[X] Violence
There are some things in life worth waiting for. Yon had been waiting literal years for this, both in general and for Amep and those like him in particular.
"You dare?" Yon demanded of Amep.
"
I dare? How can
you, a-" Amep began angrily.
"Shut the fuck up," Yon snapped, cutting the inner disciple off.
Amep threw a punch. Yon leaned into the strike, catching Amep's fist with the strongest part of his skull. Amep was an inner disciple, but Yon had had the shit kicked out of him by core disciples who had had family backing their whole lives. He'd spent years hardening his body, and the sound Amep's bones made upon collision was the sound Yon had been training for.
The surprise from Yon's defiance and then breaking his fist on the skull of an inferior was enough shock that Yon had plenty of time to solidify his stance and properly wind up to put maximal force into an uppercut to the jaw. While Yon was mostly just tough at this point, he could train longer and harder than similar disciples from his study of Diamond Body and Iron Kettle Belly, meaning he was stronger than many other outer disciples in the Medical Pavilion. The Dreaming Orchid Elixir was also a potent training tool, and he had been carefully using it for years now.
All that was to say that while he didn't break Amep's jaw like he had hoped, he still managed to rock the other boy off his feet. Even then, had this been a proper fight where both sides were prepared, the inner disciple might have been able to recover and turn things around, except for the fact that he was so surprised he let instinct take over and used his broken hand to attempt to catch his fall. The unexpected pain caused that arm to crumple, and Amep hit the ground like a sack of tubers, rolling prone.
Yon pressed the attack, delivering a kick to the ribs before he grabbed Amep by the hair and yanked the now thoroughly dazed young man back. With his left hand practically digging into the scalp he had his right ready to throw a haymaker into Amep's jaw, Yon glared daggers into his foe and said, "This is an
official fucking commission, so unless you're going to go get an elder to overrule this, my thrashing you is
Sect fucking business, you hear?"
Realizing that he had bit off more than he could chew, Amep just nodded his head in a half-drunken way. Yon threw him back to the ground and spat out, "Good! Now get out of here!"
As Amep scurried off, Yon took a deep breath and realized that he had let the Storm Lord rile his passions a bit too much. As much as he felt it wasn't a long term mistake to make his strength known, he did realize that in the short term he had created a problem for himself. Given the state the sect was in, there was no way that Amep was coming back for a rematch now that Yon had demonstrated he was too hard of a target, but Yon's subordinates were a different story. Yon was going to have to stay with the equipment to make sure there was no retaliatory sabotage.
"Yue, Ji, I'm going to need you two to take this equipment and these instructions and head out to the Rainbow Slopes," Yon said to the two seniormost of his underlings as he started to write out what exactly they needed to do. He was fairly certain that Ji had gathered quicksilver honey from prism bees before, and the task was quite straightforward, but he would make sure they had something to refer back to just in case.
Both junior outer disciples took the instructions without complaint or comment, but Yon could definitely tell that Ji wasn't looking forward to the process. His study of the Diamond Body technique meant that unless he did something really stupid he would have been fine, but even if they were careful the juniors were going to take a few stings. Nothing particularly dangerous so long as they got it treated, but the amount and quality they would be able to get would be slightly depressed in comparison to what Yon could do.
The next two days were oddly tense even though Yon had essentially nothing to do but keep an eye on the crucibles and the dessicator. Partway through the second day the news officially reached the outer disciples that the rumours were absolutely true, and a Celestial Envoy would be visiting the Lotus Eye Sect. There were further rumours that the Envoy had already visited at least one other of the Great Sects and the secret means of long distance communication between the patriarchs was how the Lotus Eye got advance warning, but that one was unlikely to receive any substantiation.
So Yon waited, meditated, and trained. When Ji and Yue returned with sacks of shimmering, mirror bright quicksilver honeycomb he spent some time picking the larva out of their sting wounds before he had everyone get the honey prepped. Soon enough it was just the tense wait to see if the mash would mature in time.
Conceptually the Dreaming Orchid Elixir was relatively straightforward, as such things went. Dreaming Orchids were hallucinogenic, and proper putrefaction released and magnified those hallucinogens. There were numerous drugs that started as a base, but the elixir very carefully brought out a hallucination of a more perfect self while providing an energetic kick that made an imbiber resonant with that self. This made it both an immediate performance enhancer and a long term training tool, although the relative efficacy decreased as one grew in power, the rate of decay was less than similar potent drugs.
