During my debriefing, the quick boost to my fire affinity seemed to only anger Instructor Yuan, and she once more called for me to change my cultivation technique. I again demurred. I wanted to see if I was right about it raising my affinity permanently.


    After she gave up on trying to convince me to change my technique, she wanted me to talk through what I experienced inside the Trial. I knew this was her main job as our instructor, but I wanted to avoid talking about my alchemy ability, so I glossed over almost everything. Frustrated by my lack of cooperation, she angrily sent me away.


    Once the meeting was over, I met with my classmates once more to discuss our experiences.


    YuLong was sitting with a hangdog expression on his face. “The Fire Peak is hell. I was able to get through the first levels easily with Fang’s formations, but after that, there were things made out of pure fire. How am I supposed to smash something made out of fire!? I used the trap formations to get by the first few, but after that, I couldn’t do anything.”


    I patted him on the shoulder to console him. “I’ll think about what I can do for you. I might be able to make something that will let you deal with those creatures better next time.”


    Zhuge Yan shook his head. “Don’t bother. The Trial changes each time you go in. At least, the Dark Peak Trial changes. Use what you learned to think of new strategies, but don’t focus too much on creating solutions for only what you saw this time.”


    I nodded in agreement and then turned to LiTing and JiaQi. “You two went to grab some treasures, right? Get anything good?”


    JiaQi’s face broke out into a grin, and she placed a large egg on the table.


    “Not sure what she is, but she was my reward for clearing ten stages. Hopefully she grows up fast enough to help me with the Trials, but even if not, she’ll still be a strong beast in the future.”


    YuLong cocked his head to the side. “How do you know it’s a she?”


    JiaQi blinked. “Because I’m a girl.”


    I had nothing to say to that, so I turned to LiTing.


    “Get anything good?”


    Her face was anxious, but she took out her trophy.


    It was a hammer.


    It wasn’t a war hammer. It was a smith’s hammer.


    YuLong grinned approvingly. “That will help you in the Earth Trial.”


    “Just make sure no one sees it,” said Yan. “You should use it to your advantage but try to hide it from everyone other than the Trial’s elder. I don''t think you could sneak it past him.”


    I looked at LiTing’s worried face and decided to come clean about my spoils as well. I place the alchemy cauldron on the table.


    “LiTing, can you take a look at this? I got it from the Fire Peak Trial.”


    They were all surprised, but JiaQi spoke first. “Your fire affinity was already five-star? Why are you cultivating earth?”


    “No… I… I passed the thirtieth stage. This was my reward.”


    YuLong slapped me on the back of the head.


    “Why didn’t you say anything when I was moaning about how hard it was? Now I look like an idiot.”


    I started to worry, but I could see that he was just having fun.


    After studying the cauldron, LiTing spoke in a calm, measured voice. “This is a Rank 3 refined cauldron. I don’t know how good the formations are, you would know more about them than me, but they could be up to Rank 4. You should hide it. Pill Lords will kill for a cauldron like this. Even Kings might get jealous.”


    “Thank you, I understand.”


    If the sect was giving out treasures like this to Masters, they couldn’t be too rare there, but I well knew that Rulers in the outside world didn’t have access to such things. I pretended to place the cauldron into my storage bag, but I instead moved a large volume of gold and pill bottles into my bag from my storage space and placed the cauldron securely into the space in my soul.


    <hr>


    After meeting with my classmates, I went to my room for a bit of privacy. There was something I was hoping to find out.


    “System, how much would it cost to make my current fire affinity permanent?”


    Processing… The cost of knowing this cost is 10 million credits.


    That seemed strange… I had been told the cost of knowledge was based on the effect it would have on the flow of karma, or something like that.


    I was already relatively certain I would be making this affinity permanent. I would need to buy it at some point anyway, and there was no reason to waste a discount if one was available. The only reason I might not do so was if there was no discount at all.


    Was the System telling me there was no discount? That didn’t seem right. Was the cost only there because of my uncertainty? This also seemed questionable.


    10 million was little enough that I was willing to splurge to see what the System was up to.


    “Purchase the knowledge of the cost.”


    This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.


    Purchase confirmed. 1,896,831,805 credits remaining.


    Cost of permanent mid five-star affinity is 325,056,129 credits.


    The cost should have been 350 million, and the value of a temporary affinity would have been 35 million. So, it wasn’t a perfect conversion of the temporary affinity into a discount. A 25 million credit discount wasn’t much, especially when I just squandered 10 million of it, but I would take it.


    The only slightly confusing thing was that it wasn’t an even 25 million. Why was there an extra 50 thousand tacked onto the price?


    I shook my head and dismissed questions I couldn’t answer. Well, questions I didn’t want to pay to answer.


    “System, make my fire affinity permanent.”


    Purchase confirmed. Cost 325,056,147 credits. 1,571,775,658 credits remaining.


    I felt a shift in my body, but I didn’t pay much attention to it because I was distracted by the message about my purchase. Why did the cost increase?


    “System, why did the cost increase?”


    Unable to calculate the cost of the answer at this time.


    This made me curse a bit, but there was nothing I could do about it. Likely, the answer was tied up in the secret of how essence affected the body to raise affinities.


    I was potentially raising my earth affinity permanently, so it seemed like essence and affinities could somehow affect the soul. That was the only way I could think of to make affinities permanent. I could only guess that this purchase was discounted because it was taking free essence from my body and shoving it into my soul.


