

He let the dew float off to the side as he took the Verdant Leaf and quickly peeled it into strips, separating the flesh from the veins inside. Then he set the veins aside and tossed the translucent pile of leaf material into the cauldron.

As soon as they touched the hot interior, they began to hiss as they released steam, but they didn’t burn. Instead, they soaked up heat from the cauldron and began to expand, almost like they were boiling.

Verse pulled out a stone pestle and quickly began to grind them together, creating a pulpy layer of material at the bottom of the cauldron. With the heat softening them, it didn’t take long before they were all ground into a paste.

“Heal.” A quiet word rumbled from Verse’s lip, filled with Wood energy as it merged into the paste at the bottom of the cauldron. Meanwhile, he continued to mash the pulp evenly, letting it mix with the power of the draconic word.

Other words followed as one by one, infusing more healing wood energy into the mix, and he added the veins from the leaf that he’d set aside, alternating them with flowers from the Spiritual Dew. As each material went in, he maintained the emerald flames at the base of the cauldron and mixed the contents.

With the addition of each material, the amount of paste in the cauldron increased, swiftly growing until it filled almost a quarter of the interior. As it did, it became more difficult to evenly mix and the amount of energy that it contained also swelled, becoming more chaotic.

Sweat beaded on Verse’s forehead as he continued to stir and infuse energy. It felt like he was trying to stir molten rock. The paste had become dense and viscous. Instead of being translucent green now, it was glowing with emerald light like the flames below it.

As he finished adding the Spiritual Dew, the quantity increased more and the density dropped until half the cauldron was filled with dense green liquid that looked like sap. He continued to stir the mixture as he let it simmer and poured more Wood energy into it.

A few moments later, he switched from Wood to Emerald Flames as he began to condense it again. It had reached a good level of potency, but it was supposed to be a paste and not a liquid, so now he needed to boil it down a bit.

As the liquid decreased, the chaotic fluctuations of energy in it grew even sharper until the entire cauldron was trembling under the force and rocking from side to side. Here and there, the edges of the paste began to smoke as it was unable to take the heat from the cauldron.

“Curse it,” he muttered as he tried to control the fluctuations, quickly changing the level of heat at the base of the cauldron.

He reached into his spatial ring to grab more Spiritual Dew to cool the mix down, but before he could get it out, the entire cauldron ignited. A wave of scorching flame exploded upward, turning into a column ten feet high. Emerald strands of wood energy roared through it, feeding the flames as it towered higher.

The flame column only lasted for an instant before it disappeared, but when it was gone, there was only a charred mess left at the bottom of the cauldron. Verse swore as he looked down at it, considering where he’d gone wrong. He reached into the cauldron, dragging his finger through the mess. Then he rubbed it between his finger and thumb. It was an ashy, oily substance.

Then he licked it.

The smell of burnt ash was strong, layered heavily with a taste of scorched wood, making it clear that the fire had been too intense for the mixture. He would have to lower it a bit the next time once he started condensing the paste. It would take longer, but the paste should condense more easily.

“I suppose succeeding on the first attempt was too much to ask for,” he said with a grumble.

“You got most of the way there,” the shrine said. “You just went too quickly toward the end. Try again. And focus on its natural energy more this time. You lost track of it when those fluctuations started or you would have known to reduce the heat. But first, don’t waste the spiritual energy in it.”

Verse frowned as he looked at the burnt paste inside of the cauldron, but then he shrugged. A wave of his hand made the cauldron dissolve, leaving only the paste floating in the air. A quick twist of wind spun it into a ball the size of an apple that he picked up.

Before he could think about it twice, he took a bite out of it. It tasted like the bottom of a scorched pan, but there was a certain chewiness. The residual energy from the herbs made his tongue tingle.

A few bites later, the ball was gone, leaving behind the taste of flame and a small amount of spiritual energy that was merging into his bones and skin. There probably wasn’t anyone else in the world besides a dragon who would eat a failed alchemy experiment, but it had some advantages.

