47 Chapter 45 - An Exam

The next two months followed a similar pattern. With each new city they visited, Ao Wen's responsibilities to care for the mortals increased. Her concoctions which initially succeeded one time in three under Senior Brother Huang's guidance now succeed nine times in ten. The cases she assisted with became more complex, and the treatments often required multiple medicines in combination.

Most importantly though, Ao Wen began to relieve visits from some of the patients she treated. Some brought gifts that ranged from silver abs gold to simple handmade goods like a scarf or hairpin. These things, however, didn't matter to Ao Wen at all. She told them truthfully that seeing them healthy was the greatest gift they'd given her. Day by day the shadows in her heart that accumulated while she fought Yin Fiend Transformation began to fade.

"Little Ye," Senior Brother Huang said one morning the day before they were due to depart on their journey to the next city. "I've just concocted something you may find interesting. Want to see?"

"Senior Brother will show me whether I say yes or no," Ao Wen teased. "If I say 'yes', senior brother will ask me if I've practiced hard, then he'll doubt if he should show me until I plead. If I say 'no', devour brother will use Alchemy to turn an ordinary expression of pride into an extraordinary hurt pout," she continued with a smile. "In the end, senior brother will always show me."

Huang Yuze visibly deflated. "You could play along you know?"

"But I've seen senior brother pout and tease. Now I've seen Senior Brother turn himself into an empty sack! Senior Brother truly is the greatest actor to ever portray an alchemist," she finished with a bright smile.

"Okay, that smile alone earned you a look," he said with a smile. "Take a look at this," he said as he opened a small box, revealing a bright yellow-orange pill, still fresh and warm from the cauldron.

"A pill!" Ao Wen said, instantly forgetting about teasing him as she came over to examine it. Pills were the exclusive realm of Alchemists. The inability to create pills was part of the reason why first and second-stage cultivators were titled as Alchemy Initiate and Alchemy Novice, and not as Novice Alchemist. An Alchemy Initiate or Novice could not practice Alchemy independently and could not create pills. In the third stage, like Senior Brother Huang, they became a genuine Alchemist when they demonstrated the ability to form pills.

"What is it? And what grade?" Ao Wen asked eagerly.

"It's a Pure grade Enlightened Flame Surge pill," he said, grinning in pride. "Master asked me to concoct it for an Initiate she finds promising."

"A pill for an Initiate? How luxurious. If Medical Saintess finds them promising they must be very talented," she said, still admiring the pill. "Will we be meeting this Initiate in the next city we visit?"

"I don't think we need to go that far," he said with a grin. "Come with me, Master is waiting."

Slightly confused, Ao Wen followed her senior brother to a small Alchemy lab. Along one wall several unlabeled drawers gave off a faint scent of medicinal components. In the middle of the room lay a simple cauldron and work table with a complete set of implements. Finally, seated behind a long table sat the Medical Saintess and another woman in robes similar to senior brother Huang.

As overwhelming as the presence of the Medical Saintess could be, it was the woman next to her that completely captured Ao Wen's attention. Her dark phoenix eyes drew Ao Wen in like mysterious black pools giving her the feeling that everything else in the room had become dimmer. Inky black tresses spilled to either side of her pale, perfectly sculpted visage. Delicate eyebrows danced above her expressive eyes and lush crimson-painted lips quirked in a mischievous smile as her eyes flowed over every centimeter of Ao Wen's body in a look that wasn't lecherous but felt more… charmed. As though something about Ao Wen had captivated the sensual beauty just as much as the beauty captivated Ao Wen.

"So this is the Initiate that Senior Brother Huang has been tutoring," the woman said languidly, her voice spilling from her dark red lips like rich honey. "My name is Qi Yue, junior sister can call me Senior Sister Qi," she said, resting her chin on long delicate fingers, clearly aware of how much she had captured Ao Wen's gaze and returning it with equal intensity.

"Initiate Yu greets Medical Saintess and Senior Sister Qi," she said with a formal bow, shaking herself free of Senior Sister Qi's smoldering gaze and trying to still her racing heart. The floor was good, she told herself. It was better to look at the floor, head lowered in deference, than to risk falling back into the soft darkness of those mysterious eyes.

"You look much better than when I last saw you," the Medical Saintess commented, bringing Ao Wen's attention back to the present and helping her focus on something other than the enigmatic Qi Yue. The Saintess wasn't just referring to her health, though a steady diet and good living conditions had done much to transform Ao Wen from a half-starved waif into an emerging young beauty. More than that, the look of defeat had left her eyes and she no longer slouched to make herself seem small. She might be the most junior of initiates but she'd discovered her own pride during her months under Huang Yuze's guidance.

"This test is overdue but formalities must be observed," the saintess continued. "On the wall are two thousand herbs in unlabeled drawers. Your task is to label at least one thousand of them in the next three hours. After that, using the herbs there, you will have five hours to concoct one hundred medicines, of which at least twenty must be suitable for low level cultivators. Among your refinements, at least fifty must be of Ordinary grade or better, and not more than twenty may be Unrefined grade," the Saintess ticked off the requirements one by one. "This is the minimum standard to wear the emblem of an Alchemy Initiate. Do you understand?"