    For some reason, when my cultivation technique was developed, it was made in such a way that it pulled the essence from the environment and pushed it into my soul instead of my body. For me, this resulted in its effects remaining after a reset, but for regular people, it seemed to only increase the amount of essence they needed to improve their affinities.


    Possibly, this technique was designed like this because it was the only way to draw in environmental essence without it being purified first. It was also possible that drawing essence into the soul to raise affinities had some additional effect that I didn’t know about, making this method more desirable. It was even possible that the Earthly Dao had specifically seeded these techniques for me, or someone like me, to take advantage of.


    I just didn’t have enough knowledge about how it all worked, and since the System refused to answer any questions on the topic, I would have to leave it for the future.


    Putting the matter of essence and affinities to the side, I took out my new cauldron and studied it.


    In energy vision, I could see that the thing was brimming with power, but I could only guess what it was all for. While I understood a few snippets of the formations, and even more looked somewhat familiar, they were so compressed and distorted that I couldn’t be sure. I would need to experiment to get a better understanding of what I was looking at.


    After placing it back into my storage space, I tried to center myself. I had a lot of work to do, and that list seemed to only keep growing.


    <hr>


    As our group focused on gaining the strength and knowledge to progress further in the Nine Rivers Sect’s Trials, time passed quickly.


    During our third expedition, I chose to go back to the Earth Peak Trial but failed out on stage sixteen. The formations I was creating helped, but if I wanted to have any chance at locking in a permanent increase to my earth affinity through the Trial, I would have to do better.


    The Earth Peak Trial should have been easier since I was able to cultivate to restore my energy inside, but that didn’t help too much in the end. The problem was the time limit. Cultivating to restore my energy was fine and all, but it ate up way too much time. Since I had to defeat enemies in this Trial, every level chewed through a good portion of my energy.


    In my debriefing, Instructor Yuan didn’t even bring up my cultivation technique. She just talked me through the problems I had and tried to point me toward potential solutions. As she pointed out, and I already knew, my biggest problem was the rate at which I was burning through my energy. I could either try to use less of it or try to regenerate it faster.


    I had kept my alchemy secret from my group, and I believed it was for good reason. But if I wanted to give myself, and them, the best chance of moving forward that I could, I needed to be more open about what I could do. We needed Qi Restoration Pills.


    When signing up for this term’s classes, I had overpaid by quite a bit, and it was time to put the money that had been ‘credited to my account’ to use. A week after our third Trial attempt, I went into the city and used that credit to purchase a large quantity of herbs. After bringing them back to my room, I concocted a multitude of useful pills with my new cauldron.


    I tried to use this time to figure out what the purpose of having a refined cauldron was and what the formations all did, but I wasn’t too impressed. The cauldron seemed to improve my ability to control energy and make it more efficient, but such things were completely unnecessary for me at this level. I would have to wait until higher ranks to see if the cauldron gave me any real benefits or not.


    Considering Instructor Yuan’s previous words about it being good that we didn’t have pills to cultivate, I didn’t provide the group with any Meridian Builder Pills. Instead, I focused on making pills that would help us train at a higher intensity for longer, mainly those focused on healing and recovery. I also created a bevy of pills and formations that might be useful during our next Trial.


    When I presented everything to the group, everyone, except Yan, was in shock.


    “I guess that explains why you got a cauldron,” grumbled JiaQi.


    “I did the best I could to think through several scenarios. Helping you all ‘cut’ better in the Metal Peak Trial was a little beyond me, but these should be sufficient for the other four central peaks.”


    I held up a fist-sized stone with an alchemical glue on one side. Developing a glue that would stick to damn near any surface had taken far more time than creating the formation had. I didn’t know how to concoct a liquid or if it was even possible with this world’s alchemy, so I ended up grinding up a pill and mixing it with a natural resin.


    “This is a shaped charge. I have them for all five basic elements. They are preloaded with qi, so you just have to push in a little more and they will go off. Use a wood charge on a rock monster. It should be an instant kill.”


    “You know,” said YuLong, looking at the table full of items. “This feels like cheating. Isn’t the Trial supposed to be testing our abilities? Not sure that’s going to happen if we take all this stuff with us.”


    Zhuge Yan smirked. “No. This is what they want. It isn’t a test of our ability to cultivate or fight. It is a test of our ability to progress and grow as cultivators. Do you think being friends with someone who is both an Alchemy Master and a Formation Master will give you a better chance to grow as a cultivator?”


    He gave me a look of chagrin. “Just being in a class with Fang gives us an advantage both now and in the future. This is the outcome they expect. We are just using our classmate’s abilities to advance as far as we can.”


    JiaQi looked at him. “So… it’s just about luck? Anyone placed in a class with the most talented student gets a free ride. And they want this outcome?”


    Yan nodded. “Luck is a valuable commodity for a cultivator, but it’s more than just that. We aren’t here randomly. Both Grandmasters Ning and Yuan selected us to be in this class. This is also a test of their foresight in assembling such a group. Admittedly, I doubt they expected a single person to provide both pills and formations, but I am confident we are not the only class that has unique advantages in the Trials.”


    The others were stunned at these words, so Yan continued. “I’m sure there is a ceiling to the amount of help we can get from Fang. Maybe they will only allow this in the Master Trials, but for now at least, this is what they are looking for.”


    Those words resolved everyone’s doubts. Allowing us to move forward together with confidence.