Of course, while continuing to eavesdrop with my divine sense, I simultaneously counted my breaths and picked up the next herb with my spiritual energy. I tossed it in.

Boom!

Oh... double shit. The contents of two other alchemists’ furnaces blew. Since they were right next to each other, they amplified and rocked the entire room. Several isolation formations went down.

I put in the next spiritual plant and counted. Before I even hit the count of two I felt the impending explosions of eight other cauldrons. Eight! At the same time.

Motherfucker. This was gonna hurt.

First, to save Old Smokey and the pill, I threw in the Bitter Root of Thwarted Arrogance together with the plant that was supposed to come before it.

I sped up the spiritual energy within my body and used the technique beyond my level for shielding, covering my body, my remaining spiritual plants, and my cauldron.

At first, for a mere moment, my isolation barrier held against the initial shockwave. It even held as the subsequent fiery blast wrapped around it. But then, the barrier dropped.

The burning billows of flames, energy, and medicinal Qi hit my shield. It held... for a breath. That was long enough for the Bitter Root of Thwarted Arrogance to melt a little and stabilize my solution.

I coughed up a mouthful of blood.

Closing my eyes, I curled in on myself, bracing to feel the tail end of the turbulent energies. Bracing for more injuries. But I felt nothing. When I looked up, I realized that I and the jade boxes filed with the guild’s expensive plants had a Gold Core level shield protecting us.

Right. I wasn’t by myself. And I wasn’t the only adult. There were people around me, strong cultivators whose jobs it was to save my ass from other people’s mistakes. I almost cried.

But I hadn’t stopped counting.

And, while they had shielded me, they hadn’t done the same for Old Smokey.

Oh, he was fine, technically.

Cauldrons, like Old Smokey, were built to withstand explosions, even from the outside. The issue was that the energy of that explosion affected the contents.

I knew it would happen, which was why I added Bitter Root of Thwarted Arrogance early. But I’d underestimated these explosions.

No, I estimated correctly based on my knowledge of the herbs involved. They should not have been that bad, to begin with!

Fuck, had some of the others gotten the wrong herb like I had but hadn’t realized it?

Well, what mattered now, was how to make a pill form in a solution that was definitely going to explode regardless of what I did — it was only a matter of time.

One of the things I learned from the notes of Immortal Zhenren Sword Within the Light of Virtue was that concocting pills was, in fact, similar to the first several realms of cultivating.

While alchemists used a cauldron to take energy from different sources and build a pill with the wanted effects, cultivators used their own bodies as a cauldron to build a ‘pill’ called a golden core (I assumed this was why realms got weird after that). But this meant the same tactics used when cultivating difficult, near explosively energetic techniques could also be employed to balance out the energies, at least temporarily, and direct the explosion when it happens. In my journey to develop my own technique, I'd also researched many others and subsequently developed methods to improve my alchemy as well. So, I used one of those methods.

I concentrated on the boiling ball of solution and energy within and spun it in a specific spiral. While this sounded like I was just stirring a pot of boiling water to keep it from boiling over, it was far more complicated than that, though the concept was the same.

Since I still needed to add the last few ingredients, I grabbed those with my energy and pulled them into Old Smokey. I kept them above the solution and spun them in the same direction of the spiral, waiting for them to melt.