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The first floor of the building was not what I expected of a workshop building. It resembled a standard shop floor with counters filled with various merchandise on display. As soon as I entered, an attendant approached me.

“How may I help you today, sir?”

I held up my silver Pavilion badge. “I’m here to register.”

“Of course, sir. This way please.”

She began leading me to the right, around the edge of the shop floor.

“What are you registering as?” she asked.

“Grandmaster Alchemist.”

“With a silver badge? So, you want to register an improvement as well?” she asked in a quieter voice.

“Yes,” I nodded.

She remained quiet until we approached a corner away from other visitors. “Do you only want to register your credentials, or would you like to purchase our promotional package?”

“Promotional package?”

She smiled as she explained. “As you are new to the city, and a new Grandmaster Alchemist, we are willing to help promote your skills to encourage more people to seek your services. As you know, special orders are far more profitable and are vital for earning high levels of contribution within the Pavilion. We wish to assist our members in being selected for such tasks as much as possible.”

I thought about it as we continued walking around the edge of the store. “What does this involve?”

“It is better if you don’t know for now as it will improve the effectiveness of our promotion. I must warn you that this may put you at odds with a few locals of limited power and ability, but I can assure you that this is all to improve our results and give you a satisfactory experience.”

I didn’t like the idea of offending anyone in an unfamiliar location, and this sounded like this was guaranteed to do just that, but if it was a standard service of the Pavilion, I might as well give it a try. This was a good life for trying such things.

“Alright,” I said. “I’ll take the promotional package.”

“Excellent. This way, sir.”

She led me to a counter in the middle of the floor that was visible from nearly everywhere in the Pavilion.

“A new Master Alchemist wishes to register,” my guide said to the woman at the counter.

“Name?” asked the attendant at the desk with a brusque demeanor.

“Su Fang, but I am here to register as a Grandmaster Alchemist,” I corrected.

The attendant’s eyes narrowed.

“Badge,” she commanded.

I showed her my silver Pavilion badge, and she snorted. She tore the badge from my hand and gave it a close inspection to check if it was real. “Fine. I will register you as a Master Alchemist.”

I glanced at the attendant who had been guiding me. She looked scared. “I am here to both register for work in the city and have my qualifications upgraded to Grandmaster,” I said to the woman at the counter.

“A yellow-haired brat who doesn’t know how high the sky is,” she spat.

The commotion caused by the attendant drew the attention of many customers. Several well-dressed older men walked over when they witnessed the scene.

“Sister Rui, what’s got you so upset today?” asked one of the men.

“Aiya, this brat is a frog in a well from some backwater that isn’t even authorized to rate Master Alchemists. Look, he\'s only got a silver badge with no stars! He’s trying to claim he’s a Grandmaster Alchemist when I can still smell his mother’s milk on him.”

“Sister Rui, no need to get so worked up over a brat. Just send him away,” said one of the other men before turning toward the entrance. “Guards! Come, take this trash away. When did the Pavilion allow such filth inside?”

I again looked at the attendant who had guided me here, but she maintained a nervous posture. I sighed heavily and turned to the counter. “Sister Rui, I am—”

“How dare you say her name,” shouted a man who hadn’t spoken yet. “You’re courting death!”

I glanced at him and then back to Rui. “Miss. I am a member of the Pavilion and wish to register as a Grandmaster Alchemist. Please handle the procedures.”

“Boy,” shouted one of the men, “you’re no Grandmaster. I bet you’re not even an alchemist.”

“If you’re an alchemist, I’ll run ten laps around the Pavilion naked!” added another.

“Miss,” I said to Sister Rui, “please go ahead and register me.”

“You will need to be tested,” she sneered. She took out several ingredients from behind the desk and threw them at me. “Make two pills with those and you will be registered, Grandmaster.”

I looked at my guide. “Where are the workshops?”

“This… this way, sir.”

As we walked away, I heard one of the men laughing. “A whelp who won’t cry until he’s seen the coffin! I can’t wait to see what excuse he comes up with for destroying those herbs.”

After we disappeared into the stairwell, my guide turned to me. “Great job! You were excellent out there.”

“Is this really a good idea?” I asked, shaking my head.

“Don’t worry about it. Those guys are just creeps who hang around bothering us. They’re sent here by their clans to scout for new talents in the city. If you slap their faces, they’ll lean on their connections to try to send someone after you, but that’s what we want. Once their connections hear you’re a Grandmaster Alchemist, they won’t bother you over that lot out there. Instead, they will be looking for you for pills.”

“Is it so easy to manipulate them?” I asked, concerned.

