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I nodded.

Expecting this, and having been tested before, I stepped forward and put my hand on the orb calmly. Typically, when I began pushing my qi into the orb, it would light up with a dark red flame that slowly got brighter. This time, that didn’t happen. A chaotic mix of lines and colors was all I could see.

“That’s from your multiple affinities,” explained Deacon Ma. “The orb can only show a single affinity. If you try to use it with multiple affinities, they will cause interference and show you nothing. Your fire affinity should be above the others, though, so if you focus on your fire affinity and give it a mental push, we should see a clear picture.”

I did so. After exerting more will, a flame finally appeared. It was not the same red color as usual though. Instead, it was a brighter, more vibrant shade of red.

“Mid eight-star fire affinity,” said Ma, “is that all?”

At his words, I pushed with all my strength. The flame grew once, then, after another pause, grew a second time. This should be peak eight-star. I pushed harder. The flame began to shrink and change. It became a small orange fire in the center of the orb. After a final push, I was able to increase it in size once, but at that point, I knew I had reached my limit.

“Mid seven-star?” said Deacon Ma, giving me a strange look. “I’ll report this to the elder. Go back and cultivate. The outer sect exam is in four months. You need to raise your cultivation to Martial Master, but don’t advance any further.”

“Yes, Deacon Ma,” I said confidently.

Before upgrading my affinities, trying to form threads of fire qi into perfect meridians was a chore. The qi constantly fought against my efforts to shape it. Trying to get smooth even ribbons of qi was nearly a nonstarter. Taking those ribbons and weaving them together without ruining them had been a nightmare.

In the time I practiced after raising my affinity to peak eight-star, everything was much smoother. The qi was willing to go where I wanted it to go and be shaped how I wanted it to be shaped. At that point, I could, with effort, form a perfect meridian. If not for the planned baptism, I may have advanced at that time.

Now, with a mid seven-star affinity, forming practice meridians was simple. It still took a little time to ensure everything was perfectly smooth and uniform, but the qi felt like it would do anything I wished. It was almost like it wanted to weave itself into meridians on its own.

After a few days of practice, I began forming my first true meridian. Having practiced forming the correct structure for years, I was confident in my ability to create a perfect meridian, so the only important variable I had to worry about was its position. The meridian had to be properly aligned with the natural flow of qi inside my body. Here, too, a high affinity showed its worth. As I started building my first meridian, it seemed to snap into place. It felt like I couldn’t build it anywhere else even if I wanted to.

Even though everything was happening smoothly, I had to maintain perfect focus. I had to perfectly weave tiny qi threads into a complex tube that was over half a meter long. Doing too much in one sitting meant my concentration could slip and small flaws would enter into the weave.

However, if I wanted to take a break, I would have to suture the weave in such a way that it wouldn’t catastrophically unravel. Then, after the break, I would need to undo the suture and fix any imperfection the pause may have caused.

Working in this manner, I finished my first meridian and advanced to Half-Step Martial Master after two weeks. This was a stressful period, but I was confident in the quality of the meridian I had constructed.

The more meridians in my body, the longer each new one would take to create. Based on past experience, I estimated my second meridian would take a month and a half. That gave me two extra months of downtime.

I could have started on my second meridian immediately, but I needed a rest. Two straight weeks of focused concentration had left me mentally exhausted. So, I didn’t charge forward immediately. However, I also didn’t want to feel rushed to complete it before the deadline, so after a week of rest I began again.

Creating my second meridian, with it also being located in my chest, was significantly more difficult. The first meridian seemed to want to pull this one out of position. Forming the second meridian was like a constant battle against gravity, where if I stopped supporting it for even a moment, it would collapse.

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The difficulties I faced were far greater than I had anticipated. When I had made weak meridians with a Mid-Yellow technique, the pull from them was nowhere near as strong. Because of this, my estimate ended up being far from accurate. It took nearly three months of hard work before the last thread snapped into place.

Once it did though, it meant I was successful. I had returned to Martial Master 1.

I circulated my qi with all the power my Peak-Yellow Rank 1 technique could muster. This time, my meridians didn’t even tremble. They were built to handle this level of qi.

I had cut it a lot closer than I had wanted, but I was ready for the outer sect disciple competition.

Before the preliminaries, Deacon Ma told me which testing site to go to. I didn’t worry about the details and just followed his instructions.

