Since a cauldron was out of reach of what the Desert Flame Tribe could get their hands on, and even if they had, he had no means to purchase, Min Hong had no choice but to settle for using the good old wok.
However, before he began, he heated the empty wok with his flame, getting it accustomed to the type of flame and heat it would soon be working with.
After that, the woks entire surface caked up and cracked, before revealing a metallic sheen beneath its charred surface.
Min Hong crushed and blew away these ashes before pouring the leftover potion he drank the last time. Having its outer skin shed off meant the entire surface was now opened to absorbing whatever was placed or poured into it.
Thus, the moment, Min Hong poured in the potion into it, the wok sucked everything up, before releasing a much more brilliant steely sheen. After feeding the wok enough potion, the wok itself began to release a unique medicinal aroma of its own.
Seeing that the wok was now ready for some alchemy, Min Hong then placed the herbs he purchased from the market in, one after the other.
Since the open surface of the wok had been sealed up by the potion Min Hong had initially poured in, it didn't absorb any shred of the herb's efficacy and simply burnt off the unnecessary extras, leaving only the pure essence extract behind in form of a multicolored powder.
Upon repeating the same process with the rest of the medicinal herbs, Min Hong finally scooped away the different colored powder and placed them into a jug which he then filled up with crystal clean water.
Warming up the jug with the flame wisp and swiveling it at specific intervals, Min Hong finally created the Qi Restoring Potion.
At this point, Min Hong was already totally exhausted, thus, after resting for a short period of time, he took a deep breath and prepared himself to officially begin the concocting the potion needed to cultivate the preparatory phase: the Phoenix Rebirth Potion.
To concoct the Qi Restoring Potion, Min Hong had to purify over thirty types of medicinal herbs one after the other, using up about three hours of his time whilst leaving him covered in sweat and panting for his dear life.
Concocting potions wasn't the same thing as refining pills. Whilst pills would have their impurities molded into them and the purged afterwards, the impurities of an herb, when concocting a potion, needed to be removed to the best of the alchemist's abilities first, before it is then mixed and watered to form a potion.
Whilst alchemists could rely on the energy of heaven and earth during the refining of a pill, there was no such thing when concocting, because one couldn't use Qi to burn away the impurities of an herb here, before extracting the essence.
The herb purification and essence extraction in potion concoction is totally dependent on the alchemist's ability to manipulate every property of their flame, and their detailed understanding of the properties of the herbs they were working with; otherwise, they would fail.
Potions are generally far better than pills in the sense that they are almost always over 90 percent pure; after all, the alchemist was required to remove the impurities and extract the essence of the herbs before they created potions.
The difficulty of the herb purification process in potion making is another notch more rigorous, tiring and difficult than most pill refining process.
If the alchemist wasn't an expert, they might end up with only 1:1,000 ratio of extracted essence in comparison to the size or volume of the herbs they were purifying.
Thus, there was an added layer of requirement for a potion alchemist as compared to a pill alchemist, and that was based on the volume of essence they could retain during the essence extraction process.
Furthermore, there was also the intermittent requirement to open the cauldron lid at perfectly timed interval; after all, the impurities of the herbs are meant to be evaporated away; hence, the cauldron lid needed to be open to allow these charred impurities float out of the cauldron.
This step is extremely important and intricate since the opening of the cauldron lid would most definitely cause a change in the internal temperature and a slight lapse in the alchemist's concentration; after all, the lid opening was another intricately measured process on its own.
This is exactly why alchemists refuse to concoct potions; it was simply too intricate, problematic, wasteful, time consuming and an exorbitantly expensive task.
Thus, almost all alchemists would simply refine pills instead, since a large majority of the herb volume would be retained; however, at the expense of the level of its purity and efficacy.
Thus, one could say Min Hong was currently starting his alchemic journey by going down the most difficult and rarely traversed route.
However, this decision was in no way by choice, but due to an extremely dichotomous reason.
On the one hand, Min Hong's insecurity about the quality and power of his flame is what made him dread pill refining.
On the other hand, however; it was the Shrine Protector's endless knowledge on alchemy that gave him the confidence in retaining a greater volume of extracted herb essence.
Thus, he felt that since he could retain higher volume of extracted herb essence as compared to being able to refine a top-grade pill due to his insecurities, Min Hong had subconsciously taken the potion concocting route.
Though he was oblivious to all these reasons and simply made these decisions due to overthinking his insecurities and using his instincts, Min Hong would later find out why the decision he made on this day would forever change his future for the better.
After getting stronger and amplifying his soul flame to burn off his insecurities, perhaps he would continue to go down the potion concocting or finally change to pill refining, or stick with both, only time will tell.
Regardless of all these however, the fact of the matter still remains that the soul flame wisp in Min Hong's hand was of far too weak for even the volume of purification he was about to begin; after all, extracting the essences of about thirty herbs was no joke, especially for someone who can't directly sense or absorb the energy of heaven and earth yet.
