In pill class, Dave sat towards the back of the room, seated next to Bing Feng. The instructor was talking about various roots and grasses and their effects on the body. Dave had thought this would be his favorite class. After all, pills are a staple of modern medicine and modern medicine has its foundation in science. To him the instructor sounded more like his kooky aunt explaining holistic medicine. The instructor listed various roots, plants, minerals, animal parts, all kinds of things and explained how mixing them together could create pills that had all sorts of varying effects, effects varying based on both the ingredients used and the mastery of its creator.
After the instructor finished his explanations, the students were handed licorice, green tea leaves, and rat bone ashes to refine into an essence bolstering pill. Essence being a person's physical energy that is refined into qi.
Bing Feng was unwilling to let time go to waste and began refining a pill immediately.
"The spring of youth, the spring of youth." He kept whispering to himself, repeating it like a mantra as Dave observed, hoping to take some cultivation hints from a native of this world. Bing Feng channeled his qi into the miniature pill cauldron, making it burst with a flame similar to that of a bunsen burner. He sprinkled the ingredients onto the flame one by one while repeating his mantra "The spring of youth," over and over again. Seconds later the flame exploded into a puff of multicolored smoke and the refinement failed.
"Curseeees! Curseees! Damn it all!" Bing Feng reacted dramatically to his failure, garnering the ill will of the instructor who appeared only to smack him on the head for his loud outburst rather than his failure in refining the pill.
"Quiet, Bing Feng. If you fail at first, try again. Do not disturb the other students."
"Forgive me instructor. I acted rashly and wasted water from my fellow students' spring of youth."
Dave forced the corners of his mouth down, suppressing a smile. It felt cathartic to not be the one at the receiving end of a lecture for once. He couldn't let himself gloat in the failure of his peers until he had succeeded on his own.
"Watch and learn Bing Feng," he stated boldly.
Dave put his palms out in front of the pill cauldron, mimicking Bing Feng's attempt and tried to channel his qi into it. After straining for nearly a minute a tiny flame, like the flame of a tealight, flickered for merely a second before extinguishing. The effort made Dave slightly nauseous and a little lightheaded.
"Ooohhh," Bing Feng gasped, "such fine qi control, I have never seen a flame so small. You impress me brother Dave."
"Heh… yeah… I was just showing you my delicate qi control."
Bing Feng's positive outlook spared him some humiliation but the problem of how to refine a pill remained.
[System notification: Congratulations! Your rank has increased: 0 >>> 1]
[New skill unlocked: Meth lab]
I leveled up? And got a new skill uh… M-m-meth lab? What kind of skill is that? I can commit petty theft, and now I can cook meth? What the fuck kind of bullshit class did this system give me??? This is madness. I want to file a complaint. I don't know who, but someone needs to answer for this. Ghetto shaman my ass, I'll call myself a space path cultivator until even this shitty system believes it. Fuck you system!
Dave put the cauldron in a chokehold while enraging himself with berating the system in his mind.
[Skill activation: Meth lab]
Oh no…
The cauldron began to bubble and froth menacingly, and mysteriously since there was no liquid in it at all. The bubbles grew larger and more violent as if the temperature was increasing in a boil, it didn't take long for them to burst into gas and become a flame that went from yellow to blue and finally a shade of violet. Dave was pleasantly surprised as it seemed to conveniently make up for his near complete lack of qi output and so he dropped the licorice in, then the green tea leaves, and at last he sprinkled the rat bone ashes over it. Each ingredient formed a colored smoke that almost escaped the cauldron before being drawn back in and forming waves on the ethereal sea inside, solidifying slowly but surely into the shape of a pill.
Bing Feng praised loudly from the sidelines as Dave held up the pill and inspected it, "Heavens be damned! You did it brother Dave. And what a beautiful pill you made! Nothing like the cursed ashes of my tragic and miserable failures."
The instructor strolled over, surely to give Bing Feng another smack on the head, but instead it caught his eye that Dave had refined a pill.
"You succeeded already junior Dave? Very good, very good, let me see the pill for a moment."
"Heh, it was no sweat." Dave said as he handed it over.
The instructor rolled it between his fingers, smelled it, and held it up under a crystal he used like a magnifying glass. "This is magnificent. I would struggle to make a pill of higher purity if I tried," he praised. "Excellent work! Now as for you, Bing Feng, you would do well to learn from your brother Dave, so far the only thing you have refined is a disturbance, not once, but twice."
I wonder if that smoke of failure is refining cancer, Dave thought to himself.
"Urgh, forgive me, instructor Pao. I have brought shame on myself again. My uncontrollable flame of passion has evaporated yet more of the springs of youth. I am deeply ashamed." Bing Feng strained himself to not shout the words at the top of his lungs. The instructor could only shake his head and replied "Don't apologize, do better."
The class ended with Bing Feng having tears in his eyes and the smoke of failure in his lungs. Dave on the other hand found that his new skill was a lot more useful than he had thought judging it by its name.