A few weeks passed by and Ning continuously went to the Old woman's house to train his potion skills.
By now, he knew quite a lot about potion making itself. If he were to guess, with his knowledge of the ingredients, he would be able to advance the potions to a higher level.
However, he felt that it was still too early. For now, he needed to act as he had just started learning.
Aside from that, he had also started teaching Helena. He gave her a strong absorption skill that he told her not to let anyone else know about.
With that, she wouldn't even need the Aether liquid that Ning was ready to give her.
Ning was currently leaning next to a white wall, in an empty room with foams to dampen the sound all around the room.
The room itself was quite large at around 20 by 20 meters, but that was only because they were in the basement of a large building.
That was the only place Ning could find in the vicinity of where Helena was. Her grandmother didn't want him to take her far away, so he had found a free underground a block or so away from her.
Helena was standing with her back to an adjacent wall, her black hair tied in twin tails beside her shoulders, and her hands outstretched as if focusing on something.
She grunted with a thought and a small blob of water appeared in front of her. It had appeared around 2 meters away from her, and she struggled to keep it afloat.
She had enough Aether to easily do what she was doing, but she lacked practice, and thus her imagination was yet to be on point.
The blob of water kept spinning around, bobbling to find a fixed shape as Helena focused her gaze on the small bucket that was 5 meters away from her.
Now that she had created the water, she needed to push it away 3 more meters back.
"Breathe," Ning said from the side, and she took a deep breath before focusing.
The blob of water slowly moved forward, threatening to drop to the ground. Until it really did.
The water splashed on the ground, just a few steps away from the bucket, and Helena couldn't help but put on a very sad face.
She had failed once again.
"Hey! That's pretty good," Ning said. "You got to nearly 4 meters in just a day of training. When I was your age, it took me nearly a week to do what you did."
Helena's frown twisted into a smile and she happily looked toward Ning. "Is that true, teacher?" she asked.
"Of course," Ning lied. He had started with creating water and moving water for Helena.
He would go from water to stone to fire in the process of teaching her, using them to go through the different energies.
He wanted to start with heat and fire, but teaching a young kid how to create fire didn't sound very safe.
After Helena learned a little more, he would teach her more advanced and dangerous stuff.
After training for a little longer, Helena managed to pour the water onto the bucket. When that happened, she nearly tired out from the fatigue.
Ning took her back home and went back to the tower for some training of his own.
Merasi was gone back to closed cultivation for a while now, and it didn't look like she would be coming out anything soon.
From what he had heard, sometimes these Supremes went to 'sleep' for more than 5 years at a time, doing nothing but eating, sleeping, and absorbing Aether.
Once his training with the group was over, he went back to the building, part of which he had bought for himself, and entered the 2nd floor where he kept his potion-making equipment.
Every single item in this room was made up of glasses, unlike the old woman's home, making this place look exactly like he was in a pharmaceutical lab or a place where they trained in chemistry.
Ning started boiling some ingredients in a glass beaker to make a potion that was supposed to work as a pain relief medicine.
He waited for the potion to be created and even made quite a condensed batch of it.
He then took a deep breath while holding the potion in his hand. He knew for sure that this potion would definitely do something for his pain, or at least he hoped so.
But he wasn't sure as he only understood the ingredients and not how they worked together.
He let go of the breath he had been holding and closed his eyes to prepare. In a single gulp, he drank the entire vial of potion.
As soon as he did, Ning created a knife in mid-air and made a long slice on the back of his hand.
Immediately, he let go of the knife and clutched his left hand in pain. He waited for the pain relief to come, and it did, but along with it also came a sense of numbness that made him lose all feeling in his body.
Ning couldn't feel a single sensation of touch, not of the floor, not of his clothes. He certainly couldn't feel the pain anymore.
The Potion had worked, but not like he wanted it to. He would have to change the recipe a little more.
Now that his hand didn't hurt anymore, he stood up and waited to see how long it would take for this effect of the potion he drank to disappear.
It took him a full 10 minutes before any feeling returned back to his body. Then, it took him another half an hour before every feeling in his body returned.
And along came the pain.
"Heal it," Ning ordered the system, and in a flash of light, the wound vanished.
"I'm close, but not quite. A few more experiments and I should be able to make a pain relief potion that should last much longer than this."
As such, his potion experiments were going relatively well.
