After waking up, Richie was immediately told by the system that his cauldron had finished upgrading and that his Daly task was available.
After taking out his cauldron,( the upgradeable cauldron ) Richie observed the changes to the cauldron, the cauldron's size had increased by a couple of centimetres and the material of the cauldron seemed to be quite a lot more sturdy, but that was it, Richie kind of expected more from a system upgraded cauldron.
Richie took a quick glance at the next upgrade cost, it costed 100 alchemy tokens, if this trend were to keep up, Richie would soon need billions or even trillions to upgrade the cauldron, Richie just didn't think it was worth it.
But the system assure him that the trend of the price increasing by ten times would not continue and that after upgrading the cauldron 5 time, it would become a lot better than the hellfire cauldron.
After being disappointed by the cauldron's upgrade, Richie started concocting another qi gathering pill, he knew he would need a lot of these.
For a qi gathering pill, Richie would need 2 stalks of spirit grass( rich in qi), one spirit fruit, and one core of any spirit animal.
Spirit animals were like spirit beasts, but they are a lot more docile and friendly, they also have extremely good meat and warm and fluffy fur (if the animal is a furry).
But most importantly, they have cores, these cores are like spirit beast cores, except the qi inside them is not useable at all, but that doesn't mean they don't have any uses.
the cores are extremely useful to alchemists, the qi in them is an essential ingredient in all pills, it helps the properties of the herbs inside the cauldron to not escape when being refined.
After an alchemist manages to perfectly burn the herbs and refine out all of the good properties, the alchemist can then burn the core into a small pill, this is the most important part of creating a pill, of the shaping of the core fails, all of the herb's spiritual essence and other properties would diffuse into the air.
But that is the best case scenario, the worse case scenario would be when the spiritual essence ,which was stored inside the core, (after refinement) goes crazy after being stored in an container. ( the core )
The spiritual essence would then blow up the cauldron and everything around it, hundreds of alchemists die of cauldron explosions per day, this is why the final part of making a pill is so important.
Richie then bought all of these ingredients from the system, the total came out to be around 200 gold coins.
Every time Richie bought herbs from the system, or any other alchemy resources, he would secretly curse the system in the back of his mind, he knew he was getting scammed, in the market, he could buy all the resources needed to make a qi gathering pill for only 40 gold coins.
After buying the resources from the system, Richie began to concoct the pill.
He first started out by raising the temperature of the fire underneath the furnace to around 1000 degrees Celsius, this was the perfect heat to extract most of the useful properties of the spirit grass.
He then dropped one spirit grass in the furnace and waited exactly 25.35 seconds before spiking the heat up to 2000 degrees.
He threw the spirit fruit into the cauldron and then right after, threw the core into the cauldron.
By now, most of the good properties in the spirit grass were trapped inside the core, this allowed Richie to turn the temperature up to 3000 degrees, an extremely high temperature even for cultivators at the second realm.
this was a good temperature to perfectly extract the spiritual energy from the fruit.
There were beads of sweat rolling down Richie's face, almost all of his qi had been used sustaining the high temperature fire.
After he was sure that all of the spirit energy from the spirit fruit was trapped in the core, Richie threw the last stalk of spirit grass into the furnace.
Now Richie brought the temperature down to 1000 degrees, but suddenly Richie experienced a lapse in concentration.
This made the temperature drop to 500 degrees. when Richie tried to fix it, the temperature skyrocketed to 1750 degrees, this was bad.
At such a temperature, most of the good properties of the spirit grass would diffuse into the core, but the bad properties would diffuse in as well, the more 'impurities' in the core, the higher the chance was of somthing going wrong in the final stages, and it would also just make the pill generally weaker and less effective.
Richie then took a deep breath and slowly moved the temperature of the fire down to 1200 degrees, he couldn't move the temperature any further down as he had run out of time.
Now that all of the useful properties had been extracted out of the herbs, Richie was now able to start the final phase in pill refinement.
Richie launched the temperature up to 4000 degrees, his current limit due to his weak fire resistance.
Richie had to complete this phase quickly, by his estimations, he would have around 55 seconds to finish refining the pill or else he would use up all of his qi, to be honest, this was the best looking pill that he had ever formed, he had high expectations for the pill.
After the temperature reached 4000 degrees, Richie began controlling the fire to burn and kind of cauterize the core, the fire was burning the outside of the core whilst Richie sent some of his limited yin and yang qi into the core through tiny holes that he had poked into the core with his qi.
After his qi managed to get into the core, the fire had sealed the core, he controlled his yin and yang qi to go into the herb essence (the useful properties).
The yin and yang qi then began to react violently, the core started shaking and the fire which was slowly compressing it into a pill wavered.
The yin and yang qi was about to react with each other, this was now the most important part of the yin-yang harmonisation technique which he learned from the system.
If he messed this up, the effects would be...
disastrous.