"I failed in the end", I muttered looking at the black smoke that was coming out o the cauldron in front of me.
There was no evident expression noticeable from my voice since the result was not surprising.
I had already expected to fail so this was expected.
The only thing I could say was unexpected was that I thought that the benefits provided by my job could allow me to barely concoct a pill and even if it doesn't I should have almost reached it but looking at everything, it appears that even with all the advantages provided to me, bad execution at something and in this case, the new techniques I had to use, was something that could not be instantly fixed or reduced by external forces regardless of how powerful it is.
From all this, it was easy to see that the reason for my failure was not caused by the way the herbs were processed but by the way, I executed the techniques that were meant to be used on the herbal solution in the cauldron but because of the way I badly executed the techniques, it leads to the whole process getting destroyed.
The result of this was of course getting to have to pill and the one which was the most important for me was the wastage o valuable materials but there was nothing I could do as I would have to try again.
It was not like I didn't gain anything from the recent experiment so it was good in the end for me if viewed from another angle.
As I thought of these things, I repositioned the cauldron in a way that would make it comfortable and easier to bring out the waste in it as I thought back to what caused me to fail in the first step.
I was confident that I had initially started the concocting process well and this confidence of mine was gotten from all the pills I had concocted in the past since the initial steps to concoct an unranked pill and a rank 1 mana pill were the same so I was sure that there was not a problem.
Although the steps were the same, it was obviously going to be different from the unranked pill route for a number of reasons and one being the level of the herbs used.
The herbs used to concoct the unranked pill were less valuable than ranked pills which meant that the latter required more attention but even then, I knew I did not make a mistake in this part.
I was so sure of this because it was only when I started to use the new techniques things started to go south.
Putting aside the pill-forming technique that for some reason also had to be used when the other techniques were also been used during their time, the two techniques; the extraction and purification technique were a little more complex due to their effects.
Just from the name alone, it was easy to recognize that the extraction technique was used to extract something. The extraction technique required Alchemists to extract certain specific ingredients, components, compounds or substances from the herbs.
The ingredients, components, compounds or substance that was being extracted was actually the impurities from the solution made by the herbs in the cauldron.
The extraction process allows the alchemist to isolate and concentrate impurities from the solution out of what was going to be used to form the pill to make it more potent since in this case, the impurities were actively being extracted by the alchemist.
This was the reason why the pill-forming technique still needed to be used with the other techniques as it also assisted in the extracting process.
This extraction technique could actually be seen as a god rank technique and although it was a little exaggerated, there was a reason for this.
Something that all alchemists bother with including me and the ones who ends up taking the pill was the impurity in it so anything that could help in this matter that will later continue to plague alchemists and the one who ends up taking the pill for a long time could as well be seen as god sent.
The reason why this useful technique was actually not used in making unranked pills was simple.
The technique simply required a lot of mana to use and alchemist that would bother with making unranked pills in the first place were most likely unranked species so there was no way most of them would even have the mana to sustain using the extraction technique.
This only furthers my thought that starting with the rank 1 mana pill was a good decision.
Unfortunately, I performed badly in my execution of this particular technique which led to the destruction of everything I had been doing from the start.
I wasn't even able to completely start the purification technique that came after the extracting process
The purification technique could also be seen as god sent since it was something that helped in matters relating to the impurities in pills.
Just like the extraction technique, the use of the purification technique could also be figured out from its name but its application was slightly different.
The purification technique is used immediately after a short duration after the previous technique was used.
How the purification technique worked was that once the specific wanted and unneeded substances had been extracted, alchemists would then take it a step further by spreading out their mana to the processed solution in the cauldron that had already had the impurity in it extracted from it and perform something like a 'scanning process'.
The scanning process was actually just the alchemist using their mana to search for hidden impurities that were able to stay hidden from the extraction technique when it was used.
The purification technique was what was used to scan the solution so the alchemist can use the extraction technique again to further purify the solution by removing impurities and unwanted substances.
All of a sudden, because of these techniques, pill-making suddenly appeared much more difficult to do.
If rank 1 was like this then how difficult would it be to concoct pills above rank 1?
Putting pills aside, how difficult would it be to create ranked items because I was sure that the difficulty of creating an item from scratch should be no less difficult than concocting pills and might, in fact, be more difficult depending on the situation.
This was not what my mind was one though. It was something else.
Since the extraction and purification technique made it so that impurities could always be found and removed, what happens when all the impurity in a pill is gone?
It was because of this, a certain knowledge also got triggered.
The end result of having an impurity-free pill is a perfect pill.
*Sigh
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