Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

Momo was ready for the next competition. She hadn't cultivated long enough for her to consider herself fully recovered, but for the purpose of simply replacing a few ingredients, she was ready.

She stayed in the room while a Divinity explained to them all the details of the next competition.

The Replacement Test required the participants to replace 3 ingredients to pass the test.

Just like with their Masters' competition, there would be a new pill for them to work with, completely conjured up by the Alchemy God for the purpose of this competition. The details of the pill, including its recipe, would be something they would only find out about when the test began.

Unlike their Masters' competition, they could request all the ingredients they wanted at once. However, if the ingredients were found to be wasted on purpose, they would immediately be disqualified.

Finally, the fastest to be done with the whole thing would be considered to have passed. And they would have a week of time to do it. If they took any longer than that, they would be considered as having failed.

They wouldn't, however, be disqualified from the next competition.

Momo felt slightly better about her chances in this competition. Her master helped her with training in the matter of replacing ingredients, so she was more or less certain that she would do well in the upcoming competition.

After the host announced the test, everyone walked out to the stage and found a place for themselves.

Momo ignored all outside influences and focused on just herself at the moment. Red Dawn, her cauldron, sat before her on the floor while she prepped for the competition.

The competition started with the recipe of the new pill flashed across the sky. Enjoy new tales from My Virtual Library Empire

Momo looked up, scanning the recipe, trying to learn from it. She let out an involuntary laugh at its sight.

'I'm in luck,' she thought, quite surprised.

The recipe was for an antidote pill. And with Momo having practiced making antidote pills for all sorts of poison and venom, her confidence in replacing the ingredients was at an all-time high.

She went through the recipe, trying to understand more about what the pill did. She wanted to learn about the poison. In the meantime, sets of ingredients for the pill were handed to her in a storage bag.

Momo quickly realized that this issue was slightly harder than what she had thought it would be at first glance. While it was an antidote pill, nowhere in the text did it say what the poison would be. Its effects were completely unknown to her.

It was then that she realized that the unnamed poison was intentional. She needed to replace 3 of the ingredients while not knowing what they did.

'I wish I could do what my master did,' she thought. She knew how easily her master could just close his eyes and think about the effects of a pill. She couldn't do something so easily. She needed time to learn about all the ingredients and understand their reaction with each other.

'I need to know what pill it will help first,' Momo thought, looking back at the recipe. 'I've worked with these ingredients before. I should be able to tell what poison they counter.'

Thinking as much, Momo got to work. She looked through the recipe and went back through her own knowledge of the ingredients and what pills she had used them in before. Alongside that, she also remembered the effects of the ingredients to see if it was something that covered a lot of things or something specific.

For example, something that lowered the body's heat could be dealing with increased heat, which could be from a lot of different issues. But something that stopped blood from coagulating would only be for something that coagulated blood in the first place.

The effects of poisons were easier to deal with after considering each of the effects as its own separate case first, and then combining it all together to deal with it at once.

Momo's first fear was that it was a generic antidote that was meant to work with all sorts of poisons, but upon looking through it more, she realized that was not the case. The ingredients were meant for a specific poison. As for what that was, she couldn't tell just yet.

Momo took 15 minutes to list out all the ingredients and what they dealt with. Aside from common issues she could not assign the cause to, there were specific issues that a combination of these ingredients targeted.

The first issue was the thinning of blood. That meant the poison would increase the content of water in the blood. If water was simply added, blood vessels would have to be destroyed, and yet this antidote didn't have any that stopped it. Which meant the thinning happened by blood breaking down.

That was helpful to know.

The second issue was one that targeted a person's lungs, stiffening them. There was another ingredient that had an anti-petrification effect, which meant this stiffening was caused by the lungs hardening.

Another issue noted down.

Finally, the last issue she recognized was that this pill was heavy in Fire energy, which meant the original poison would be Wood heavy since Fire element countered Wood the best.

Once she learned that, she needed to put it all together to figure out what specific poison that was used here.

Momo didn't understand why she was using this route to replace her ingredients, but now she had and she couldn't get herself to stop. Her mind worked through the many poisons, comparing and contrasting their effects with the knowledge she held from her decades of using poisons.

After much thought, she landed on one specific poison that fit all the criteria.

The Drowning Vine poison was something that broke down someone's blood, thinning it. It also hardened their lungs so the victim couldn't breathe properly.

After that, even if someone's heart beat normally, it wouldn't help as the blood could no longer carry as much nutrients as before to the brain, and the lack of breathing made even that harder.

In the end, the victim would just lose consciousness and die.

Now that Momo had figured out the poison, she simply needed to find an antidote for it. She didn't have to deal with this specifically before, she didn't have a pill.

If she could only make an antidote for this poison, couldn't she compare it to the pill above and see what could be replaced?

Momo began thinking along that line, trying to come up with ways to deal with that poison. Information flashed through her mind, ingredients coming at the front which she vetted based on what they did and did not.

The longer she continued, the more she slowly lost herself to those thoughts, no longer thinking about the test. She was now lost in the world of poison in her own thoughts.

Her thoughts slowly expanded beyond the scope of the competition, outside of her own volition, as she went through poisons, venoms, and toxins, and ways to deal with them.

Unconsciously, Momo entered a trance.

And as she did, the sky above began to roil with worldly energy.