Chapter 64 — Knowing Is Not Doing

CHAPTER 64

Knowing Is Not Doing

Shi Feng slipped off his floor bedding before dawn, careful not to wake Ling Qingzhu, and lit the furnace in the kitchen.

He chose a simple strengthening pill from the knowledge that now belonged to him. The ingredients were common and the heat was modest. Mo Tianheng once refined it with one hand while watching three harder preparations with the other.

Shi Feng felt confident. I know the order, he thought. This will be simple! I know the changes, and I know the exact moment the medicine begins to bind. I can even remember how it feels under an old master’s fingers, as clearly as the grip of my own sword.

He laid out the ingredients and began.

The first extraction separated cleanly. The second needed less heat, and he lowered the fire before the smell turned sharp. Then he sent a thin thread of qi into the joined liquid and tried to hold its surface in the remembered pattern.

The thread surged.

The mixture leaped against the wall of the vessel. Shi Feng caught the heat, shifted his angle, and lost the pattern completely.

Crack!

Something split inside the furnace.

“Young man!” a cracked voice shouted over the wall. It was Granny Qin, who sold sesame cakes opposite the gate and never missed a noise in her life. “Aiyo, what was that? Is something on fire? Do I need to bring water?”

“Nothing is on fire, Granny!” Shi Feng called back.

“It sounded like a bone breaking!” Granny Qin cried. “Are you hurt? You’re too thin, you know. Come over later and I’ll give you a hot sesame cake!”

“It was only a pill, Granny,” Shi Feng said.

“A pill that breaks? Aiyo, what kind of pill does that?” Granny Qin called.

“A bad one,” Shi Feng said under his breath, and removed the lid.

Three ugly lumps clung to a skin of scorched residue. None of them deserved to be called a pill. Shi Feng was stunned. A pill this simple!

He stared at them for a while. In Mo Tianheng’s memory, this movement was as natural as lifting a cup. Shi Feng copied the direction, but he used far too much force at one point and too little steady pressure at another. He knew exactly what went wrong.

And knowing didn’t stop it. Shi Feng thought bitterly: a perfect map, and my own feet still walk off the road! How can this be so hard?

He cleaned the vessel and halved the next portion of ingredients. This time he drew his qi more slowly. The first breaths held. When the two extracts joined, his current thinned just where the remembered technique expected it to stay even.

He tried to compensate, but it was too late. The medicine broke into beads instead of gathering. One stuck to the lid and two collapsed into a greasy smear.

Shi Feng set the lid on the table very carefully. His expression was blank, but his heart was close to wailing. He could break Foundation Establishment cultivators with his bare hands, and the furnace didn’t care in the least.

Combat strength wasn’t refining control. His meridians gave him a frightening capacity, and his bones could carry force that no one at his realm could imagine. None of it turned his qi into the qi of a Profound Heaven master.

Some remembered techniques were wholly beyond him. Others could be simplified, but they still demanded a precision and steadiness that his present body must supply by itself.

Bone Refinement was a bottleneck, he thought. It was no use arguing that Mo Tianheng found the task easy. The hands at the furnace were Shi Feng’s, not Mo Tianheng’s!

Shi Feng took a blank sheet and drew columns. Portion of ingredients. Changes of heat. Length of steady control. Point of failure. Then he wrote down both attempts.

Mo Tianheng’s expertise let him recognize each mistake. Now Shi Feng needed to make his own hands stop repeating them. He scraped the failed medicine away and prepared the smallest portion his furnace could hold.

The third attempt used only a sliver of the usual portion, and he practised one stage alone. He held the extraction steady, released it before his control thinned, and repeated the motion with another small pinch.

Six breaths. Then seven.

“Seven!” Shi Feng muttered. “Real progress at last.”

It was also a real bill for ingredients.

By the time grey light touched the kitchen window, a tray held misshapen beads, scorched flakes and two failed mixtures that still smelled strongly of medicine. Shi Feng sorted them.

Shi Feng scraped the scorched residue into a bowl. The herbs’ qi was still there, even though the binding had failed.

The failed lumps held only the ingredients’ original strength. A sound pill would have multiplied it. Anyone else would be poisoned by this mess, but his physique could devour it safely.

Shi Feng swallowed one.

The All-Devouring Physique drew out what was left. Warmth flowed into the golden traces in his skeleton, and nothing dulled the benefit. No hidden poison or impure burden followed it. He ate the rest of the failures, residue and all, rinsed the vessel with warm water and drank that as well.

It wasn’t a successful refinement, but it wasn’t a total loss either. He wrote that distinction beneath the costs.

Practice still burned fuel, time and ingredients. Taking back some benefit from the waste softened the expense, but it couldn’t turn bad technique into good pills or give him anything he could honestly sell.

When Ling Qingzhu came out of the room into the courtyard, he’d already washed the vessels and hidden the failed residue. An ordinary ointment was warming over the small fire. She looked at the little tray of jars.

“You were up early,” Ling Qingzhu said. “I heard you sneaking. Tiptoeing isn’t your talent.”

“I tried to be quiet,” Shi Feng said.

Ling Qingzhu bit back a smile. “Granny Qin says you broke a bone. Want a bucket?”

“It was a pill,” Shi Feng said.

“And? Did it work?” Ling Qingzhu asked.

“No,” Shi Feng said.

She made a small sound that might have been a laugh. He lifted the pot from the fire before he looked up.

“This one will,” Shi Feng said.

An ordinary ointment needed plain extraction, careful mixing and clean hands. It didn’t need the steady qi that ruined his pills, and Mo Tianheng’s knowledge cut the wasteful steps. Even with his cheap furnace, the result would be better than anything on the medicine street.

Shi Feng thought: the old master would have laughed at an ointment. Let him laugh, since he’s gone and the jars are mine.

Shi Feng finished the preparation, let it cool and filled the jars. Ling Qingzhu picked up a lid and read the label in his handwriting.

“Cracked skin?” Ling Qingzhu asked. “That’s it? The great alchemist’s debut is hand cream?”

“For cracked skin,” Shi Feng said.

“Nothing for meridians?” Ling Qingzhu asked, and her expression turned careful.

“None promised,” Shi Feng said.

Her face softened at his bluntness. She looked at the cheap furnace and the row of jars.

“Good. Don’t promise anybody immortality before breakfast,” Ling Qingzhu said.

“Immortality requires a larger deposit,” Shi Feng said.

“Then Granny Qin keeps the bucket,” Ling Qingzhu said. She was laughing before she reached the gate. Shi Feng tightened the last lid. The salves and washes were worth selling, he decided. The pills weren’t, and would stay private practice until he could make them properly.

He wrapped the sealed ring and put it back in the box in his corner of the room. Its storage still waited for Foundation Establishment. The alchemy inheritance had come from devouring Mo Tianheng’s remnant spirit, while the ring’s inner storage space remained locked behind its Foundation Establishment seal.

On the table lay his new practice record. Beneath the morning’s failures, Shi Feng added a final line.

Smaller portions. Longer steady control. Don’t pay twice for the same mistake.

He counted the remaining herbs in his basket. At this burn rate, his savings would last four more mornings before the furnace went cold—unless the twelve jars of ointment on his tray started paying for his practice tomorrow at the silk-lane market.