Chapter 259 : Chapter 259
Chapter 259. Alchemical Inspiration
A few days later, in a spacious house she had rented, Fulan watched liquid and gas mix inside a reaction vessel, producing wisps of purple smoke before passing through a specially made one-way conduit into a designated container.
Then Fulan moved to the side of that container and opened the valves of the two neighboring containers connected to it.
She poured mental power into the system, and the pipes inside began providing force, causing the contents within to surge toward the final container.
In the end, under Fulan’s Harmonization Method, the three substances transformed in an instant into a mass of green liquid, within which faint golden light shimmered.
This was the First-Tier alchemical product Fulan was trying to make: a Life-Replenishing Potion, something that could truly be called a “red health potion.”
The moment Fulan finished producing this alchemical creation, she immediately poured the liquid into an opaque black bottle.
This bottle had been made specifically to store Life-Replenishing Potions.
As the Life-Replenishing Potion flowed into it, the surface of the black bottle abruptly changed color. The black on it turned green.
This time, Fulan had refined a little too much Life-Replenishing Potion. Seeing the green liquid reach the narrow mouth of the bottle, she stopped.
Looking at the remaining green liquid, Fulan saw that faint golden light was still flickering within it, though that golden glow was already becoming sparser and sparser.
Not wanting to waste it, she drank the green liquid down in one gulp. The moment it touched the inside of her mouth, it instantly dissolved and vanished, leaving behind only a streak of golden light.
That streak of golden light went straight into the nearest living being—herself. Fulan immediately felt the vitality in her body increase, and the exhaustion from long hours of potion-making was swept away.
Even some of the mental power she had consumed began to recover. This was the effect of the Life-Replenishing Potion. No matter what injury you had suffered, this potion directly replenished your vitality.
This replenishment of vitality also produced the effect of an Energy Potion without side effects, and it could directly dispel fatigue, allowing the body to rapidly restore mental power.
Because of the materials required and the complexity of the refining process, the price of Life-Replenishing Potions had always remained extremely high on the outside market, at roughly nine gold coins per hundred milliliters.
And after carrying out her calculations and measurements, Fulan discovered that she had produced approximately 850 milliliters of Life-Replenishing Potion in total.
The cost of the materials and equipment she had used to make it came to thirty-seven gold coins, which made her raise an eyebrow. It was actually that profitable?
Her equipment could be reused, and the total cost of all the materials came to only twenty gold coins. Although the profit margin was nowhere near as high as the business she had done back when she was an apprentice—
Life-Replenishing Potions had the advantage of a far higher selling price. If one truly compared these two methods and assumed that every batch could be sold, then making Life-Replenishing Potions was still the faster way to earn money.
Moreover, Fulan refined this kind of potion far faster than ordinary people who produced it, because she had adopted an advanced modular refining process.
She had divided the refining procedure into several parts. For example, with three raw materials that each had time limits, she had specifically calculated the time needed for their reactions, then introduced and transformed the materials at precise moments.
Her method made it very easy to control timing and the amount of each material used, because before she had even begun, she had already determined through experimentation the proportions and timing for each material.
It could be said that her method was extremely advanced by the standards of this world. The idea itself was simple, but people in another world who had never seen such a thing simply would not think of it.
When they refined Life-Replenishing Potions, they did everything entirely by hand. Although they also went through steps involving experimental semi-finished products beforehand, once every material had to be personally handled from beginning to end, mistakes would occur if one was not skilled enough.
And the refining process was under intense time pressure. From time to time, there would be cases where too much of a certain material was added, or the reaction time ran too long, causing some materials to be wasted.
This did not mean Fulan was somehow smarter than the people of this world in this area. It was simply that people in this other world lacked this kind of mindset.
The alchemists here were accustomed to having every material pass through their own hands.
Only that way, in their view, could they better seize from those materials the things they needed. That was the principle they followed.
“It feels like this method of mine could become another paper.”
Fulan rubbed her head, then looked at her panel.
【You have completed the production of a First-Tier alchemical creation. Alchemy proficiency +200】
【Alchemy (Extraordinary) (Proficiency: 13063): You have learned alchemy in the broad sense and are highly familiar with producing alchemical objects.】
The reason her Alchemy had reached Extraordinary-level proficiency was that she had spent some time using an apprentice-level alchemical creation as an experiment and had directly written the Law of Conservation of Energy into it.
After she wrote that paper, her Alchemy had immediately gained over twenty thousand points of proficiency, which delighted her immensely.
But just as she had wanted to continue and write down the other laws of thermodynamics as well, she discovered that even if she wrote all of them out, her Alchemy would not gain even a single additional point of proficiency.
Only after thinking it through did she understand that the issue lay in how the panel judged things, not in anything else.
