Chapter 40: Life 58, Age 26, Martial Master 3
As I stood in front of Deacon Liu, I regretted how I handled things, but I knew I needed more information.
“Deacon, I will try to handle the situation better next time, but can you tell me how that guy was able to make pills at over 100% efficacy?”
He sighed. “Very well, let’s move on. Pill efficacy. What is pill efficacy? When you make a pill, there are two basic ways to judge the result, efficacy and purity. Purity limits the number of pills you can take, while efficacy controls how effective those pills are.”
I nodded. This information was familiar.
“You can make Perfect Rank 1 pills. This means the pill has zero toxins, which means you can take as many of them as you want without worry. Taking 10 pills is the same as taking 100. However, as you have seen, Perfect pills are extremely difficult to make, and very few alchemists can do so. There is a natural limit to how pure we can make pills. The best pills commonly sold are High-Purity, but even with these, you have to be careful about how many you take. Pill toxins will slowly build up over time, polluting your qi and meridians. Take too many and your strength will plummet.”
“So, when people can’t improve purity anymore, they focus on efficacy,” I said. “But how?”
“There are at least a few ways to improve the efficacy of pills. There are three that I know of. The first is the easiest. Use better herbs. A pill is considered 100% effective if it is equal to a pill made by extracting 100% of the energy from top-quality common herbs. Herbs have a natural maximum amount of energy they can hold. If you use herbs that are all at that maximum, then extract and use all that energy, you have made a 100% effective pill. However, herbalists are capable of pushing the energy in herbs above their natural maximum. If all your ingredients have 150% of their natural maximum energy, you can make 150% effective pills.”
“Is that what Wen Hao did? He used abnormally powerful herbs?”
“No,” the deacon scoffed. “This was an open competition. The hall wouldn’t have provided herbs of that quality and using them in such a way would be extremely wasteful. No, there is no question that Wen Hao went with the second method. He used his blessing.”