Make of a man and woman a circle; then around the circle a quadrangle. Out of this a triangle; then make again a circle, and you will have the Stone of the Wise.

Zhang Huoyun absently mused over his forefather’s words, written down in the text passed down across the family for generations. For all twelve years of his life, the only life he’d known was the family trade. Nestled in the outskirts Yunjiang Town, the Zhang Family apothecary served two roles.

For the common villagers living within the town itself, they provided herbs and medicines, following the recipes written down in the family scrolls since at least the time of his great-great-grandfather. Despite attempting to make sense of the afflictions they suffered when they came to consult him and his father, Huoyun hadn’t the slightest clue about how the records inscribed by his long-dead ancestor actually achieved the results they did.

Still, he wasn’t about to complain. For most days of the many years he’d been actively a part of the family trade, continued patronage by the villagers was their primary source of income. For five generations, following the words passed down by their ancestor who had journeyed to distant lands and preserved their knowledge for posterity, the Zhang family had established themselves as among the master crafters of medicine on this side of the River Zhu, before it drained into the Great Confluence.

Despite the financial stability they provided, though, it was the second role they played that held his interest.

He glanced over to the open flame, wisps of a green vapour trailing off from the bowl of liquid currently being subject to a slow, simmering heat. Since the time he was old enough to read, he’d been taught the secrets of the family scrolls, among which were twelve fundamental processes that allowed them to flourish the way they did.

Calcination was the general term for what he was doing now, and one of the first principles in his ancestor’s archives. To subject to an intense flame. Simple in theory, difficult in execution: the heat had to be carefully controlled, otherwise the combination of xinyan herbs and crushed citrinated salt would lose their potency.

Huoyun judged the vapour emanating from the bowl, before increasing the distance from the heat slightly. If he continued on, calcination would soon give way to putrefaction. At this stage, the mixture, having been tempered and refined through prolonged heat, will begin to decompose, releasing impurities into the solution. If that happened, creating the final product would be difficult: he would need to introduce a series of fermentation, and then sublimation steps in between, which would mean a lower potency of the daoshi elixir.

Satisfied with the changes made, he returned to his musings. He’d let the flame carry on at this heat for a while longer, before splitting it into two halves – separation – and then filtering out any residue that was left. From there, all that was left would be congelation of the resultant elixir into a pill, and then he and his father could deliver this year’s set of daoshi elixir pills to the newly-minted cultivators of the Yangjian Sect atop Mount Qingliu.

Each year, the Elders of Yangjian Sect would provide their newest junior members who had passed the rigorous training process to enter their ranks proper with one of these elixirs each. It was supposedly able to heighten the internal strength of spirit they had accrued over long years of training and meditation, advancing them months of power within a single day and night of meditation. Though Huoyun longed to understand just exactly how his processing of the raw materials that went into the pill could do what it did, such knowledge sadly eluded him. He’d need to become a member of the Sect in order to learn the secrets of their cultivation, which in turn would mean giving up his life here. As much as curiosity gnawed at him, he just couldn’t leave his father alone like that.

Besides, he was probably far too old to enter the stages of training now. From his annual visits up the mountain alongside his father for delivery of the pill, he’d seen just how young their training began. Even at this moment, the people his age were probably running up the sides of mountains while he worked on the pills they would be taking at some point in the future.

Truthfully speaking, the Elders up on the mountain were probably more than able to create the pills on their own. Still, they chose to contact his family for the yearly shipment, and this tradition had gone on for over four generations now. From what his father told him, that was in turn told by his father, the potency of the pills created by their family had so stunned elders of past generations that they had made the decision to continue the agreement for ten more generations.

Yet another sign of the genius of his ancient ancestor. Huoyun didn’t know exactly where Zhang Shenggang had travelled, and received such exotic knowledge in a field he had termed alchemy, but it was clearly enough to awe even the master cultivators of his age.

Alchemy. At the thought of that word, Huoyun frowned, his thoughts drifted back toward the passage he had been mulling over.

Zhang Shenggang’s records that had been passed down through the family for generations were bizarre, for lack of a better word. There were recipes for things that could treat a wide range of ailments, written with precise detail. Of alchemy itself, he had detailed twelve main processes, and a hundred-and-eight derived ones. Calcination, solution-dissolution, separation, conjunction, putrefaction, congelation, cibation, fermentation, sublimation, exaltation, multiplication, and projection were, in various combinations, supposedly able to give rise to the creation of any substance, or so Zhang Shenggang claimed.

