After that wearying meeting, Sen decided to indulge in a few hours of actual sleep. When he woke up, he realized something. While he couldn’t reasonably make all the children at the orphanage into cultivators, he could make their lives a great deal easier. He immediately pulled out the largest cauldron in his storage rings and went to work. He started with a dramatically modified version of the cleansing pills Master Feng had fed him all those long years ago. The first change was to make them into elixirs. He’d learned the hard way with Ai that it was much easier to get children to drink elixirs than swallow pills.
The second, more fundamental change was to stretch out how long it took for them to work. There was some benefit for cultivators in enduring a swift purge of toxins and impurities from their bodies. All of that accumulated filth would actually impede qi cycling and interfere with body cultivation. But there were other benefits to that purge that cultivators didn’t think much about. For a mortal, a mortal child in particular, it would improve their health and help to ensure problem-free growth. However, those benefits would come whether the purge took a few hours or a few months.
He actually had to spend a little time thinking about it. The elixir would naturally spread out through their bodies, so he didn’t need to worry about that part. All he really needed to do was segregate parts of the elixir in some kind of shell that would break down over time. Those segregated parts would settle into the children’s bodies, and the cleansing would happen in small stages. They might find it a little uncomfortable, but it wouldn’t be the excruciating experience he went through. Just as importantly, they wouldn’t leak and endless fountain of foul-smelling goop everywhere.
He tried to make it work with medicinal herbs and reagents, but they tended to break down to fast. After the fifth failure, he came to the not so blinding realization that he could just use qi. As long as he made the shells around the elixir weak enough, the vital qi in the children’s bodies would slowly break it down. There was a bit of guesswork involved there. Even mortals varied in the amount of vital qi, the very foundation of life, they had. It was the main reason some mortals lived for eighty or ninety years, while others seemed to wilt and perish after a handful of decades. There were two main challenges.
The first challenge was creating all of the different thicknesses of shells so that the process would happen slowly. The second challenge was ensuring an even distribution of those in every vial. Hi qi control was sufficiently refined that crafting the shells was more tedious than difficult. Sen wondered if he’d have had the patience to endure that tedium as well in years past. In the end, getting the even distribution required way more effort than any other part of the process. He basically had to control all of the shells individually to achieve what he wanted. When he was done, though, he had dozens and dozens of vials ready to go.
The second project was more straightforward. Most of these children had lingering issues from eating what was, in the end, basically trash. Sen and Auntie Caihong had traded theories over the years about why mortals suffered from eating trash rather than other kinds of food. They never came up with a concrete answer, but they’d both seen that it mattered. While Sen couldn’t reverse time and give them years of quality food, he could help shore up some of those lingering problems. He wasn’t sure if what he did next truly qualified as alchemy, but he wound up with dozens more vials.
The elixirs in those vials would help to bolster the mechanisms that processed foods into something the body could use to grow stronger and healthier. While he might not know exactly what they did, he’d examined enough people over the years to know what they were. He’d also spent enough time examining how his own body worked over the years to make some fairly good guesses about their functions. That made creating an elixir to gently improve them a straightforward task.
More importantly, taken together, the elixirs would provide a much better physical foundation for the rest of their lives. It was a start, but it wasn’t sufficient. That would be enough for most of the children, but there were a few who had much more substantial problems. He’d honestly tried not to notice. It had simply been impossible to ignore when he’d checked their dantians and qi channels. One of the boys had terrifyingly fragile bones. Not quite bad enough that he’d break them from basic play, but any serious fall or blow would probably cripple him for life.
One of the girls was fighting a losing battle against half a dozen illnesses that shouldn’t pose a problem for any healthy person. He’d even detecting lingering remnants from healing elixirs or pills in her system. So, it wasn’t willful neglect. Someone had gone out of their way to try to get the girl real help. Sen even felt a bit of sympathy for whichever alchemist they had employed. Clearing the illnesses looked like an easy enough problem to solve on the surface. Well within the abilities of even mortal alchemists, provided they had the right medicinal herbs.
He suspected that had been tried and more than once, only for the illnesses to return. Put in that position, Sen would have been at his wit’s end. What those mortal alchemists likely guessed at, but lacked the tools to resolve, was that there was a deeper problem at work. Something fundamental in the girl’s body wasn’t doing what it was supposed to be doing. His attention had been focused elsewhere at the time, so he’d only made note of the problem. He hadn’t explored it. Something that was true of all the children with more vexing issues.
Unfortunately, it would take even him a little time with each of them to work out the best course of action. He could take each of them aside and help them, but he knew what many of these children were like. Lavishing even that minor bit of attention on a few of them would make them targets. He’d seen it happen in his own childhood. Someone would rouse the sympathies of an adult. Maybe they’d get some food or medicine, only to have those things taken. All too often, they’d get a beating from some of the older, crueler children. The shelter and education granted at the orphanage for a year or two might have buried some of those instincts. Those graves would, however, be exceedingly shallow. It wouldn’t take much for them to claw their way free.
No, he needed to give those children what they needed in a way that singled them out, but not too much. He thought about it for a few minutes before a smile lit his face. These were kids, and nobody loved spectacle more than kids. Sen would offer them an alchemy demonstration. It would just be a very special alchemy demonstration.