After leaving the restaurant, Fairy Xu walked slowly through the streets replaying the old man’s words in her mind. Originally, she only wanted to convince him to share how he cured the boy. The medicine needed for such a transformation was beyond anything she understood, but their meeting went in a completely different direction and she was unable to reconcile her beliefs with what he said.
The old man was adamant that alchemy was a plague on the world, a way for people to cheat resources from others and lord over the masses. At one point, he even claimed alchemy was responsible for keeping people ignorant of how the world worked. However, to her, the old man’s arguments sounded more like a disagreement of methods than a complete rebuttal.
Alchemists used natural ingredients from the world and combined them to make elixirs, solutions, pills, and a wide variety of items that were useful to humans. They used techniques such as boiling, burning, and melting to mix materials and relied on properties and attributes to create new products. These were the fundamentals taught to her and every other alchemist in her sect, fundamentals needed when exploring the unknown.
Still, there was always something missing to her and with this line of thought, Fairy Xu asked herself, what is alchemy? Her whole life she followed the teachings of her master and the ancient tomes. Alchemy was a set of rigid techniques tested and verified for millennia that humans used to shape the world they knew. But she wondered if the outcome is the same, does the technique matter?
The elders in the Warring Crane Sect followed the same alchemic techniques passed down for generations; the records of debates only ever noted minor adjustments or improvements to a specific process. It was a time-honored tradition, but she could not help but to think perhaps her thinking was too narrow-minded. It was possible that the narrow road she walked down with other alchemists was the reason why so few grandmasters existed.
She again asked herself, what is alchemy? If it was a set of techniques then what she knew was true alchemy, but when she considered the goal, the steps to achieve it were not important. Any system that accomplished the goal would be an alchemic technique. New patterns, methods, tools, and steps. It was completely opposite of everything she was taught, but the more she thought about it the more correct it seemed.
The ancient manual the old man passed to her was older than any tome in the Warring Crane Sect and the first page alone held insights into the true meaning of alchemy she had never thought of. Even if the experiments failed, such a different way of viewing the world excited her unlike any of the records she had read deep in the sect library.
There was no doubt in her mind that a manual like this would either be burned as heresy or guarded as a treasure in the deepest recesses of a sect. For the old man to give such a priceless record to her as if it were worthless, it only made him more mysterious to her.
She did not believe he was a fool. During their argument he countered each of her points while she could not argue against any of his, this would not be possible if he did not have experience with alchemy. However, even if he did not understand the contents of the manual, anyone would know it was valuable just from its age. In the end, she left the meeting with more questions about his identity than she had before.
He handed out priceless treasures as if they were stones from the street and he was not afraid of going against her sect even after Wang Zi pressured him. She also questioned whether the boy was his grandson, not that it mattered to her. When they first met the boy was crippled, there was no denying that. He had no cultivation at the auction, but today she could sense he was stronger than she was despite being much younger. This was impossible to achieve in less than a year.
When putting everything together, she could only surmise that the old man was either a very powerful rogue cultivator or the leader of a powerful sect or clan she did not know of. In the end, she decided his identity was irrelevant. His manual gave her a lot to think about and she wanted to test the first page right away.
Although there were symbols in the manual she did not recognize, she guessed they formed a language used to describe the different array diagrams on the side of the page. Four circles with intricate branches within, each slightly more complicated than the last. She had seen arrays before, but these were far more complicated than the defense arrays at the sect. There was also a small list of simple ingredients that were rather common and directions in their use.
After asking a few locals for information, she arrived at a large alchemic shop that sold a variety of herbs and supplies needed to make the silver solutions and carry out the experiments listed in the manual. None of the ingredients were rare and after spending 53 small spirit stones, she had enough materials to attempt the process on the first page dozens of times.
She wanted nothing more than to hurry back to her room and bury her head into research; however, she had to return to the arena to meet with Huang Yun. His guards did not say anything about her meeting with the old man, nor did they question her purchases, which she should have felt happy about, but their silence left her feeling uneasy.
Huang Yun never questioned her about her meeting, but his guards would surely tell him the old man prevented them from entering the room with her. She was able to gain a lot from the meeting privately with the old man, but now she would need to make an excuse that did not bring additional attention to the meeting.
She also needed to rethink her plan. The Warring Crane Sect had a grandmaster alchemist in its past, and the alchemy elders spent hundreds of years studying his tomes, but the techniques they used were not radically different from the ones she knew and saw other sects use. They still relied on a variety of flames and cauldrons.
Her goal was to step beyond a grandmaster alchemist and the manual might be exactly what she was looking for, but her situation was complicated. If she joined a sect she would be relatively safe and have a place to learn, but it came at the cost of freedom. She would need to keep the manual hidden at all costs and practicing from it would be extremely difficult.
Still, she could not wander the world free of influence due to the number of resources alchemists required. She understood her view of the world was limited, but she could not imagine there being very many successful free alchemists. Struggling between her choices, she decided for the time being she would continue with her current plan.
She would contact a sect elder and remove herself from the current Huang Clan issue she found herself in. If that did not work, then she would find the old man. However, he made it clear to her that he would not be her savior; she would need to escape on her own.
Placing the items into her storage ring and exiting the shop, she entered the busy streets followed by her guards and hastened her way back to the Arena. She now had two paths ahead of her, one led to a grandmaster alchemist, the other led to an unknown.
Huang Yun blocked both paths, but she never considered him an overly difficult obstacle. She had a solution for one of the paths, now she just needed a way to clear the other. After tonight, she would have a better idea of where she wanted to go. If she chose the path of the sect, then she only needed to continue as she was, but if she chose different, things would become tricky.
There were no guarantees on the path of the manual. Ancient techniques usually disappeared because better methods came along, not because they were lost. She only knew that the words in the manual felt right to her, forcing her to make a choice. Alchemists were not free from the struggles of the Jianghu. She understood if she followed the path of the manual, her hands would become dirty keeping its secrets. There was only one question, was it worth it?
