A couple of days had passed since Thunder Cloud Apparels had opened for business. Yun Lei had worked hard the last week so he just wanted to relax for a bit before moving on to opening the restaurant.
Of course, he didn't spend this entire time doing nothing. Atop the table, there were several books on the same topic: alchemy.
As he had seen on the centre street, an apothecary seemed to be one of those places that were never empty. Even in the small ones not endorsed by the Alchemists Guild, there was a constant flow of people.
The Yun Family didn't have any alchemists under their hire and purchased most of their pills and medicines from third parties.
Yun Lei, of course, didn't like this. Being dependent on someone else for something as essential as medicine didn't sit right with him. Of course, he also saw it as a big waste of money.
Thus, he had been studying alchemy himself. His very brief study about the subject before had led him to the conclusion that you needed a lot of profound energy to be able to make pills. But the more he read, the more he thought it might be possible for him to become an alchemist.
Rather than the amount of profound energy, how well one could control it was far more important.
How could cultivators control profound energy in the first place? Yun Lei had seen many attempts to answer that question in the library.
Some suggested that the amount of profound energy one could store in their body was proportional to their control of it. This made sense in a practical setting given that the higher one's realm of cultivation was, the finer their control over profound energy would be.
Yun Lei knew that the amount of profound energy had no correlation with control over it. This was because he had already figured out in the past that he could control the profound energy other people let out of their bodies. Which should have been impossible since he didn't have any profound energy in his body, at all.
Rather, it was impossible for everyone else but him, since they could only control the profound energy in their own body. He wasn't sure about why that was. He could speculate but it would just be a shot in the dark.
But it had told him the answer that many had tried to find before. Soul Strength, that was what allowed cultivators to control profound energy.
The energy of the soul was something that belonged entirely to the cultivator, unlike profound energy. In a sense, it was almost like a limb that people could control. And with that limb, they could exhibit influence over profound energy.
Although there appeared to be no methods one could use to directly increase soul strength, profound cultivation had the side effect of strengthening the soul. Just like how a limb would be more developed with greater use, so too did soul strength.
All of this meant that Yun Lei's control over profound energy was much finer than most people. His soul strength was higher than any other person he had ever seen before.
The more he thought about it, the more it made sense. His soul was severely damaged yet he could still fully control his body using his soul strength as a crutch. It was bound to be higher since he was constantly exerting it.
So, he was quite suited for alchemy with the exception of the issue that he didn't have any profound energy. But there was a solution to that issue. Two, in fact.
One was to simply have a cultivator sit beside him and have them release profound energy whenever he needed it. This method was a bit janky since he couldn't simply extract the energy directly and needed to let the cultivator know when to release it. This would inevitably lead to inaccuracies in the alchemic process as he had to split his focus.
The other was profound crystals. Profound crystals were the crystallised form of profound energy. They were found in many shapes and sizes but the main method of acquiring them was through mining.
Cultivators used it as a currency and they could also directly extract profound energy from it and use it for cultivation.
Since the energy was nice and gathered up in a single spot, cultivating with a profound crystal was a lot faster than normal cultivation.
They did have a fatal flaw, though. Most of them carried impurities. Absorbing one or two crystals didn't have much of an effect but higher amounts led to the accumulation of impurities in the body.
For Yun Lei's intended use, they were perfect little packages of profound energy. Sure, the impurities would mean that the pills would be an inferior product but that was much better than having no product at all.
"Young Master." The one to speak was Senior Mo. Standing behind him were Situ Yue as well as a few other maids.
"Ah, you brought everything I asked for. Please, leave it on the table."
Yun Lei hadn't met Senior Mo since their talk atop that carriage but he didn't want to rush the old man into making a decision. He had asked for some profound crystals to be delivered to him and they couldn't exactly be left in the hands of a servant so Senior Mo had come himself.
As for Situ Yue, he had sent her to fetch some ingredients from the market and the other maids were there to deliver an alchemical cauldron. There was no one to use the thing so it had just been rotting away in the storage.
The crystals were stored in jade boxes which stopped the energy in them from slowly leaking away. Most medical ingredients would receive the same treatment but the ones he had asked for this time weren't precious enough for such precautions to be taken.
After studying the alchemy books, Yun Lei had already picked the pill he wanted to try making first. Of course, his method would work in theory but without trying it out, there was no way to tell. Thus, the first pill not only had to be easy to make, but it also had to constitute of cheap ingredients whose loss wouldn't cause much of a harm.
