Learning To Live As A Cultivator

Rolling his blur-filled eyes, he stood up and carefully made his way to the shelves beside the stove, which were lined by a handful of earthen pots and bottles. Mostly, these contained the spices he had purchased, but also nuts and dried fruit. Carefully he brushed his fingers along the shelf until they b.u.mped into the first pot and he took it down and removed it"s lid. He sniffed the contents and the sweet scent of fruit teased his nose. He placed the jar on the small side table at his waist then reached for another pot. When he smelled it"s contents, he paused in thought.

"What are you doing?" Jin Li asked.

"F-found sand soap," he replied, wondering how he had come to leave the soap there, instead of next to the bath. It must have been when he refilled the pot from his purchased spare supplies, tucked away in the chest beneath the bed. But he thought he had placed the pot back in the shed. Was he wrong? Did he place something else in there instead by mistake? He started pulling down the other pots, but found the dried peas, beans and nuts.

And then he remembered something, that little thing he had created on a whim.

When he had last been to town and received his cooking lesson from Mino"s grandmother, he happened to ask her if she knew how to dry herbs. She had been surprised when he asked this; shouldn"t an alchemist student already be aware? He was honest as best he could be; he (Leo) was a refining pill idiot, as in he was so concerned in creating and making pills, that he had failed to learn anything else! Okay, so he had not put it so bluntly, saying instead that his talents were not great, he had to focus on making pills and had yet to learn other things.

"The school p-p-provides the herbs," Leon had told her, "b-but I see you have d-dried herbs upon the r-racks, so I was c-c-curious." She had taught him how to dry herbs naturally or using a cooling wood fire.

Naturally, once his stove was installed, he would test out what he had learned and adapt it for himself. In fact, he did the day Jin Li had disappeared after his collapse. Seeing as he had a lot of sweet sunclover in his garden, he dried this out first... or attempted to. It took a while to cool the oven enough to create a perfect atmosphere. Three blackened attempts later, he had herbs he could leave to go cold and crush in his pestle and mortar to pour into a jade bottle. Later, these dried herbs could be used in making pills or potions.

The flowers sitting in a pot of water then caught his eye. There had been flowering stems amongst the herbs he"d requested to make the cloudy spiritual pills. He could have thrown the flowers away as he did not need them, but he had remembered how his mother had refused to throw away flowers without long stems just because they had broken from the main bouquet and had found himself reluctant. He remembered that girls favoured the thumb nail sized petals of the bladed thistle plant for their baths and wondered about giving them to some girls, but giving flowers to girls... this could be misconstrued, even if his intentions were pure. But what about bath salts, dried petals for decoration and scent that could be added to water, could he make such a thing?

Well, he had plenty of flowers to play with, the five blossom daisies had just bloomed in this garden. He had bought the seeds for this herb a while ago, not that he needed them for any pill or potion, yet. He had been curious about the fact that this herb flowered five times a year and each time the flower was supposed to be coloured differently. The flower that had bloomed, this time, was a pale yellow. Leo had written that while this plant was not considered rare, it was also not considered common as it was easy to grow initially, it was hard to maintain. Of course, Leon had not had the plant long, so could not be sure.

With this flower, the dusty stem of the purple haze gra.s.s (which had a strangely calming scent) and the petals of the bladed thistle flower all carefully dried in his oven and mixed with salt formed from boiling dry the spring water from the western caves, he created his concoction. He had also added some of the dried sweet sunclover, after all this herb had detoxifying properties, should be good for the skin as well! But he hadn"t yet tested whether they were of any actual use or even made the bath water smell pretty. Leon thought it was this that he had accidentally placed in the shed instead of sand soap.

"I sh-should g-give this to Sun," Leon said grabbing the pot with the sand soap once more.

He checked the contents to be certain, replaced the stopper and cautiously made his way to the front of the hut, using the blob of bright light to guide him.

"Wait!" Jin Li ordered. Then he offered the sigh of one who has a duty to perform, but does not wish to strain himself. "I will guide you, less you fall and break something else!" Leon heard his light footsteps then felt his hand grabbed and placed upon the other"s arm. Leon felt his face heat up slightly as his sensitive fingers felt the steel beneath them and the warmth of Jin Li"s body. The youth steadily moved him towards the door and to the shed where steam was already curling out from the gaps in the wood and from the fluttering curtain covering.

Suddenly, there was a surge in the spiritual energy within the air about them and the winds whipped about the pair in a frenzy as the energies were sucked directly into the small shed. Leon felt Jin Li pull him closer and shelter him, though he did not think much of it until the energies calmed and dispersed once more.

Jin Li pulled him much more quickly into the shed to see a startled Sun standing up in the metal tub looking shocked. "What"s g-going on?" Leon asked Jin Li as the man came to a stop.

Jin Li did not get the chance to explain as Sun held an earthen pot in his hand and exclaimed; "What sort of sand soap is this?!"