The first big trick to successfully making the elixir was making sure that the fermentation ended at the correct time. Not enough time and the potency would be poor and there would be many impurities. Too much time and the hallucinogens would start breaking down into useless byproducts. There were a variety of methods, but the simplest was just to smell and taste a batch after about two days. Of course, you needed to be able to remain coherent while doing that, so that step was what generally kept junior alchemists from pursuing the elixir.
Unless of course they had specialized training, such as the Iron Kettle Stomach technique.
While Yon didn't let any of his subordinates in on what he was doing while checking the mash batches, he did assign them to read up on the medical texts that helped him develop that skill. Rather interestingly, Hodan seemed to have figured out what the next step would be from general principles, so Yon made sure to give him a few extra hints as to how to make the Iron Kettle work.
Once the mash reached proper maturation, the next step was to properly tune the hallucinogen, which was where the Umbral Crescents came in. Grown upon hidden knowledge, the mushrooms were utterly desiccated to remove their own vitality such that when the essence of the drinker intermingled with them during ingestion the only shape the hallucinations could take would be of the future self. The Sarcophagus Sphagnum was needed both to physically accelerate the desiccation process, and to spiritually neutralize out the lingering alignment to the Knowing Flame the fungus held.
Desiccated, ground to the finest powder and spread over ultrafine, essence-neutral filter paper, and then desiccated again, the Umbral Crescents became a conceptual filter. Pouring the fermented mash over them, it separated the accumulated dreaming into the impure past and the perfected future. The filtrate would move on in the process, while the remarkably toxic residue was sent to the Medical Pavilion's alchemical cesspit as tribute to the Harvestfather.
If one imbibed the filtrate at this stage, it would produce hallucinations of a more perfect future self, but they wouldn't be useful. This was where the quicksilver honey came in, giving the energy needed to be useful while also promoting conceptual crystallization. Combining the honey to the filtrate was however its own challenge, requiring the searing hot blood of a Living Forge to literally and metaphysically weld the two together. There were apparently more efficient ways to do the step, but the simple and low skill process was to perform the welding in an open crucible over a ritually prepared cold plate.
The copy of text that Yon had learned from had margin notes that suggested that there was a way to directly use the crystals that sublimely accumulated on the plate, but as it was the crystals were far too potent for most people to ingest. The esoteric crystallization would occur too quickly and be too localized - either the gut or the brain, depending on the drinker - and would not produce the desired results. Fortunately, by collecting the distillate vapours that did not directly crystallize, the perfect solvent was available.
The last step was a quick one, but it was also one of the most delicate. The crystallized dreams of the perfected self could not just be directly dissolved back into the distillate, a barrier was needed to both maintain the metaphysical shape of the crystals as well as to slow down the eventual absorption by the body of the drinker. This was achieved by carefully and delicately grinding up the crystals in a bath of light oil before introducing the distillate, with the trickiest part being getting the grind fine enough without using too much force.
Once again, Yon's Iron Kettle Stomach came in clutch as it let him put a tiny sample on his tongue without adverse effects. If he started to taste random flavours then the grind was still too coarse, while if there was nothing then he had used too much force. Only when there was a short static shock and numbness had he done it right. No matter what though he had to spit the sample out and wash with high proof alcohol.
It was during this step that he made sure to take tiny sips of the last batch of Dreaming Orchid Elixir, since it steadied his hand and made his sense of taste sharper, which let him massively improve his skill at performing this critical and delicate stage. While gripped in the sublime dream of the elixir, he wondered what it would be like to do the entire process while under its effects. He would have needed most of the current batch to have been able to pull that off though, and a single perfect dose was not the purpose of this project.
He was just finishing up the thirteenth bottle - not his biggest batch but by far his best so far - when Va came racing in, her demure composure nearly cracking under the internal pressure of her need for the project to be done. Her eyes sparkled with equal parts relief and greed at the sealed glass bottles, and at Yon's expression she could only reply, "They're coming.
Now."
---
Special thanks to
@Aleph for assistance in the alchemy procedure.
