665. Almost Evil (Patreon)

More and more singleton herbs joined his original set. At last, the list stabilized. Even as the other clones progressed, herbs rarely joined Mortal’s set. He looked over the herbs, looking them up and down.

Currently, I’m looking at eight herbs. Judging the pill’s difficulty by the number of herbs required to cultivate it, it’s well out of my skill range!

Oh well. If I have to rely on Xi Sanji, so be it. I’ll try my hardest to figure it out first, but I’m not afraid to call on her if I can’t. After all, these are all elements I’m used to. Even if I don’t understand the finer points of pill cultivation, I should still be able to guess the way they align and suppress and enhance one another. The pill library the other clones are downloading into our brain means I basically can’t help but know that right now, even putting aside my own hard-earned knowledge!

The bulb with the small flowers, the dried bud that bloomed into a flower, the black leaf with ridged edges, and the fire-colored flower all remained in his set of eight. Five new herbs joined them. A scraggly red root with small tubers exuded fire element. A spray of heavy flowers dangled from a thick black stem. The flowers glowed like stars, and the stem absorbed that light. Floating beside the flowers, a dry bean pod in brown held ember-hot beans. A long branch rounded out the five, the left half of it alive, full of leaves and flowers, the right half of it dead and dry.

Mortal put a hand on his chin, thoughtful. Life and death. Yang. Fire. Wind. It’s not impossible to combine them, but it’s certainly not going to be easy.

Let’s start from the easy combinations, and work up. It makes sense, right? What kind of madman would start from the hardest eight-herb combination? Let’s do twosies and threesies and work up from there.

The nice part is that I’m currently in a dataspace. In other words, none of these herbs are real. While it does mean that I’m not a hundred percent accurate in terms of what the combinations will be, since I won’t be able to accurately predict things like imperfections and extraneous additions, I’ll be able to figure out the basics of the combinations with infinite copies of the herbs.

Basically, I’m applying the principles of computer modelling to pill cultivation. It’s probably the only way I could possibly learn pill cultivation without a massive waste of resources. After all, I’m not learning pill cultivation the proper way. Even attempting two- or three-based combinations with these herbs is probably far beyond the beginning capacity of an ordinary pill cultivator. Pill cultivators almost certainly begin with simple, easy herbs. Common herbs. These herbs… I’m going to guess they’re the kind of herbs most pill cultivators don’t see in their lifetimes.

Waving his hand, he drew a few of the burning-red beans to hover over his palm. Heat shimmered over the ember-hot beans. He put a hand on his chin and considered the other herbs, then called forth a petal from the flame-flower and a tuber from the red roots. He swirled them around in midair, combining the data into a pill.

In real life, I’d have to actually fire the pill in a pill furnace, and we’d have to worry about times, temperatures, things like that. What I’m doing right now is conceptually combining the herbs based on what I know about them. It isn’t the same as an actual pill brewing, but it’s close enough to get an idea of what might come out.

In actual pill cultivation in my novels, there’s all sorts of transformations and hybridizations that can be done to change the nature of herbs in combination with one another. However, the information in this library covers the majority of that, so I can disregard those for now. Besides, if they left these herbs apart, I think I can assume that the only hybridizations—that is, combining two herbs together to create a new one—would be between these herbs, and likely, they would have already accomplished that. It would create too large a search space if the herbs could be hybridized with any herbs in the library.

I think… if this is a puzzle, then I think that whoever created it would want it to be solvable. The solver would have to put in significant effort, I’d expect, but the level of difficulty of “the herbs must be hybridized with any other herb in the world” is only for people who like puzzles, not for people who are trying to hide information from an attacker, but want that information to be discovered again later.

As for transformations… I’m going to rule out transformations that aren’t listed on the cards. Same with the hybridizations, I think the person who hid this puzzle wanted it to be solved, rather than waiting for some genius to come along and decode the impossible.

In midair, his attempted pill burst into flames. Mortal furrowed his brows, then waved his hand. The three component parts separated, floating unharmed in the air, the fire gone. With a flick of his finger, he dismissed the flower petal and called forth its stem instead, then recombined the ingredients. Over and over, using different parts of the plants in different proportions, testing their data infinitely. At last, a stable pill spun in the air, and yet, Mortal frowned. He waved his hand, dismissing the pills to their component parts again.

This isn’t right. It’s too far from reality. I’m basically just creating a plant mash and rolling it into a ball. I need a fire.

A fire… He turned his hand over, calling phoenix fire to his hand. Well, that’s easy enough.

And a pot. Mortal looked around, then looked down at his dantian. …I mean… it’s not the furthest thing from a furnace. And I’m a clone, so it’s not too big of a deal if I die. It’s risky, but… just combining the data isn’t as good as combining the data in my best approximation of a furnace, including heat.

He took a deep breath. With a gesture, he sent the components into his dantian. Using the fire, he began to heat them. Alright. Here we go. I hope it doesn’t hurt!

Once more, the pill components spun together. Using his dantian, Mortal pressurized them, while the phoenix fire burned from below. His stomach heated up, but not so painfully that he couldn’t press on. Between the pressure and the heat, the fire flower melted. The ember burst into flame, boiling the liquid. The tuber burned away, purifying to a white, fibrous powder that fell into the liquid. The boiling liquid thickened and wrapped around the ember as it burned out, creating a smooth red coating on an ashy black pill.

There we go. That’s more like it!

Calling the data pill from his dantian, Mortal scratched its surface with his fingernail and extracted a bit of the coating and the pill beneath. He lifted his finger to his mouth, then paused.

I’m about to use my bodiless mental clone form’s tongue to test the effects of a data pill created from mental copies of the herbs… this is insane.

Or a complete, perfect computer model of a human body trying a new pharmaceutical that still only exists in the dataspace. It’s a very normal, reasonable thing to do, right?

Right!

Anyways, here goes! He tasted the pill.