Three hours passed in a flash, and all those grandmasters were sweating profusely. They could refine a 1-star magic gem within fifteen minutes if it were any other time.
However, today, they all took three entire hours to carefully combine the magic cores and then purify them while refining the final product.
To refine a high-quality magic gem, it was an essential step to eliminate all the impurities within magic cores, which were mostly collected from magic beasts or some wild races living in the wilderness.
Those impurities include the element of a magic core because if the element were left alone, the magic gem would remain the same as a magic core, non-absorbable.
Meaning the element mana within a magic core couldn't be absorbed by someone else with another element. Even if someone had the same magic element, the mana they could absorb from a raw magic core is 10% before the magic core would turn into dust, and the remaining 90% will go to waste.
