Chapter 10: Life 16, Age 92, Martial Disciple Peak
After Teacher left, I did not see him again for a long time.
It took me nearly three years to concoct my first pill. The day after it was deposited, I checked the ledger to find that I had submitted a trash pill. I had to do better. I didn’t deposit another pill until a year later.
In that period of time, I finally advanced to Martial Disciple 7.
Years flowed by in a steady stream. I began submitting pills regularly, but all of them were evaluated as trash. Unfortunately, I had not learned a method to evaluate pills from Teacher. If I had, I would not have bothered submitting my failures.
Over time, I began to feel the process at a deeper level. I began to sense the qi that made up the peonies. It was like strings of chaos wrapped around a thick green strand of power. As I heated the flower up, the strings of chaos burned away. If I heated it too far, the green medicinal power began to evaporate.
One big stumbling block was keeping my power correctly distributed. If too much was concentrated in one spot, it would quickly burn through the strands of chaos and eat away at the medicinal energy. To combat this, I had to quickly move all energy away from this area, which usually had the knock-on effect of creating several new hotspots. Really, I felt like once the situation began to grow out of control, it was completely unsalvageable. That must have been why Teacher highlighted the importance of Qi Gathering Powder. When the situation began to spiral out of control, I would quickly turn up the heat and begin burning everything away.
I persisted for decades. My output of trash pills had dropped to nearly zero. I still occasionally produced a few I thought might be viable. They weren’t, but I was nearly always able to salvage the situation into usable powder.
When I was over 50 years old, I finally had a breakthrough. I learned to more smoothly control fire qi. This allowed me to treat it almost like a self-leveling liquid. The qi wanted to evenly disperse around the flower. This still wasn’t perfect, since the chaos strings weren’t evenly distributed, but it was getting close.
That year, I finally submitted my first successful Low-Purity Basic Qi Gathering Pill.