Thankfully, there was a pill that was perfect for what he wanted and its recipe was spread far and wide. Blood Clotting Pills, rank 1. It was the pill every aspiring alchemist needed to be capable of making to receive an acknowledgement from the Guild as a beginner.
Although it was easy to make, as all rank 1 pills were, and relatively common, it was one of the pills that was bought and sold the most. The reason wasn't hard to understand.
In a battle, one would get injured and when one got injured, they would start bleeding. Blood loss was a silent killer, one of the most common ways to die. Preventing that was precisely the job of a Blood Clotting Pill.
It did exactly the job its name suggested. It encouraged the formation of blood clots, decreasing bleeding. It also helped the healing factor of the body very, very slightly.
"Thank you." Yun Lei spoke before everyone left the room. Senior Mo hesitated for a bit, opening and closing his mouth a few times but he too left not long after.
After closing the door, Yun Lei got to work. He had already prepared some wood for the fire. Doing such a thing in an enclosed space wasn't a good idea but he couldn't just do it in the open. Going around flaunting his abilities would never be a good idea.
Alongside the wood, a mortar and pestle and some water had been prepared as well.
The first thing to do before making any pill was to prepare the ingredients. In this case, there were three. Yarrow, yellow hazel and winter lotus. Yarrow and yellow hazel were common ingredients while winter lotus was a little harder to get as it only grew in the winter.
The medical effects of both yarrow and yellow hazel, in the case of the pill he was going to make, was quite similar. They slowed down bleeding and helped to form clots. Winter lotus added a bit of healing power to the pill and also helped to hold all the ingredients together.
The yarrow needed to be ground into powder first and it would be the base of the pill, that is, the ingredient that made up most of its composition.
Yun Lei lit a fire before setting the cauldron atop it. It was quite small, the size of a human head but from the craftmanship alone, one could tell that it was very expensive. After the cauldron heated up, he slowly poured water into it.
The entire room was filled with the sizzling sound before more water was poured in and the sound was quickly drowned out. The water had to be brought to a boil before any of the ingredients could be added. Doing this was said to result in a better pill as well as lower impurities.
When the water started boiling, Yun Lei added the first ingredient, the yarrow powder. The water quickly turned cloudy as the white powder started mixing in it. He stirred the mixture with a ladle for a little while until it was time to add the remaining ingredients.
The yellow hazel was added into the mix with one of Yun Lei's hands while the other continuously stirred. When the winter lotus was added, a fragrant smell began to arise from the mixture.
Finally, it was time to put the lid on the cauldron and the true alchemical process could finally begin. Unlike most other cauldrons, the lids of alchemical ones had large holes atop them. This hole was used later in the process to let the water out as steam as the mixture was slowly reduced.
Pulling out a profound crystal from its jade box, Yun Lei began extracting energy from it. A good chunk of it was slowly guided into the cauldron before the remaining bit was used to seal the hole. He quickly tossed the crystal, which had shrunk significantly, aside. The pill needed all his attention.
Controlling profound energy had always felt weird to him. If he had to describe it, it was like moving his finger, except that the finger was very difficult to control and not attached to his body in any way. With the profound energy that was inside the cauldron, he could feel everything that was happening.
The yellow hazel and winter lotus had already withered and their medical efficacy had dissolved in the water. The next step of the process was to separate the water with medical efficacy while letting the rest boil off.
Slowly guiding the profound energy, he formed a spherical bubble with it. As the boiling water moved around, he carefully trapped the medical efficacy in it while letting the rest leave. This process continued until he felt that he had trapped everything.
Of course, he had no experience with the process so his feelings could have been entirely wrong. But for his first pill, he would rather end up with something barely useable than nothing at all.
He slowly unsealed the hole, and steam began rushing out. During the entire process, the profound energy under his control had been decreasing, slowly but surely. Profound energy was the aura of the heavens and the earth. Cultivators could control it for a short period of time but they would eventually return from where they came.
After all the water that wasn't trapped in his energy bubble boiled off, he sealed the hole once more and began the same process of separation again. The water without efficacy was let out while the rest remained trapped. The bubble slowly decreased in size, becoming smaller and smaller as time passed.
Upon the third time this process was repeated, the only thing remaining was a brownish sludge. He compressed the bubble, squeezing the sludge into the shape of a pill as the heat of the cauldron dried it.
Yun Lei was drenched in sweat, both from the heat and the long period of exertion but there was a big smile on his face.
He had done it.