Sen looked over the small sea of young faces and felt a little intimidated. Vengeful cultivators, generals, and kings? None of them held any fear for him. Yet, somehow, all these children looking at him with expectant eyes had daunted him. Not a lot. Not enough to make him second-guess himself. Just enough for him to notice. The odd part was that he wasn’t entirely sure why it was happening. He glanced around the courtyard. The mistress of the orphanage was watching him with an almost identical expression of curious expectation. Falling Leaf, however, was sitting on a bench and eating something with an expression of mild boredom.
He supposed that made sense. It wasn’t like this was the first time she’d been around to watch him do alchemy. That vague indifference actually made him feel better. Before anything and everything else, she still saw him as that same boy who had trained so relentlessly in Uncle Kho’s courtyard. It was comforting to know that there were still a few people in the world who remembered him as that boy. It also helped to ground him in the moment. Turning back to face the children who had sat down on the ground, he gave them all a gentle smile. Then, he sat down on the ground facing them.
“Who here knows what alchemy is?” he asked.
There was a long silence before one of the children, an older boy, stood up. Sen glanced at the mistress of the orphanage. She gave him a subtle nod. Apparently, this is a normal thing, thought Sen. He honestly had no idea why the boy would have stand up to answer, but he supposed it didn’t make a difference. Sen nodded at the standing youth, whose expression had become increasingly worried.
“Making medicine?” the boy half said and half asked.
“That’s a good answer,” said Sen, and the boy nearly collapsed back to the ground. “Most alchemists do make medicine, but it’s not the only thing they can make. Alchemy is, ultimately, transformation.”
The children all stared at him with expressions of total bewilderment. Sen swiftly realized his mistake. Transformation was probably not a word that most of these children had ever heard. He lifted his hand and medicinal herbs flowed out of a storage ring. It was a trivial use of qi to have them float into the air, but the children all looked very impressed.
“Transformation is turning one thing, like these herbs, into something else.” He lifted his other hand and elixirs and pills floated up into the air. “Like this medicine. You’ve probably seen transformation before and didn’t even know it. Eggs can become birds. Caterpillars can become butterflies. And children, like you, children can become adults.”
Sen watched as understanding dawned on most of their faces. He feared he might have taken a little bit of wonder from their lives, but he had at least compensated them with a bit of wisdom. At least, he hoped he had. It was a dramatic oversimplification of alchemy, but he wasn’t trying to teach them alchemy. Nor did he imagine that they would care about things like alchemical synergies and elemental attribution. That would truly steal the magic from their eyes. No, it was enough that they understood that most basic principle of alchemy. Anything else, if they truly wished to know, they could learn in time. Standing up, Sen had the elixirs and pills disappear back into his storage ring. The herbs began to swirl around him. It was utterly unnecessary, but it did look impressive.
“Today, I’m going to show you a little alchemy.”
Sen waved his hand and a stone table rose from the stones of the courtyard. The eyes of the children went wide at the sight. There were even a few gasps when he summoned a cauldron. He took a moment to pour a little water into the cauldron. Lifting his hand into the air, he snapped. Four small fireballs ignited in the corners of the courtyard. He made them chase each other around the court, moving faster and faster until he ignited a ring of fire in the air above everyone. With another snap, the ring appeared raced downward, growing smaller and smaller until it appeared to condense into a single flame beneath the cauldron. Sen had to hide his amusement. If he hadn’t had the children’s attention before. He had it now.
“I require assistance with this first elixir,” announced Sen. “We will let the heavens choose!”
It took another trivial effort of will for Sen to create what looked like miniature thunderclouds over the children’s heads. He even created tiny lightning bolts to jump from spot to spot inside the clouds. The lightning intensified until the clouds burst apart. I never thought that this would come in useful, thought Sen. A quick application of water illusion magic made it look like a beam of heavenly light descended on the boy with the weak bones. Sen once again had to suppress his laughter as the boy’s mouth dropped open. The child even went so far as to point at himself, like he thought the heavens had mistaken him for someone more important.