Once there, we were given a set of herbs and sent off to concoct them. As usual, we were not directly observed during our work in the preliminaries. Before, I had thought a large part of this was the sect putting their trust in us, or maybe it had to do with observers watching us in secret. Now, I was pretty sure that there really was no one watching. Not because they trusted us but because this test didn’t matter. Most of the victors would have been pre-selected. If someone did cheat and turn in a pill concocted by someone else, the judges simply didn’t care.

We only needed to make a Rank 1 pill, so I could have finished concocting it in a few minutes, but I forced myself to slow down. Turning it in too early would be bad. I waited until three hours passed before beginning my work.

Again here, I could have made a Perfect pill, but that wasn’t the goal. I focused on making the pill good, but not too good. It was a delicate balance, but I had practiced controlling my output enough to roughly predict the final results.

When I looked at the herbs, I was a bit surprised. One of them was completely new to me. I hadn’t encountered it in Rudy’s workshop. Looking at it, I could tell it would add some kind of healing effect to the pill. The herbs contained a strong red medicinal energy, so this seemed to be some sort of fire qi healing pill. However, without being more familiar with the herbs, it was difficult for me to tell exactly what it was for.

Even though I had never seen one of the herbs before, it was only a Rank 1 pill, so concocting it was still simple. First, I burned away nearly all of the pill toxins. Then, I thought about how strong to make the pill. I began purposefully damaging the medicinal power. Since this pill was new to me, it was hard to estimate the exact results, but I could roughly guess what the results would be based on my experience.

When I judged the medicinal energy to be in an acceptable condition, I condensed it into a pill. After it solidified, I inspected it.

Rank 1 Fire Qi Expulsion Pill, 57% medicinal efficacy.

The name didn’t tell me everything, but I was confident this was some type of healing pill, so that gave me a big clue. My guess was that it was to help people who had been injured by fire qi. I had accidentally burned myself before, so I knew that qi could get stuck in wounds. That qi needed to be expelled before the wound could properly heal.

It was a good pill to remember, so I noted the recipe down in my journal for the future.

After that, I turned in my pill and went home to await the results.

There were no surprises this time. I was confirmed to be in the finals. I was placed in the top twenty. Not at the front of the pack, but not too far back. I believe this was to make an eventual win more believable, but I couldn’t say if the organizers even cared about such things.

As always, the task of the finals was to create five Superior Qi Gathering Pills. Deacon Ma said that I should aim for a total efficacy between 460 and 480. This was supposed to be good enough that I could be passed through without challenge, but not so high that it would draw undue attention.

At the same time, I had to put on a bit of a show. It would be easy to perfectly trim away all the pill toxins on the surface and then intentionally damage the medicinal energy just enough to drop the efficacy a few points. This was what I had done in the preliminaries. I couldn’t do that here, though. I needed to make everything look natural. The damage to efficacy had to come from proper errors in concocting.

Also, I had to mind my speed. I couldn’t do everything too fast. I had to watch the bright stars of the competition and spend a little more time on everything than they did.

Honestly, it was the greatest challenge I had faced as an alchemist in years. I’ll never know how successful all the ruses were, or if my acting even mattered at all, but I did it. I completed five sub-par pills to the best of my ability. I could only hope working with Elder Mu would be worth all the trouble.

After I completed my work, I waited with the other contestants who had finished earlier. We had to wait a couple more hours before everything was completed. Several of the contestants were extremely slow and methodical in their process. No matter how much I wanted everything to wrap up, I couldn’t fault them for their dedication to the craft.

Knowing the results had nothing to do with the actual products we made, I wasn’t worried about my performance. However, I was still anxious to hear a good result. If the elder’s plan fell through, I might be stuck in the outer sect for at least another year. I needed to move up if I wanted to continue advancing.

“First place, Wen Hao, 493 points.”

People cheered at the announcement. This was considered an incredibly high score. Assuming he didn’t make any Perfect pills, it meant at least three had to be at 99%. It showed this Wen Hao had a lot of potential. I wondered if it was true. I doubted they would completely falsify the top score, but I wouldn’t rule anything out at this point.

Announcements for second, third, and fourth places all followed, but I didn’t hear my name.

“Fifth place, Su Fang, 476 points.”

I smiled. It wasn’t a high enough rank to receive the spirit fire, but I didn’t need that anyway. I wondered if that was part of Elder Mu’s plan. He would have an extra alchemist who could secretly concoct Rank 2 pills for him that no one knew about. It probably was, I decided.

It didn’t matter to me. Let the powerful play their games. I just needed to focus on my personal progression.