Chapter 62：Alchemy Lesson (2/2)
”Those are important, but not the most important thing during a pill-making process.” She looked straight into his eyes, and said, ”The most important things are the cauldron, the ingredients, and the elemental synergy.”
Alex's full attention was on her words now. She continued, ”Tell me, why did you say the temperature was important?”
Alex answered, ”Because the recipes tell you that you need to burn certain ingredients at a certain temperature. Also, you have to constantly change the temperature throughout the entire pill-making process according to the recipe. So, having the fire at accurate temperature is necessary.”
Ma Rong smiled and said,” That is correct. Having an accurate temperature is important. But tell me, what burns the ingredients? The fire or the cauldron?”
”Uhh… the cauldron?”
”Yes. So, it doesn't matter if the temperature of the fire is accurate or not, if the temperature of the cauldron isn't accurate at all. However, we can prevent this from happening. We can make the transition of heat from the fire to cauldron very fast if we use the right type of cauldron.”
”So, it doesn't matter how well your fire manipulation is if your cauldron itself is garbage. This just leads to a bad pill.”
Ma Rong then proceeded to the next topic. ”Next on the list is the ingredients. This is pretty simple. If you have good ingredients, you end up with good pills. If you have bad ingredients, you end up with bad pills. However, while the concept itself may be simple, applying it not very much.”
”There are 3 things in an ingredient that determines whether it's good or not. The first one is age. The older the ingredient is, the more energy it contains, making it better in general. The second is the time from when it was obtained, to the time it was made into a pill. The third one is the elemental affinity of the ingredient.”
”Age is pretty easy to determine based on how much energy it has. Once an alchemist has been used to the ingredients, they can usually tell its age just by feeling the energy in it.”
”The second point about the time can be fixed using some wooden or jade boxes that don't leak the ingredients aura. This way you can conserve the energy inside the box, and have it be more useful during your alchemy process.”
”As for the third part, the elements are a way vaster topic that I am not able to teach you fully, because I myself do not know a lot about it. However, I still do know quite a bit, and knowing about this topic is absolutely crucial if you ever want to be an earth grade or a heaven grade alchemist.”
”The third point is about an ingredient's element also is in part the third most important thing to remember when making a pill, the elemental synergies. This basically means that every element has a certain elemental energy in it, and based on the different elements in the ingredients you can either make an incredible pill or end up with your cauldron exploding.”