But what other choice did he have other than to use the only method that he had?
First of all, the challenges Min Hong was facing, was the fact that he had no shred Qi whatsoever in his body, and thus he didn't have the necessary strength to sustain the soul flame, making its strength weak, which in turn meant he would require ten times the effort to obtain half a reward.
Second of all, Min Hong also lacked the knowledge of where to obtain another flame, and even worse, the capability to subdue one, so he would have to settle for the adorable purple wisp for the foreseeable future.
For an alchemist to practice concoction or refining alchemy methods they not only need an ideally strong soul flame, but an ideally powerful Mental Sense and Soul Qi as well, and the most important of these requirements was ideally powerful Mental Sense.
Mental Sense was simply the ability of a martial artist to focus on the tiniest of details, and the scope of which that sensory focus could span. Soul Qi, however, was the energy required to keep a martial artist's Mental Sense active.
In layman's terms, if a cultivator's senses could pick up the details of his environment over a ten-meter radius, in a 10x focused zoom; then their Soul Qi volume would be determined by how long they could maintain this state.
The other two requirements were not that difficult. As for the soul flame, as long as one made proper preparations, one could seize a fire-attribute Magical Beast, extract its essence flame, subdue it and then gradually tame it to obtain steady increase in familiarity with it.
Over ninety-nine percent of all capable alchemists used soul flames.
As for those who possessed extremely powerful strength to fearlessly go in search of a powerful beast and defeat it; then possess ancient inheritances deep enough to extract its essence flame, and then tame it... they were rarer and less than 1:1,000,000 alchemists.
As for those old monsters who could find, subdue and tame the extremely mysterious and mystical heavenly flames... they are simply figures of myths and legends; after all, heavenly flames are sentient and intelligent.
After hours of back-to-back herb essence extractions and intermittent rests, Min Hong snapped his fingers and a wisp of purple flame flickered to like on his index finger.
"Not bad, after going through the several grueling essence extractions, the flame wisp's strength has increased by a slight margin. Whatever, this is still better than nothing, I guess."
After consecutively extracting the ten easiest herbs essence, Min Hong threw the first batch of the more difficult ones into the wok as his Spirit Sense erupted out.
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[Note: Mental Sense < Spirit Sense < Soul Sense... As to why Min Hong has a Spirit Sense, I believe that to be easily obvious by now.]
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The flame in Min Hong's hand suddenly fluctuated as he focused on the nature of the flame and began to condense it further, overlapping some of its innate amplifying properties and locking them in an endless loop that fed into each other.
Eventually, Min Hong succeeded; and the little wisp, though still little, was now about five times as powerful as it was at the start; however, such a reckless action drained his Soul Qi just as fast.
If other alchemists saw what Min Hong was currently doing, they would be stunned silly; however, the person in question simply smiled bitterly. What other choice did he have?
Mental Sense and Soul Qi was the foundation of any alchemical process.
There was already a heavy requirement on the amount of Soul Qi needed to control a soul flame to its finest and tiniest properties, including density and temperature.
If there was even the slightest of deviation, it could waste all of one's previous efforts and causing one to end up with a pile of ash instead.
Furthermore, if the herbs had a very large medicinal energy, and there was an amplification process in the method; at best, one could end up blowing up their cauldrons, but at worst, one could end up creating a medicinal atomic bomb.
Most alchemists wouldn't start expending their Soul Qi right at the beginning of an alchemical process. They would only use it towards the latter stages, when whatever it was, they were concocting or refining was about to emerge in order to very carefully control their soul flame to its finest and tiniest details.
After all, that was the most critical period of any alchemical process.
During this period, one would have to constantly adjust the power and nature of their soul flames; sometimes making it extremely hot and big enough to engulf the contents of their cauldrons, and other times, extremely low and yet still big enough to engulf the contents of their cauldrons.
One might think this only results in four different permutations: hot-large, hot-small, warm-large and warm-small.
However, when one realized that it is not just one herb that would be present within the cauldron and each of these herbs possess uniquely different properties that required a specific flame adjustment that needed to be constantly altered to suit their individual requirements, one would realize that the permutation was truly endless.
Furthermore, all of these was asides the fact that it would require an extremely large consumption of Soul Qi.
Should an alchemist exhaust their Soul Qi before or during this period, all their hard work could basically be considered a failure.
Thus, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call Min Hong's decision to begin expending his Soul Qi right at the start of his concocting process, a futile and fruitless endeavor.
However, when one finally realizes that he was still only using this precious Soul Qi to simply increase his soul flame's power, treating it like firewood; then it would border on the term; absolute madness.
Some alchemists might even fly into a fit and curse at him for doing so. Even if someone was a reckless fool and frivolous spender, they would still do their best to refrain from an expenditure of such level and scale.
However, Min Hong wasn't worried a bit; after all, most alchemist his age or rank would still be on the Mental Sense level, thus, this level of expenditure, though exhausting, was still very much manageable.