Chapter 29：The First Step (2/2)

By now it was getting harder to cultivate more than 2 hours each night. After turning into Yang Qi, his Qi amount had increased by quite a bit and didn't require as much Qi to do the same task.

He stood up and walked out. After working as an aid for the last few days, he had got to learn about 10 or so pill recipes. Some increased your qi, some healed you, some helped make breakthroughs easier.

One pill was even as simple as making you smell good. Alex was shocked that people would spend their hard-earned contribution points on such menial pills.

By now, he had earned about 450 or so contribution points. So, he decided to finally make a pill for himself. It was nighttime, so the outer sect disciples were finally allowed to learn alchemy.

The pill he had decided upon was the [Qi Improvement Pill]. He had read the recipe from one of the inner sect disciples and found out that the ingredients were very easy to come by and didn't cost a lot.

He bought 7 sets of the ingredients, and it had cost him 420 points.

He reached the Alchemy Hall and looked at the outer sect disciples grouped up to work as an aid. For some reason, he felt he didn't need aid, and simply walked in.

He had about 20 points remaining, so he could only use the rooms for 4 hours at best. The remaining 10 points he had spent on ceramic bottles to keep the pill.

He walked into a room and closed the door. He was nervous. He walked up to the cauldron and sat down cross-legged beside it.

He opened his inventory and put the panel to the side. This was the reason he thought he didn't need aid. He could simply order the ingredients in the inventory and pull them out one by one as needed.

His concentration was now divided into 3 parts. While the inventory didn't need too much attention, the fire and the ingredients in the cauldron certainly did.

He had to now drop the fire to 800 Celsius, put the second ingredient, move it around for 4 seconds, and then bring the fire up to 1500 Celsius.

He tried to do just that. He put his Qi into the fire to drop the temperature. But due to his constant Flame Mastery practice, he was too good at dropping temperatures and ended up reducing the temperature too fast.

He took out the second ingredient, and put that into the cauldron. But, for a split second while he was taking out the second ingredient, he forgot to move the first ingredient.

It was a very small mistake, but it was a mistake nonetheless. Similar things kept happening during the pill-making process. Either there would be a lapse in attention towards some ingredients, or he would change the fire too suddenly, or too slowly.

By the time he put in the final ingredient, he knew he had made too many mistakes. After the final ingredient turned into powder, he used his Qi to slowly form it into a spherical shape and condensed that into a pill.

After he finally succeeded in making it into a pill, he pulled it out of the cauldron. When he saw the pill, he sighed. It read,

[Qi Improvement Pill: 6%]

His first attempt at alchemy had ended in a failure.