Sen just waved for the boy to come forward. Unlike when he’d been looking at their dantians and qi channels, he’d used all of this buildup to study what was wrong with the most afflicted children. By the time the boy had reached the table, Sen had a pretty good idea of what had gone wrong and how to fix it. His initial thought that it was a disease turned out to be wrong. That was a relief. Diseases were almost always harder to treat. A close examination of the bones showed that it was pure deprivation. The boy had simply never gotten enough of the things that gave bones their innate strength. That was true for all of the children to some extent, but it was particularly egregious with this child.
That made the treatment simpler, though. Sen just needed to make something that would reinforce what was already there and enhance that absorption of those missing things. It wouldn’t be a perfect solution. The boy would have to be a cultivator for Sen to make something that would be a perfect solution. A mortal body lacked the innate qi to support remaking the bones entirely. Beyond that, it would take the recuperative power of a cultivator body to withstand the stress that would come with such process. Fortunately, this boy’s bones didn’t need to persist for hundreds or thousands of years, just one mortal lifetime. That was achievable.
“What’s your name?” asked Sen when the boy was standing by the table.
“Zhuge Run Chu,” whispered the boy in a voice so quiet that it took cultivator hearing to pick it out of the noise.
“Run Chu. This is the most important part of the elixir I’m about to make,” said Sen.
He summoned a water-attributed flower from his storage ring. It wasn’t actually the most important ingredient, just the last one that needed to go into the cauldron. He held it out to the boy, who took it with shaking hands.
“Keep that safe,” commanded Sen. “When the time comes, it will be your responsibility to place that flower into the cauldron.”
Run Chu let out a tiny squeak and nodded his head furiously.
“Good.”
With that Sen turned his attention to the cauldron. In truth, he didn’t even need a cauldron or his pot to craft elixirs for mortals anymore. He could contain the process in the open air with nothing more than dense qi. Years of having to prove over and over again that he could do alchemy in a pot had taught him something important. People expected alchemists to use cauldrons. So, he’d found one in his storage rings for this demonstration. For that matter, he could have made the elixir the boy needed in less than a minute. A feat that would have impressed other alchemists and cultivators, but there was no spectacle to that.
Instead of going for speed, he stretched it out for most of ten minutes. He created unnecessary noises inside the cauldron every time he added an herb or alchemical agent. Mist burst from the cauldron every time he picked up the lid. Then, came the moment of truth. He formed a qi platform beneath Run Chu and positioned him by the cauldron. An act that drew an aborted shriek from the boy.
“Are you ready?” asked Sen in voice of such overblown seriousness that only a child could take it seriously.
“I’m ready,” squeaked the boy.
Sen lifted the lid to another burst of mist.
“Quickly! Add the flower!”
Run Chu didn’t add the flower so much as drop the flow into the cauldron, but that was good enough. Sen slammed the lid back down and, just for a bit of added drama, he created a flash of lightning and a boom of thunder in the sky. He surreptitiously watched the children from the corner of his eye while he made up a name for the concoction. When all of them had leaned forward in eager expectation, he lifted the lid with a booming cry of…
“Behold! The Elixir of the Mountain’s Gaze!”
A pale green liquid rose from the pot in a perfect sphere. That drew excited noised from the children. It spun in place while Sen bled the heat from it. When it cooled enough, he held out a glass vial beneath the newly formed elixir. It slowly poured into the vial. Run Chu stared at the vial with an awed expression. Sen gave the boy what he hoped was his best fatherly smile and held out the vial.
“This is for you. Drink it quickly! Before the power fades!”
Small hands took the vial and the boy tipped it into his mouth. Sen had added a few things so that the taste wouldn’t be appalling. A method that had apparently worked, because Run Chu swallowed it all in a couple of big gulps. Sen lowered the qi platform back to the ground and gave the youth a serious look.
“The mountain’s gaze is on you now. The mountain stands firm before all storms, which means that you must stand firm. Can you do it?”
Run Chu stared up at him with conviction burning in his eyes.
He bowed to Sen, hand clasping fist, and said, “I can do it, Lord Lu!”
“Good. Now join the others.”
Sen let the children whisper excitedly to each other for several moments before he turned to look at them.
“That is but one elixir. Today, I mean to show you the heights that alchemy can reach. But I cannot do it alone. Let the heavens choose!”