Chapter 108: PASSION TALK

CHAPTER

108

PASSION TALK

JIEYUAN

—∞—

Meiyao pulled the group of ingredients she’d separated for the antidote closer and pushed the other two further to the side.

“There are four steps to refining. They’re the same, whether you’re refining concoctions or constructs. Prior to it, you’d also need to properly plan out the concoction, and there are a lot of calculations involved, but my bloodright lets me skip all of that.”

She picked up the first of the flowers. A small, black-petaled rose.

“The first step’s attuning, so that you can use your soulforce on the plants. The refining rituals only work on attuned materials, too. It’s the reason why I can’t refine higher-realm plants, since the ritual only works on plants from the same realm.”

She then whispered, softly, “Regrow.”

That was Meiyao’s attuning hymn, the same he’d heard her using sometimes, when she’d be attuning chroma. With his soulsense, Jieyuan noticed the spirit-shadow of the rose shift, as Meiyao left her imprint on it.

She then went through the remaining flowers, repeating the process.

“The next step is essencification,” Meiyao said. “Refining the ingredients into chromal essence.”

The plants all rose into the air at the same time, moved by Meiyao’s soulforce, until they were hovering between them at eye-level. Given their weight, Jieyuan reckoned it didn’t take much concentration to move them around.

One of the plants—that black rose from before—floated closer to her, and she laid a finger on it. “This is where the essencification comes in. It’s not a chanting ritual, like the heavenly ones we use to cultivate, but a channeling ritual. You shouldn’t be a stranger to them. Every time you channel chroma into an artifact, you’re actually performing a very rudimentary channeling ritual.”

Jieyuan hadn’t known that, but he wasn’t too surprised. Every aspect of cultivation seemed to come down to rituals, one way or another.

While Meiyao spoke, Jieyuan caught, with his soulsense, the trail of chroma leaving Meiyao’s finger and disappearing into the flower.

“This ritual is a bit more complicated than that, of course,” Meiyao said, even as she kept pumping chroma into the rose. “Usually, there’s some calculation involved here. Every ingredient has its own essencification factor—which you’d find after a lot of trial and error—and based on that, you also have to take into account its mass and age to calculate the exact channeling rate.”

The rose began to change. Its surface rippled, and then it started losing its shape. The edges rounded, merged together, fading away, as it turned more and more indistinct, like it was being reduced to pure color. About a minute later the rose had lost all shape, and what was left was an indistinct, swirling clump of a black liquid streaked green.

“There we go. Chromal essence.” Meiyao smirked at him. “Again, my bloodright gives me an advantage here.

Jieyuan wondered how much more impressed he’d be if he knew more about refining. All the chromal crafts were said to be the kind of thing that demanded lifelong effort to get anywhere with. The kind of thing you needed to dedicate several years to just to get your foot in.

Meiyao could’ve only really started delving into refining after she became a cultivator, and she hadn’t been one for a whole year yet. Not to mention that most of her time would’ve been spent training and cultivating, leaving very little space to pursue the crafts.

With a little wave of her hand, the amorphous, liquid clump floated off to the side, and another of the flowers floated closer. Meiyao repeated the same process on it, and then on all the other ones, until they were left with seven shimmering swirls of goo, each one its own rainbow of blurring colors.

“Now, for the third step,” Meiyao said. “Amalgamation.”

The clumps of chromal essence then started to move, floating closer and closer, until they met each other at the center and started to merge, until they were one big cluster—about the size of his fist—shifting through just about every hue imaginable.

Meiyao brought it closer to her again, and touched it with her finger.

“The amalgamation ritual is much like the essencification one. For each amalgam you’ll have your own channeling rate, calculated from the coefficients of each of the ingredients used and their quantities. But…” And she raised her eyebrows at him.

“Let me guess,” Jieyuan said in his best dry voice, “your bloodright helps with that?”

She smirked, then said, “Something else you have to take into account is incompatibility. This isn’t an amalgam, yet, but just a mixture of essences. If any of the essences are incompatible with each other, the ritual will fail. But if it works, they’ll be amalgamated into what we call a raw amalgam. The chromal ink used in inscribing is also a raw amalgam.”

