Merri's Alchemy room was surprisingly small. This was not on purpose, but rather a by-product of the house never having been designed to have an alchemy room. Instead, one of the many vacant offices was repurposed for her personal use.
There were no chairs in the room, nor were there any windows. In order to maximize the space she had available, Merri got rid of those. She devoted pretty much the entirety of the wall space to material and tool storage. Even the table she used for preparation was covered in drawers and hooks. The only places free of the airtight cabinets were one of the corners of the room where she actually performed alchemy and the faucet, both clearly spots that necessitated space free.
Despite the airtight nature of the various drawers and cabinets, it would have been impossible for Breda to miss the very clear, and extremely pungent, smell of the air. It would be entirely reasonable to say the air could be tasted.
All sorts of scents filled the air. Some were fruity, others sweet, a few notes of sour as well, but the overwhelming majority of the scents were bitter.
Breda was currently experiencing something of a shock to her system as the smells overwhelmed her.
Merri, very familiar with her field, simply let her get used to it for a bit as she set out to prepare.
The healing salve she was preparing to create was one of her now ruined sect's specialties. It could be considered the single most influential product their growth, not because it sold well to the more powerful and rich cultivators, but because it was so cheap to make it could be sold quite profitably to the lower classes of cultivators.
It was also relatively easy to make as far as alchemical recipes were concerned, so whenever the disciples needed to practice their basic skills, that was the go-to recipe. It helped keep up production as well.
Unfortunately the recipe was 'lost' with the downfall of her sect and the recipe was never written down by anyone. It was often considered a shame by the community that they never thought to write something so basic down.
The reason for not doing so was obviously to keep the competition from imposing on their monopoly, but they should have had at least one copy.
Luckily for Arc and unfortunately for the majority of alchemical associations out there. Merri still knew how to make such a salve, and she was damned good at it too.
For the low price of 75 gold pieces and three hours of concentration, she could make a batch of salve capable of being sold for up to 500. If she doubled the time it took by taking extra steps, she could make it more potent, doubling the sale price in turn.
Of course she didn't LIKE doing such a thing, but for Arc's development she was more than willing to suffer three more hours. Besides, this time she had help.
She estimated that she could cut off a good hour or two just by having someone else help prepare ingredients.
Just as Breda's overload subsided (something that included a fair few bouts of coughing and tearing up), Merri finished setting up the materials in a simple manner.
"You ready to start preparing materials?"
"Ah! Yes! What do I need to do?"
Merri gestured towards the table with various herbs, dried fruits, leaves, and tools lined up. "Cut what I say to cut, grind what I tell you to grind, and mix what I tell you to mix. Keep the tools clean in between ingredients. Once you finish with that, start a small flame under the cauldron and fill it with four of this size bucket of water. The flame under the cauldron will keep itself stable and at a proper intensity. You are pretty much done after that." She handed a knife to Breda handle first. "Time is of the essence, but you don't have to rush."
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The very first thing that Breda took note of once she began cutting was the quality of the tools she was using. The knife especially was extremely sharp. It cut through ingredients with little resistance and held its edge extremely well. While those qualities were certainly notable, they were not really surprising. What caught her off guard was how easy it was to clean.
All of the tools she used, and consequently cleaned, seemed to actively reject the contamination of the ingredients. The cleaning seemed to take no time at all. The most impressive of the tools at her disposal in this regard was definitely the mortar and pestle, she didn't even need to scrape out debris to clean it, it all just fell out.
The ingredients she was processing also surprised her. Some very expensive fruits, a few stalks of different grasses, a whole heap of leaves (which she was required to squeeze into a bucket), some bright blue rocks that acted like chalk, an orange herb that flexed in one direction but crumbled in the other. There were clumps of what looked like green tree bark she was told to shred and put into a small pot of boiling water, where they promptly turned a deep ocean blue. She was told to burn a pot of berries and place the ash in a bottle of alcohol.
As much as she wanted to ask questions, Breda determined that she would be unable to understand the answers. She just did as she was told.
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Merri was unfazed by her assistant's awe. She had seen it all before.
Instead she focused on properly combining the ingredients and setting them in proper order for combination. The two most important ingredients for this recipe are the condensing agent, the part of the recipe that actually made the gel a gel, and the regenerative agent, which did the regenerating. Neither of these are particularly hard to make, in fact many other alchemists use similar recipes to what Merri does for this very formula, it is the process by which the regenerating agent is attached to the condensing agent that is the so called 'secret'.