Of the daoshi elixir, the same one that Huoyun was now brewing, the instructions had been more vague, left to the reader’s interpretation, merely listing down the broad strokes of the alchemical processes needed to create the final product. It had been his son who had added on his own words on the margins of the text, listing with greater precision the steps that had since been followed by his descendants.

The same was true for the many other tinctures, brews, pills, elixirs, and twelve other classifications of the many recipes left behind by Zhang Shenggang. If the imprecision on that subject didn’t bother Huoyun enough, alongside those texts were cryptic writings and passages that bordered on the straight-up insane.

Make of a man and woman a circle, the first stanza of his five-line poem returned once more to his mind. For ten years, Huoyun had practiced with the medicines, committing the broad steps written by his ancestor to memory, but it was these incomprehensible inscriptions that plagued his waking thoughts. Some of his dreaming ones, too, for that matter.

His father, like his ancestors, dismissed them as ramblings of their ancestor, who had included plenty of puns and jokes alongside the main text. A combination of mental deterioration with old age, alongside his natural sense of humour, they called it.

Even then, Huoyun just couldn’t help but think that there was something more. There were references to something he had called the lapis philosophorum, that he also referred to as the magnum opus. He had written of substances called azoth and alkahest, said to allow for the solution of any material or substance in existence.

What interested him most, though, was his references to something he had termed the elixir vitae.

It was only a single paragraph, but it was also exactly what made his ramblings both sound credible, and yet impossible.

With the Stone Conjured of the Reddened Soul, drip two drops of thy Divine Essence of Mind, Body, and Soul unto the Waters of Life. Ferment, multiply, and project thy Essence of Self, and thou shall possess the elixir vitae, the all-cure; the One and the All. When Mind, Body, and Soul are One, and None, and All; finite, and yet unending… then thou shall grasp immortality in thy hands.

There were words Huoyun recognised; the three Processes that made their family business as successful as it was. Yet he had gone into the straight-up esoteric, the territory of cultivators; speaking of the Soul, of Essences, and most intriguingly to Huoyun… of immortality.

On the next page, he’d just gone on to write the recipe of another different medicine that could cure headaches, as though nothing had happened on the previous page. In the entirety of the rest of his writings, there were only two other mentions about anything pertaining to the Soul, or of cultivation.

The first was a simple line: Confront the Dark Night of the Soul. First the blackness, then comes the light. Refine into yellow, for the Red Sun shall rise. Chaos and order, dark and light. Silver and gold, the All and the Self.

The second made even less sense. The Mind is of Mercury, the Body of Salt, and the Soul of Sulfur. Subject the Self to the Twelve. Three shall create, and Three shall destroy. One is Three, Three is All, and Three is One. From Two meets Three, and of Four equate Five, for the Two are One.

Like he said – Zhang Shenggang’s words made no sense at times, and when looking at subjects outside of the soul, there were hundreds more passages like those. Yet, considering how often it happened, and how lucid the words on his next page would be, Huoyun couldn’t help but feel that there was a hidden secret that lay within, a final lesson waiting to be imparted by his long dead ancestor.

The work was unfinished. On the last page of the last volume of his encrypted texts, he had merely written down the title, followed by several words, and then his writing instrument’s skidmark as he passed away right there and then.

Recipe: A Hearty Soup for Three (great for dinners!!!)

Ingredients:

Salt, 1 portion. Mercury, 1 portion. Sulfur, 1 portion.
Meat, 2 portions; 1 male, 1 female
1x tree bark (check that there is no mould)
1x fistful of dirt (extra chunky)
1x iron sword (DO NOT EAT RAW!)
1x burning matchstick (warning: fire is hot)
1x tears of the reader (mmm, salty)

Method:

Cultivate –

The first time he’d seen that, he refused to believe that his ancestor had died while making it a practical joke. Eventually, though, amidst chuckles at his reaction, Huoyun’s father told him that he had been much the same as him in his youth. Over generations, though, the Zhangs eventually agreed that their ancestor had made his death a grand prank, and was no doubt laughing at them all in the afterlife.

Still… Huoyun couldn’t help but doubt. What if there was more? What if there was a pattern to the madness? What if Zhang Shenggang had been trying to study what cultivators in all the dozens of Sects across the lands were chasing for as long as history existed?

And more importantly… had he found the answer?

Huoyun didn’t know.

What he knew was that based on the colour of the smoke now coming from the bowl, it was time to move on to separation, and then dissolution. For now, thoughts of his madman of an ancestor could wait. There was work to be done.

When he went up Mount Qingliu with his father in a week’s time for the annual delivery and induction ceremony of the junior members of Yangjian Sect, perhaps he might find answers that had eluded him for a lifetime.