She started channeling chroma into it, and the change was immediate. It started to swirl faster, its colors shifting rapidly. Meiyao kept it up for a few moments before she drew her hand back.

Physically, the liquid clump didn’t look any different from before she’d done the ritual, but to his soulsense it’d changed. Before he’d been able to pick apart all the different spirit-shadows of the essences comprising it, but now what he sensed was one, whole thing.

“And there you have it,” Meiyao said. “A raw amalgam. All that’s left is congealing, where it’s turned into a refined amalgam, into either a concoction or a construct. But first…”

The amalgam started to separate into much smaller, little spheres, each roughly thrice the size of a thumbnail.

“Are those…” Jieyuan frowned. “Those are some pretty big pills.”

“Just watch,” Meiyao said.

She brought one of the spheres closer, touched it.

“Congealment is the hardest step, where refiners usually fail. During the congealment ritual, you have to get the channeling rate right, like with the other three—but there’s another component to it. Intent.”

She tapped the sphere, glancing at him. “You have to perfectly visualize the refined amalgam in your mind’s eye and know exactly what properties it should have. These must match its possible properties, too.”

She closed her hand around it and closed her eyes. “Thankfully, it’s much easier in the case of pills than it’d be with, say, a weapon. Constructers often have to study how weapons are produced the mundane way to get it right. Concocting is far more straightforward, however, so my bloodright mostly covers it. But I still need to be more careful about it.”

Meiyao’s brows furrowed, her expression becoming one of intense concentration. Jieyuan stayed quiet, just watching, doing nothing to disturb her. She stayed that way for several minutes. Just as sweat began to build up on her forehead, though, her face relaxed a bit, and Jieyuan sensed the flow of chroma pooling inside her closed hand.

Another minute passed before Meiyao opened her hand. What she held out for him to see wasn’t a liquid mass held together by her soulforce anymore, but a solid, hard pill. It was only color, too. A dark shade of yellow.

It was also much smaller than the original amalgam, smaller than a thumbnail. About the right size for a pill.

“It is smaller. Is it denser?” he guessed.

“No,” Meiyao said. “The congealment sacrifices not just your chroma, but also most of the original amalgam. More than half of it. Refining is very costly.”

She tossed the pill to him, and he held it up pinched between his fingers, eying it. He also felt it with his soulsense, but the impression he got from it was too general. “Is this it, then?

“That’s it. An antidote pill,” Meiyao said, as she pulled another of the amalgam spheres into her grasp. This time, the flow of chroma started immediately, and Meiyao’s expression barely changed. “There shouldn’t be many Redsoul toxins and poisons it can’t cure.”

“That might come in handy,” Jieyuan said. They hadn’t come across any poisons yet, but you never know, with the Dome. “Though, of course, I’m also hoping it won’t be necessary, to begin with.”

“Agreed,” Meiyao said. And just as she finished speaking, she opened her hand again, revealing another finished pill.

She quickly went through the remaining ones—seven in total. She handed them all to him.

“We’ll distribute them later,” she said, looking briefly Daojue’s way. “I’ll get started with the other ones. You can rest up, if you want. I’ll be taking first watch.”

“I think I’ll keep you company a little while longer, if you don’t mind.”

It’d have been smarter to take Meiyao up on her offer and beg off, but he could spare at least some minutes. Meiyao was in a good mood, and he didn’t want to let it go to waste.

“Oh.” Meiyao gave him a wide smile. “Sure. There’s still a lot I haven’t told you, so maybe…?”

“I’d love to hear it,” Jieyuan said.

He wasn’t all that interested in refining. Or in any of the chromal crafts, really. Unlike Meiyao it’d probably take him decades to get anywhere with them, and he had other priorities. But Meiyao clearly knew a lot, and he might end up learning something with more immediate applications.

“You know, Amyas, you don’t have to come up with excuses for spending time with a girl, not in your own head.”

That was, of course, Maeva.

Shut up, Jieyuan sent.

She giggled, the sound of it coming like she was just to his side. “Oh, you’re adorable. You were much the same, back on Earth. Remember that time you fell for that girl who was into chemistry, so you convinced yourself becoming a chemist might—”

Maeva, Jieyuan thought at her, doing his best to keep his face under control. I will stop the Command. Actually, I should do it anyway, no need to waste—

“No!” Maeva said, immediately. “This is interesting. Refining’s like a science. Let me stay. Please?”