“It works great, but we can only do it about once a year or people won’t fall for it,” the girl explained. “A lot of those guys have already left to gather a crowd to watch your inevitable failure, so you should have a good audience when you hand in the pills. Now, it’s just on you. How good of an idea this is all depends on how good of an alchemist you are.”

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I looked at the ingredients Rui had thrown at me. I didn’t recognize most of them, which was a surprise. “What pills am I supposed to make?”

“That’s on you to figure out. This is the standard test for a gold badge. We give you two sets of herbs mixed together, and you have to know or figure out what they make.” She paused for a second before continuing. “I’m not sure about those herbs myself, though. They were chosen by a senior alchemist who showed up last week, so your test might be more difficult than usual.”

I was given a workshop on the fourth floor which was reserved for Grandmasters.

Once inside, I began examining the herbs. I didn’t know any pill recipes that called for any combination of them, so I would have to develop two new pills from scratch. The only saving grace was that I knew they could be divided into exactly two sets of ingredients.

I only recognized three of the herbs. While I didn’t know a recipe that combined them, I did know they were water, wood, and earth herbs with healing properties. Examining the rest, I found fire and metal herbs that also had medicinal energy that seemed to have healing properties, so I grouped these five and set them to the side.

The medicinal energy in the remaining herbs was completely new to me, but there were four of one type and three of the other, so I separated them into two more piles.

In the end, I was left with a single stalk of what looked to be nothing more than a large green onion. Its medicinal energy was strange, and it didn’t seem to fit with any of the existing three piles, so I placed it off to the side.

With no better plan in mind, I began making a pill using the herbs in the ‘healing’ pile. There were five herbs, forming a cycle of the five basic elements. I wasn’t sure what kind of pill I was making, so I wasn’t completely confident about where to start. However, since it was a healing pill, wood was likely supposed to be the final element, so I started with the fire herb.

I used a standard enhancement technique to improve its quality with my wood qi, then slowly combined each herb in sequence. I decided not to push these pills to Perfect quality, but other than that, I made the highest quality I was capable of. There were no surprises in the concoction process, and a small pill dropped to the bottom of my cauldron when everything was complete.

I had no idea what I had made, so I couldn’t judge its efficacy, but it was a High-Purity pill, whatever it was, so I put it in a jade bottle and began work on the other set of ingredients.

These were strange. I had never seen the type of medicinal energy in them before, but I had seen qi that was similar. The illusionist at the Dragon Gate Festival used two types of qi which I had learned were dark and light qi. The energy in these herbs was similar enough that I had to assume they contained dark and light medicinal energy.

In my travels with Mei, I had learned a little more about working with the secondary elements. They didn’t form a chain. Instead, there were two pairs, dark with light and wind with lightning. Dark qi could either negate or bolster light qi based on how it was used. I needed to combine these ingredients in such a way as to bolster the energy instead of negating it.

Where to start, though?

There was one extra dark herb, which seemed to be a clue. There was likely an optimal sequence, but I didn’t know how to determine such a thing, so I chose what looked like the best place to start and began concocting.

I cleaned the medicinal energy for one dark and one light herb and began looking at how to mix them. I didn’t have appropriate affinities, which complicated matters further, but even if I did, I wasn’t sure how to mix them in a constructive way instead of a destructive way.

The first pill had a basic five-element sequence. I didn’t know the pill, but I knew the sequence and the goal. The ingredients provided me with clues for how to work with them. For the second pill, the number of ingredients told me I needed to end with a dark-based pill. Did the ingredients also tell me how to mix them?

I looked at the strange green onion and had an idea.

I cleansed its energy and siphoned a small portion away, injecting it into the dark medicinal energy. When I did, the dark energy seemed compelled to mix with the light energy.

I then prepared a new dark herb, injected a portion of the onion’s energy into the previously mixed set, and pushed it to mix with the new dark energy. I continued this process, injecting onion power into the mixed energy and switching between light and dark herbs until I ran out of ingredients. At that moment, I pushed with my willpower and compressed the energies.

A pill formed and dropped to the bottom of the cauldron. I didn’t know what I made, or if it was even a proper pill, but I made something at least.

With two pills in hand, I walked out of the workshop where my guide was waiting for me.

“How did you do?” she asked.

“I have no idea.”

“If you don’t know it’s bad, then it should be pretty good,” said the girl. “By the way, when we get down there, make sure to demand a formal appraisal by a certified alchemist.”

The shop floor was packed when I walked out of the stairwell.

“That’s him!” someone shouted. “That’s the fool who doesn’t know the difference between heaven and earth!”

