Alex reached his master's home a few minutes later. He walked into the room he previously had gone to and waited for his master. Ma Rong came soon enough.
"Congratulations on becoming a core disciple," she said.
"Thank you, master," he said with a big smile. He didn't know how being a core disciple would help him, but it should ease his master's problem a lot.
"Now that you are one, you should start dressing like it too," Ma Rong said.
"Huh? What do you— Oh," he looked down to clothes and made a goofy smile. "I just woke up from my sleep so I forgot to change," he said.
Ma Rong chuckled a little too. "Although, I heard you did quite badly at the exams," she said.
"Oh yeah, master. To not reveal our relationship yet, I decided to choose a normal cauldron without a lid, and I didn't realize how bad I was at making pills without my regular cauldron and lid. I also stupidly decided not to use Elemental Guidance the first time and it made the pills quite bad as well," he said.
Ma Rong nodded, "Well, at least you learned how to get a good harmony level even with a trash cauldron. Most other core disciples would simply fail at creating anything above 15% as well."
"However, now you should start learning how to make a pill better, and for that, you need to understand how pills are made," she said.
"How pills are made? Is there more to pill-making than what you've taught me?" he asked curiously.
"Hmm… my bad. I should probably say how pill recipes are made. What I mean is, you should start making your own pills," Ma Rong said.
Alex was surprised. "I should make my own pills? Is that even—"
"Possible?" Ma Rong cut him mid-sentence. "Yes, it is possible. But it is also highly unlikely you will succeed anytime soon. At least, even with your talent, I doubt you will be able to make one without reaching the latter realms of True realm," she said.
Alex got a little confused. "If making new pills are impossible for me until I get into the True realms then what is the point?" He asked.
"Experience," Ma Rong said. "Making pills from the recipe will only help you understand how to make pills, they will never teach you how the interaction between the energies end up affecting a human body when they eat the pill."
"You can tell that fire energy will overwhelm wood energy, but you can't tell what the resulting energy will do. Will it harm a person? Heal them? Increase their strength or speed? What about affecting one's Qi itself?"
"There are many aspects to the energies that you will have to learn and figure out by yourself. And you can only do that by making your own pills," Ma Rong said.
Alex couldn't see any flaw with that statement. Until now, he had made pills based on the recipe. He would easily learn the recipe without any problem and would mostly know what to do.
This, however, had dulled his instinct in pill-making. If only he started to make one by himself could he truly understand how everything worked. But there was one problem that he needed to think of a solution to first if he wanted to do that.
"Umm… Master, if I add in random ingredients willy nilly, won't I cause an explosion? That would at best harm my cauldron and at worst kill me," he said.
"Yes, I know," Ma Rong said. "Not only that, there is another worse problem too. Say you happened to make a pill, what do you do after that?" Ma Rong asked.
Alex thought for a second, couldn't come up with an answer that didn't include eating the pill himself or giving it to some other person. However, that would be completely immoral and dangerous as he wouldn't know what the function of the new pills would be.
"I honestly do not know master. I assume it has nothing to do with feeding other people?" he asked.
"There are evil alchemists out there who will do that, but not us. For normal alchemists there are two methods," Ma Rong said.
"The first one is to feed it to a domestic monster called a Pill Swine. Pill Swine's body composition is very close to a human body, however, they are very bad at cultivation and are slow to breakthrough. This makes them the perfect test subject to experiment on. It, however, can be considered immoral as well depending on your standing."
"The ethics of the method is highly debated as to whether it is good or not among the higher level cultivators who can afford to make their own pills," Ma Rong said.
Alex thought about it, but he couldn't think of why it would be immoral. 'We kill the animals on our farm all the time. If they were bred with an aim, I don't think it's immoral for humans to use them for that,' he thought.
"They don't seem any more different than the ones we rear for food, so I don't think it is unethical at all," Alex said.
"Well I disagree," Ma Rong said. "But, as I said, it's still a debate and nothing is fixed. Maybe I will come to appreciate them at some point," Ma Rong said.
"Are there Pill Swines in the sect?" he asked. "I don't think I have ever heard or seen them."
"That's not weird at all," Ma Rong said. "Pill Swines are only useful for high-level alchemists who can create new pills, so most alchemists won't even have a use for it. As such, we have elders rearing it behind the alchemy garden on the left."
"You can reach it from both here, if you fly down left from here, or if you just walk to the back of the core disciple's mountain. Since only Elders and Core disciples have any possible use for it, the sect keeps them at a place where they both can easily reach it."