Little surprise there. If Maeva was one thing, it was curious about—well, everything, but science most of all. She was the kind of person who’d learn something just for the sake of learning. In that, they couldn’t have been any more different. Then behave.

There was a shimmer in the corner of his vision, and he stole a quick glance to see Maeva appear like she was stepping out from behind him. She primly ruffled her lab coat, and then sat down beside him, shooting him a brief, sunny smile as she did before focusing on Meiyao.

Meiyao didn’t see or hear any of it, of course, and went over the remaining flowers, resuming her explanations. This time she talked about compatibilities, how different properties with each other, even the calculations she didn’t need to do.

“One trick to tell whether two plants are compatible,” she said, holding up two flowers, “is through their essencification factors. If they’re too different, they’re probably incompatible. There are exceptions, however. But there are tricks to tell those too. You see…”

At one point Meiyao had started taking breaks from the refining process itself to explain some particular thing or another, just as she was doing now.

Jieyuan nodded along, and not just for show. Maeva had been right, and the only real reason he was listening was because it was Meiyao speaking.

But as it went on, he found himself getting interested in refining too, despite himself. He recalled how Maeva would babble on to him—to Amyas—about physics stuff. Although he hadn’t cared for the subject, the way his sister was so passionate about it would get him hooked, at least while their talks lasted.

But with Meiyao it went further. Though Maeva had been a great many things, she’d never been all that good at teaching. Pretty much everything concerning science had come too intuitively to her for her to explain it properly to a normal person like him.

With Meiyao, it should’ve been the same, but one thing that was becoming clear was that though her bloodskills let her skip most of the process, she didn’t just coast on her talent alone. She was very well read on the theory. Not just that, she was a surprisingly good at explaining things.

“I wasn’t that bad,” Maeva said.

He didn’t glance at her, but he could hear the pout in her voice. Maeva, you tried to give me a lecture on subatomic physics when I was in third-grade, that quantum chromodynamics thing you got your first doctorate in. I was still wrapping my head around gravity, and you wanted me to understand fundamental particle interactions.

“If you’d read all the books I gave you on quantum physics—”

Maeva, I was nine. And yes—I know you were already reading that kind of stuff at that age, but you know very well that doesn’t count. Now be quiet.

Maeva did quiet down, though not before giving him a look of mock outrage.

After a while, Meiyao finished up e with the first three batches of pills—one of each type—and started producing more flowers from her pouch to make some more. But Jieyuan decided he’d indulged himself enough, and excused himself.

As he closed his eyes, though, and sent his focus inward, he didn’t go to rest quite yet. He wasn’t all that tired. Meiyao had called their stop earlier today, and at fourth-sign it took more than walking to get him tired anyway. More than that, what he was about to do would tire him out, so better get it over with first.

He whispered the Command, and when he opened his eyes again, he was back in the Radiant Gold Palace—in that arena where tournament was held.

He was standing in the middle of the center stage, and Maeva was right in front of him. For once she wasn’t wearing her sundress and lab coat, but rather cultivator’s robes and armor. Granted, white and yellow robes.

“All right, Amyas,” Maeva said. “What do you want to do?”

Even after a week of this, the sight of Maeva—bookish, scrawny Maeva, who in life probably had never so much as thrown a punch—dressed like a martial artist was still enough to pull some chuckles out of him.

This more than anything really drove home how she wasn’t the real Maeva, too. She’d have never done something like this.

“Footwork.”

“Got it,” Maeva said, crossing her arms. The space in front of them began to warp, then, as a fissure appeared in the center of the stage. It expanded quickly, the other half of the stage shooting away from them—and the entire room expanding as it did—until it stopped several hundred yards away.

Maeva then snapped her fingers, and a familiar, root-like bridge appeared right in front of them, connecting the two halves. And beneath it, over the stretch of empty space, a roaring river.

But it wasn’t over yet. The next moment, the bridge began to twist into itself as its surfaced rolled with chaotic motions, and from the river sprouted green, tentacle-like reeds that rose into the air.

Maeva stepped closer to the bridge, dropped to a lower stance, glanced back at him, shot him a smile. “Ready when you are.”