Her panel could only record those Skills that counted as “Extraordinary” in this world, while ordinary Skills—and the techniques from Earth in her previous life—would not be recorded by the panel.
For example, Fulan could make certain Combat Techniques appear on the panel, such as some kind of swordsmanship with a specific prefix, but she could not make plain, unqualified swordsmanship appear on it, because that simply was not “Extraordinary” at all.
As for the sciences from her previous life, they were not truly “Extraordinary.” It was merely that their principles happened to correspond to those of the genuinely Extraordinary things here.
And among all forms of alchemy, it just so happened that the Law of Conservation of Energy was also followed—though even that might not necessarily be entirely correct.
As for the other laws of thermodynamics, they had largely been derived from pure theory and focused on the crucial concept of “heat,” which did not really overlap much with Alchemy.
That was why Fulan’s Alchemy had gained no proficiency from them. Once you wrote about something that belonged to an entirely different field, it would be strange if the panel gave you anything for it.
Unless Fulan were to demonstrate in detail within a paper that “heat” had an extremely close connection to Alchemy, the panel would absolutely never grant her any proficiency for it.
Setting those thoughts aside, Fulan looked at the updated state of her panel.
【Name: Fulan
Profession: Alchemist (One Star) ... (omitted)
Attributes: Physique: 10.1 Mental: 15.6
Skills: ... (omitted)
Traits: Alchemical Inspiration (When using alchemy, there is a certain probability of triggering the following effects:
1. A positive change occurs in the alchemical creation.
2. The success rate of production increases.
3. The success rate of special alchemy reaches 100%.
The probability is determined by your familiarity with the relevant process during the use of alchemy, as well as your Alchemy proficiency.) ... (omitted)】
When Fulan saw this Trait, she was not surprised at all. It was exactly as she had expected. The Trait granted by Alchemist in the end was one that strengthened production-related work.
If she had chosen a Mage profession from the Alchemy School instead, she would probably have gained a specialization that strengthened Alchemy School spells.
That was also one of the reasons she had chosen the Alchemist profession rather than an Alchemy School Mage profession.
Although judging from the amount of Mental it had added, even if Fulan had not already possessed such a high Mental attribute, this profession still would not have granted much Mental in the first place.
But she did not really need Mental points anymore anyway. Her Mental attribute was already higher than that of 99.99% of mages, so she had little need for more of it.
Rather than spending time piling up so much Mental, it would be better to directly pursue the attribute points gained from advancement.
By comparison, a production-oriented Trait like the one granted by Alchemist was probably more useful to her, since in the future she might run into situations that required alchemical creations.
Still, while Fulan understood the first two effects of this Trait and had even seen related information about them in the preparation of many alchemical creations, what exactly did the third effect mean?
After thinking for a moment, she connected it to something she had once seen in the title of a paper.
Fulan’s eyes lit up. She immediately began searching through the rather tall stack of Selections booklets she had piled up. Pulling a thin booklet from the middle, she flipped to a page from memory.
This page introduced a paper titled “Several Case Studies in Miracle Alchemy.”
At a closer look, Fulan saw that the author of this paper was Elise as well. She could not help thinking that Elise had really written quite a lot of papers.
While going through the papers recommended in these Selections, Fulan had already seen quite a few authored by Elise.
Nearly all of them were achievements related to the Alchemy School, and many of them introduced basic knowledge of the Alchemy School.
After carefully reading the description of this paper in the Selections, Fulan rubbed the page with her fingers for quite a while, then scratched her head.
The Miracle Alchemy described above had caught her somewhat off guard. If she had to summarize it with a single term, then it would be “gacha.”
This form of alchemy involved directly throwing in materials, then using the Skill called Miracle Alchemy to let those materials fuse together within it over a relatively short period of time.
It required no specific materials and no fixed procedure. So long as you used Miracle Alchemy for a short while, there was a chance that you would obtain an alchemical product called a Curio.
There was absolutely no pattern to the production of these Curios. It was pure gacha. Even if you prepared exactly the same materials, the results would still be different—not possibly different, but definitely different.
That was because the same Curio could be made from different materials, but never had any Curio been made from the exact same materials. This Miracle Alchemy was pure gacha.
In ancient times, before the current mainstream form of alchemy had become widespread, it was precisely this Miracle Alchemy that had flourished.
But alchemists eventually grew sick of the uncertainty of this gacha-like process, and once modern alchemy began to take shape, they all turned instead toward the mainstream system used today.
And any research related to Miracle Alchemy was focused either on how to increase the success rate, or on how to use certain combinations to obtain the specific Curio one wanted.
Elise’s paper was the same. It used several examples to explain how to make use of the patterns within Miracle Alchemy.