Chapter 364: First Success (1/2)

Alex's forehead was full of sweat. He was on his 4th start of the night and he had already burned 3 of the same ingredient. Although they were easily acquirable ingredients, his heart still bled a little when he thought of them getting ruined.

But that was the life of an Alchemist. He was lucky enough to get the Alchemy God's Knowledge, however, the other Alchemists didn't get such an opportunity. So, they had to work hard to get these ingredients and then burn them while trying to learn something from them.

An alchemist that was successful had more burnt ingredients and more exploded cauldrons than one that failed.

So, Alex suck it up and started the process a fourth time. Fortunately, the last 3 tries weren't wasted at all. Thanks to them, he had come to learn of the correct temperature and the correct movement required to extract the most energy from the ingredients without burning it.

So, once the cauldron had heated enough, he put in the first ingredient. He knew what to do this time, so he followed what he learned and moved the ingredient around to extract the most energy possible.

Once the ingredient had released almost all of its energy, it started burning and turning to powder. Once that happened, Alex knew it was time to put in the next ingredient.

He chose the next ingredient based on what ingredient was on the cauldron right now. Since the energy released right now was a low amount of Water energy, he decided to use a wood energy ingredient that would absorb the water energy and grow.

He knew that he was very much likely going to burn this ingredient, but he still bit his tongue and put it in. The ingredient was something he had just used last night, so he was quite used to it and knew exactly what it released.

Suddenly, a thought came to him. ”Do I need to create an entirely new temperature and movement for the ingredients, or can I just follow the recipes?” he wondered.

He tried following the instruction for that exact ingredient from other recipes. The same movement at the same temperature, and it worked. He was quite happy when he learned that. So, he chose the next ingredient after that one.

He decided to go for an earth energy ingredient that he could control with the wood energy in the cauldron and thus lower the overall wood energy a bit

Following the previous recipes had worked for the wood energy ingredient, so he decided to do the same for this one as well. However, when he did the same thing for this ingredient, he didn't get his desired result at all.

When he put in the ingredient, everything was fine. But then, he started moving the ingredient around and it violently released its energy. The amount of earth energy that was released was very large in a very short amount of time.

The same thing happened in the other pill recipe as well, and it was helpful there as it was required to rein in the high fire energy, but in the current one where the existing energy was wood, the violent release of energy sought to ruin all of the wood energy in the cauldron.

As soon as that happened, Alex was sure what was going to happen next. He quickly used his Qi to grasp the entire cauldron and threw it as far away as he possibly could.