Chapter 500 - Ripples (VII)
Chapter 500
Ripples (VII)
It was about half an hour after the start that they seemed to finish tossing things into the cauldron and meticulously measuring them, closing the lid on the thing and sitting on opposite sides with their arms stretched out towards it. They did not touch the cauldron, as I imagine their hands would be burned off, but seemed to be sending pulses of Qi through their palms at intervals.
I didn't speak or move, and I barely even breathed, fearing I might disturb them. A few strange things soon began to happen; for starters, the herbal aroma that was all but suffocating began to retreat, and, within just fifteen minutes of closing the lid, it was gone.
Even after unclogging my nostrils and taking a free lungful, the air was simply stale and somewhat nondescript.
Secondly, the temperature, too, cooled to the point it was a perfectly pleasant seventy-something within the same timeframe. It was as though both it and the aroma were sucked back into the cauldron to increase the efficacy of the pills as much as possible.
Vapors of white and coral began to emerge from underneath them and frame their bodies like a strange stroke around their edges; it was as though they were on fire yet not, with illusionary colors teetering on the edge of real and fake.
At about the forty-five-minute mark, the cauldron began to shake gently as its surface also started turning redder. Both quickly repositioned themselves and also extended their arms out sideways as though to hug it, with motes of Qi rapidly leaving their palms in strange patterns.
Even if I was watching it all unfold, it looked nothing like the alchemy I 'did' back in Silvercrest City. I genuinely did believe, even if it wasn't one-to-one, alchemy wasn't all that different from drug making. Take ingredients, mix them in perfect ratios, use one of the methods to do it...
... but this looked nothing like that. It was closer to literal magic than anything remotely pharmaceutical. Maybe the initial portion of it, when they were first tossing in the ingredients and measuring them and sifting, was somewhat reminiscent of procedures back on Earth, but this... yeah. It was literal magic.
And, as such, I couldn't really grasp much of anything.
It wasn't as though I could use my Divine Sense to peek inside the caldron--not that I didn't try, I did. But the moment I got within the few inches of it, my Divine Sense was literally burned away. And though I pressed my gums together and didn't scream in pain, I really wanted to.
At about an hour mark, I got kinda bored and sat down.
Nothing had happened as far as I was concerned, but the two were definitely sweating buckets--both in a literal and more liberal sense. They shuffled their positions, body and arm-wise, every five minutes or so, as the sheen around them grew ever so slightly thicker with each iteration.
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Right now, they were kind of glowing, almost like fireflies. Were the cauldron itself not absolutely beaming as well at this point, they would have undoubtedly looked quite majestic in the dark.
The room was slowly heating up and eroding my ability to ignore. Ignore the bombshell that was dropped on me, ignore the two (of many) deaths that I was almost directly responsible for, and ignore the many things gnawing away at my heart that I wasn't quite ready to deal with just yet. Time, fortunately, always ticks.
At the two-hour mark, the first major shift happened--the cauldron began to levitate. It wasn't merely an inch or two off the ground but good two feet, with its tip stretching out almost to the ceiling. It also began to shake without a stop; though there was a rhythm of sorts to it, like a sine wave, where it would occasionally vibrate and shake harder, and sometimes it was barely discernible, it never truly stopped.
It was also now that I began to sense it--the Qi. And I also began to sweat a bit. If they made a mistake for some reason and that thing went kaboom, I'm pretty sure we'd all immediately be turned into dust and ashes, alongside everything around us. That thing was like a fuckin' nuclear warhead, the prototype. I could only hope and pray that the two knew what the hell they were doing.
... and seeing how it did not go off even at the three-hour mark, it seems like they indeed did know what the hell they were doing.
Hours ticked by rather uneventfully; they continued to shift their positions, the cauldron continued to be more and more unstable, and I continued to trust in their ability.
Finally, at the ten-hour mark, it seemed to be coming to an end--but in a way that I hadn't expected. The first shock was a low hum--a distantly familiar one that I've heard a few times before, a hum of Dao. Immediately after, a purely white pillar of light descended from above as though from heaven, piercing through the ceiling and shrouding both the two of them and the cauldron.
The shaking, seeming like it was just about to explode cauldron calmed down and turned completely still as the two figures suddenly ascended and started floating alongside of it, their countenance that of calm and serenity, as though they weren't struggling with their veins bulging just a moment ago.
The hum turned louder and soon became a song, but it was... strange. There was no sound, per se, and more that the song was being conjured in some other way. I experienced it more than I heard it, leaving me a bit befuddled.
It didn't last long, the whole ordeal, perhaps half a minute at most. Soon, the things quieted down, and the two who were floating around came back down to the ground, with the cauldron following soon after. The lid turned slightly uncapped as white smoke burst forth, and the blazingly chilling scent of herbs immediately perfumed throughout the entire room.
However, unlike before, it wasn't pleasant; rather, it was... relaxing.
Of course, I couldn't enjoy any of that shit since my view was immediately overcome by a burst of notifications.
[--congratulations, Host. One of your Disciples, Lao Shun, has managed to invoke the Song of Dao while concocting a pill]
[Song of Dao signals the blessing from the Dao itself, purifying the pills of all their toxicity and making them near-Perfect. Any Alchemist that manages to invoke it immediately goes up a minor rank]
[Lao Shun has gone from Tri Aspects Initiate to Tri Aspects Novice]
[...]
[Your Disciple, Lao Shun, has managed to concoct two sets of near-perfect Void-Nullifying Pills (???)]
[Due to the quality of the pills, Host only needs to consume one instead of five while attempting the breakthrough]
[...]
[Your Disciple Lao Shun has achieved a remarkable feat; rewards recalculated]
[...]
[Rewards]
[Reward 1: A Random Genesis-tier Extinct Alchemy Recipe --> Immortal Pill (Genesis)]
[Reward 2: Voidfire (???)]
[Reward 3: New System Function: Ingredient Synthesis]
[Reward 4: Portable Alchemy Chamber]
[Reward 5: The System has automatically generated an Alchemy-oriented extension to Enduring Eternity, Enduring Salvation. Host may choose not to use it]
[Reward 6: Codex of Unending Knowledge (???) Transcription]