Chapter 197: A Road Almost Taken
The day passed quickly for Benton. No emergencies arose, so he was able to devote his entire attention to completing his analysis of formations in the rest of the main sect ground buildings. He hit a couple of snags, and it ended up taking the rest of the day and into the night for him to finish.
In the meantime, Wan Ai entered the Trials Pagoda and successfully completed advancing her herb technique to Mastery. Which was fantastic. That would help her alchemy so much.
What would help her even more would be learning a beginning technique for pill making. He could easily create one for her that would cram all the information she needed into her brain. As it was, she was making do with learning from manuals that he’d acquired for her, and as far as he knew, she had yet to be able to produce a single pill.
Not that her failure was a bad thing. She was still in the Qi Gathering realm. When she advanced to Foundation Establishment, he’d give her an actual technique for making pills, and her current experience would really help her learn that one. Really, successes and failures weren’t nearly as important at the moment as the process of digging in and learning and trying.
A knowledge technique on top of that, though, would speed her even further.
The problem was time. His best guess was that she would breakthrough to Foundation Establishment in two hundred to two hundred and twenty days. That was maybe enough time to master another Qi Gathering level technique. Maybe. But her dagger technique was also only at Small Success.
In an ideal world, she’d have all her techniques mastered by the time she advanced, giving her a fresh start to work on the new, more important ones he’d be giving her. The likelihood of her reaching Mastery with her weapon and a new technique seemed small. The likelihood was that she’d advance with both of them at Large Success.
Was it better for her to move to the next major realm with two mastered techniques and purely mundane experience with pill making or to have only one mastered technique, decent control but not mastery over her weapon, and enhanced but not expert knowledge about pill making?
In the end, that was something only she could decide.
He used a message to summon her. It didn’t take long for her to arrive, and unsurprisingly, she brought Zou Tian with her.
After they got the standard greetings out of the way, Benton explained her choices to her.
“I prefer to learn on my own, Master,” she said as soon as he’d finished speaking.