"I understand," Ao Wen said, pulling her focus completely to the task at hand. All this time, while she'd been doing work to help patients or prepare medicines, she'd had the status of Huang Yuze's Medicine Girl, essentially a specialized servant. This was the door to formally set foot on the path of Alchemy! "If I need an herb for a concoction that's not among the ones I identify at first, may I check the remaining herbs to see if it's present, or may I only use the ones I identify in three hours?"

"You may search for additional herbs if you like," the Saintess replied. "But you will not be given more time. Any other questions?" Seeing Ao Wen shake her head, the Saintess placed an hourglass on the table. "You have three turns of the glass. Begin. Yuze, come join us on the panel, your junior sister and I are interested in your observations."

Ao Wen moved directly to the drawers containing herbs and began removing drawer after drawer until she had a full row of twenty drawers before her. Once she had pulled out the drawers, she moved quickly down the line, pushing some back, and leaving others in place. Once she'd reached the end of the line, she retrieved a pen and labeled the fifteen drawers she'd left in place, returning them to their place on the shelf before repeating the process with the next twenty drawers. She worked rapidly and methodically, labeling those she could identify quickly and leaving any others that she wasn't instantly sure of to the side. By the point that half her time had passed, she'd identified seven hundred of the two thousand herbs! Next, she returned to the beginning of the remaining herbs and once again moved some back and left others in place.

"Interesting," the Saintess remarked quietly to her direct disciples. "Yuze, do you think it's deliberate on her part?"

"Probably," he said. "I'm not sure if it comes from being an orphan or if it's part of her initial batches of medicine being so fraught with failure, but she aggressively looks for things she can make the most of. Of the four hundred herbs she's set aside in this batch, two hundred and fifty of them are used in at least five different medicinal recipes each. Correctly identifying them will significantly expand the variety of medicines she can concoct."

"It's a trap though," Qi Yue said languidly from the side. "While they might be useful in a large number of recipes, several of those recipes can't be completed with the herbs present. She may spend her time here and not gain as much as she believes."

"Let's see how hard she chases her idea," the Saintess murmured, keenly interested in this young initiate's approach.

An hour later Ao Wen had identified three hundred of her four hundred "high potential" herbs, including two hundred of the highly versatile ones she'd been seeking. Many of the herbs were similar to others with radically different effects and she'd needed to resort to actively testing many of them, dripping water on a portion, burning others, even grinding into powder to taste or better release the fragrance of an herb. Finally, with thirty minutes remaining, she'd identified the required one thousand herbs. Standing back she looked at the sand glass and the remaining thousand herbs. She had ideas about many of them but it would require more testing and comparison to be sure. This time couldn't be spent concocting so she should be identifying as many more as possible but that didn't feel like the right answer. The time for quantity was over.

Walking over to the work table, she laid out a large scroll and began writing recipes from memory that she could complete with the herbs she'd identified. She spent ten of her remaining thirty minutes on this task alone. Once she completed that, she began to write a list of recipes that were missing a single ingredient. Another five minutes passed as she made notations about the missing ingredients, noting which ones were missing something she knew wasn't present and which ones were missing something that might be present. Finally, with fifteen minutes remaining, she returned to the unidentified herbs, pulling out every herb that had a strong presence of fire or cold energy, along with many that held strong connections to blood qi.

"None of those match what she's missing," Qi Yue said, frowning.

"No," the Saintess replied. "But in a pinch, an inferior version of some medicines can be made by substituting two or three other herbs with the right properties."

"Of all the books I've handed her," Huang Yuze said, "the one she treasures the most is the one Master wrote for alchemists with limited resources. It has the most notes in its margins, the most dogeared pages, and the most worn cover."

"Is it because it was written by Master that she values it so?" Qi Yue asked, genuinely curious.

"No," the young man said. "It's because I once challenged her to use that book to create plans to supply her orphanage with the most medicine using a limited supply of herbs. She poured herself into optimizing yield through substitution in a way I'd never seen from anyone in the sect. She even tested a few of her own modifications following Master's guidelines."

Finally, time expired and Ao Wen moved to concocting. To produce one hundred medicines in five hours would require her to do much of her refinement in batches. Sweat poured from her brow as she began processing batch after batch of herbs, her alchemy flames rotating steadily to different configurations of the Eight Trigrams. Glancing at the steadily falling sand, she pushed herself to work faster, splitting her focus between refining and writing out her labels and the next steps of her plan. She had to keep making adjustments whenever her yield was less than she expected, removing recipes from the list and adding others to replace it.

At the two hour mark, nearly finished with her refining, her cauldron shuddered before a thick cloud of black smoke rolled out of the cauldron. Not just a failure, the entire cauldron full of Bitter Arrow Root had scorched, turning into a black sludge. Bitter Arrow Root paste formed the foundation of ten out of her one hundred recipes. The cauldron contained all of the Bitter Arrow Root that was present for the exam. The setback was massive. Trembling, Ao Wen began to mechanically scrub the waste sludge from her cauldron, mind racing.