He could taste the process that had caused it to fail, giving him an intimate understanding of exactly where he’d gone wrong. The Wood and Flame energies in it sprang into sharp relief.

The shrine had told him dragons could eat practically anything with spiritual energy. Herbs were an important resource, as were other natural treasures of the world. Over time, they would strengthen his body and enhance his natural affinities. As strange as it seemed, it was just another form of cultivation.

Despite that, it didn’t taste very good, which made him not want to fail again.

“It needs some salt,” he said with a grimace. “Eating this once is enough. Next time, I’m taking the slower route.”

He could also absorb the energy through his skin, like holding a spirit stone. Eating was faster and it gave him a better idea of the substance, but he didn’t plan to do it all the time. Maybe if he wasn’t sure where he’d gone wrong.

A few moments later, another cauldron formed in front of him and he began to heat it with emerald flame. When it was ready, he repeated the same process. This time, however, as soon it was time to reduce the liquid, he lowered the flame by half. Time stretched out as he stirred the mixture and continued to infuse it with Wood energy.

Bit by bit, the mixture condensed and he continued to decrease the flame. Eventually, the cauldron was barely warm to the touch and there was a thick green paste at the bottom that gleamed with spiritual energy.

A jade jar floated up from beside him and a current of hardened wind scooped the paste out of the cauldron and placed it inside. Another jar followed, until he’d filled three of them. The cauldron dissolved into a mist of emerald light as looked down at the jars in his hand.

He could sense the dense vitality in each of them. It was stronger than most Qi Gathering healing pills, close to the middle of Essence Condensation. He scooped out a thin layer of paste and rubbed it between his fingers, where it released a cool wave of energy.

He glanced around the courtyard, but there was nothing injured to test it on, so he pulled out a dagger and made a thin slash on his left arm, just barely drawing blood. Then he rubbed the paste onto the wound. As the paste covered the wound, it glowed with green light and began to quickly close.

“Seems like a success,” he said with a smile, but the sense of elation quickly turned into self-critique. “A low quality version though, or it would be working faster.”

“Master-quality Woodbalm Paste would close that wound within seconds,” the shrine agreed, “but yours is good for a first success. Keep working on it. This recipe isn’t complicated, but it’s foundational. It will help you train your Wood infusion and your control of Fire. Those are the basis for the future. Right now, your infusion was unstable and your control of emerald flame was rudimentary at best. You lost a lot of the potential from the herbs.”

Verse nodded in agreement. There was no reason to get upset at the truth. It was a success, but it wasn’t a good one. Low-quality products were barely worth being called apprentice work.

Within a rank, there were five tiers of alchemical quality: low, medium, high, peak, and master. It was a simple system that represented how much of the medicinal property from the herbs an alchemist was able to harness.

Low quality meant around 10-30% of the herb’s strength had been harnessed in the finished product, medium 30-50%, high 50-70%, peak 70-80%, and master was anything above that.

Right now he had time, so he was going to do things correctly. Woodbalm Paste was one of the simplest and most basic recipes available. If he skipped practicing on it and tried harder things before mastering it, he would only be wasting herbs.

He would focus on it until he was able to reliably make a master-quality version. That would prove his control over Wood and Fire had developed enough to take the next step. Then he would move on.

In alchemy, slow and steady was the best route.

Pills for cultivation breakthroughs, explosive combat ability, and even legendary ones that could overturn rivers and mountains would come eventually, but they all relied on a stable foundation. They also needed deep insights into the dao to be channeled into them.

Some people might have been depressed by the amount of time it would take to study alchemy, but for him, a sense of excitement was actually building deep in his chest. He was looking forward to training his abilities and daos through the work. It felt like progress waiting to happen, where everything was within his control. All he had to do was put in the effort.

“Let’s try again,” he said as a sense of excitement built up in him. “I already have some ideas on how to adjust the flame.”

Another emerald cauldron swiftly took shape between his hands. From the side of the courtyard, Leaf watched him with his head on his paws, apparently curious what his dragon was doing now.