Alex took a deep breath and prepared himself. Once the cauldron was at the right temperature, he put in the first ingredient. Thanks to his spiritual sense, he could see what was happening inside the cauldron to a frighteningly accurate degree.
As he moved the ingredient around, slowly burning it, he felt the ingredient release some energy from within it. He felt some of the released energy move back into the now powder ingredient while some hung about in the air inside the cauldron. Some energy even flew out of the cauldron.
He tried to catch them with his Qi, but the energy seemed to just phase through it. Ma Rong watched every step of his. She could see how accurate his Qi manipulation was and how accurate his temperature changing ability was.
Alex put in the second ingredient. The same thing happened with this one as well. Energy release out of the second ingredient as well. However, somehow the energy from the first ingredient immediately moved towards the newly released energy and 'devoured' it. He could feel the energy was still there, but somehow the 'feeling' the energy gave off was changed.
'Am I feeling the elements in the energy?' he thought.
He continued with the pill formation. Due to his increased mental capacity and being able to handle more than 5 things at once, he was able to easily handle the pill-making process.
From the first ingredient to the last ingredient, he felt like he made little to no mistake. A lot of the energy skipped out of the cauldron, but that wasn't something he could control.
By this time, the ingredients had turned to powder, and the energy behind them had harmonized to some level. Now it was time to form the pill.
He slowly started to condense the powders into a pill. There were 2 sets of energies inside the cauldron now. The ones in the powder, and the ones in the air.
As he started to condense the powder to form a pill, the energy in the air started to skip out of the cauldron. Almost half the energy from the ingredients was in the air, and somehow it had been lost now.
He stopped caring about that and started focusing on the pill formation. Soon, a pill was finally done being formed. Alex slowly took it out and looked at it,
[Qi Improving Pill: 26%
Improved Cultivation speed by 26% for 18 hours]
Alex couldn't process what he was seeing. '26%… that- that's an earth grade pill, right?' he thought. Suddenly, the pill started floating and landed on Ma Rong's hand.
"An earth grade pill!!" she somehow had a shocked face as well as a face of understanding. "I had expected you to do good, but I didn't think you would improve so much." She said.
"Having a Saint realm cultivator's sense as a self-tempering realm alchemist is practically just cheating." She said with a blank look. She was starting to wonder how much she had improved now that she too had spiritual sense.
She reached into her bag and took out another piece of talisman and handed it to Alex. She then said, "This talisman has information about some of the widely available ingredients. Burn a few of them to release some energies, and try to feel their elements. The better you become at recognizing elements and understanding their relationship, the more you grow as an alchemist."
"Also, Refine the cauldron and you can make better pills." She said
"Master, how do I refine an artifact?" he asked. This was the perfect opportunity. He had tried refining the Ebony Corundum Stiletto but had nearly gotten hurt instead. So he wondered if his idea of refining was wrong.
"Refining is easy. Just pour your Qi into the item, and continuously wash it from the inside. At some point, it will be easier to pour in the Qi, and at that moment, you drop some of your blood to it. The blood must be blood with your essence in it, meaning it must originate in your forehead. "
"We can communicate using this communication talisman." She said and left.
Alex stayed there looking at the talisman. It looked similar to another normal talisman, but instead of storing some text, this talisman helped with communications.
Alex looked inside using his spiritual sense. Ever since unlocking his spiritual sense, he hadn't had to use the system at all. He could do almost everything with his spiritual sense.
The talisman seemed to connect to another talisman only. That talisman was probably on his master. He put the talisman in his bag and looked at the two other information talismans he had acquired.
One of them explained the relationship between the five elements. It didn't talk about the other 2 higher elements Yin and Yang. The other talisman talked about the different ingredients and their elemental affinity.
He read the first talisman for about half an hour and understood the concept behind it. He then read the second talisman and tried to memorize it.
Once he was done, he was shocked at what he had just learned.
'So that's why!!' he thought.
The first ingredient in the recipe for Qi Improving Pill had water energy in it. The second ingredient he put in had fire energy in it. The water energy was vastly stronger in power and amount in this case and had destroyed the fire element behind the second ingredient. Which left the cauldron with a lot of energy but very low water energy in it.
This then played into the next ingredients and so on. Alex decided to try making the same pill once more.