The people at the center of the gathering laughed at this remark, but I noticed that very few found it funny. Instead, most of the people here were giving me an appraising look.

They knew what was going on, I realized, and they were here to see the quality of the Pavilion’s new alchemist. This suddenly made me wonder… If the Pavilion only put on this kind of show once a year, why did this guide offer it to me? Was it that so few people would be willing to go through this? That didn’t seem right. I looked at my charming young guide out of the corner of my eye. At that moment, she seemed all too similar to Mei.

“Open up, open up,” shouted a man in the center, “Let the fool through. I want to hear his excuses!”

People in the crowd instantly made way for me. This pleased the man who had shouted immensely, but looking at those who moved, I couldn’t help but feel the quick movement was in deference to me, not the shouter.

“Alright, hand it over,” mocked Rui from behind her counter. “Or what, were you not even able to make a single pill?”

“I want a formal appraisal from a qualified alchemist,” I said with dignity.

She sneered at me. “Oh, think you can sneak out of here before we can check your results? No such luck. Alchemist Li,” she said, turning to the side and giving a deep bow of respect. “Would you please assist us in our appraisal?”

When she spoke these words, the façade of mockery vanished as if it never existed. The pompous young men around me didn’t seem to notice, but I saw a look of fear and agitation flash across her face. She was playing her part in the bit, but this alchemist wasn’t someone she wanted to offend by doing so.

An ancient man with gray hair and a long beard dressed in simple light blue robes stepped out of the crowd. “Young man, please allow me to examine your pills.”

Alchemist Li was impeccably polite without the slightest hint of mockery in his tone. He understood the situation and was willing to let it play out, but he was not willing to take part in it. This didn’t make any difference for the marks in the crowd. They acted as if Li had been mocking me all the same.

“Alchemist Li,” I said with a deep bow before handing him my pills, “please offer me your guidance.”

He opened the first bottle and examined it carefully with a slight frown. I heard a snort of amusement from him when he placed it back in the bottle. “A wood-aligned High-Purity Phoenix Restoration Pill. A rare sight. The ability to create such a thing shows your skills are promising, but your lack of knowledge hurt you. The pill technically has 117% efficacy, which is quite amazing, but being wood-aligned, it will still be far less effective than a normal Phoenix Restoration Pill. You should have made it fire-aligned.”

I nodded at his judgment. I didn’t know if the Twin Mountains Sect had intentionally limited my exposure to Rank 3 herbs, but since I also hadn’t seen these while working under the Pavilion, my lack of knowledge was likely simply due to the poverty of the Wastes.

Alchemist Li proceeded to open the second bottle. He took a long time examining it. His face was a mixture of shock and bafflement. This only made the nearby observers burst into laughter.

“You have no idea what this is, do you?” he asked me.

“No, sir. I have never seen these herbs before and was unsure how to use them.”

“This is a Shadowed Soul Pill. It makes one completely undetectable for up to an hour, based on its efficacy. This pill, I’m sorry to say, is wrong. It is indeed a High-Purity Shadowed Soul Pill, but the ingredients were combined in the wrong order, so I can only rate it at 57% efficacy, but the mere fact you were still able to create it without knowing the recipe and not following the proper sequence is worthy of praise.”

The onlookers were confused about his comments. Did I succeed or fail? They weren’t sure. They wanted to mock me, but they had no idea if it was appropriate.

Li stroked his long beard for several moments in thought. “Rui JunPing,” he said turning to the girl at the counter. “Register him as a three-star gold member.”

Rui’s eyes widened in true shock that went beyond the act she had been performing. “Yes, sir. Right away.”

Li looked at me with a grandfatherly smile. “You need to study more. You have great potential, but you need a firmer foundation to stand upon. A three-star gold badge is the highest honor we bestow on Grandmaster Alchemists, and it should open many doors for you to experience the richness of the Grandmaster level before you are ready to advance further.”

I gave Alchemist Li a deep bow. “Thank you, elder, for your advice. I will do my best to follow it.”

I didn’t pay any more attention to the rubes surrounding me. They had done their part to stir up publicity, and I wouldn’t hold anything they said against them.

“What do I do now?” I asked Rui.

“Grandmaster, sir,” she stammered. The three-star rating seemed to truly shock her. “I will register you immediately and a new badge will be provided. When you are ready, please visit the Alchemy Office and provide them with samples of your work. They will contact you with any special requests we receive.”

“Thank you,” I said politely. I turned away and walked out of the Pavilion, ready to meet back up with Mei. I expected someone to try and stop me for a private conversation, but everyone darted out of my path.