Alchemy Talent

Inside a sealed room, a table made of sturdy, corrosion-resistant moss wood sat in the center, with various bottles and jars arranged neatly upon it.

In the middle of the table sat a crucible, inside which a golden liquid was churning. When the liquid's agitation reached its peak, a pair of hands quickly poured two vials into the crucible, the second added exactly two seconds after the first.

This was Karen, and he was currently engaged in alchemy within his laboratory.

In the game, the most basic items were the Lion King Potion and the Basic Healing Potion, both requiring only two herbs.

Here, the Healing Potion is considered an intermediate concoction, and I currently lack the ability to craft it. What I can make now is this simplest version: the Basic Strength Potion, which provides a minor boost to the user's strength attribute. (Limited to primary-level professionals in strength; those with other attributes must be intermediate-level or higher.)

It seems these potions aren't for everyone; since they contain magic, the average person truly cannot absorb or adapt to them.

Similar items include the Basic Agility Potion and the Basic Intellect Potion; their effects and usage requirements are much the same, all being the most basic of the basic.

Even this lowest-tier potion requires three magical ingredients and seven non-magical ones—a total of ten ingredients to harmonize. The difficulty is worlds apart from the game. In the game, you just click a skill, wait for a bar to fill for a few seconds, and the potion is done. Here, every potion requires multiple steps and absolute focus on the details; even a simple one takes half an hour.

The success rate isn't high either; I've failed dozens of times already. I wonder if this one will succeed.

The liquid in the crucible had fully harmonized and reached a stable state, ready for the final solidification. Karen steadied his nerves and employed an advanced solidification technique to adjust the magical structure of the materials.

Once the operation was complete, Karen poured the liquid from the crucible into a prepared crystal vial. Feeling the stable magic within the liquid and seeing no changes after a gentle shake, it seemed he had finally succeeded.

To craft this single bottle of potion, Karen had spent three full days.

During the initial extraction phase, Karen had only attempted the primitive process a few times just to understand it.

Extracting materials was far too simple and lacked any real challenge; Karen felt there was no need to practice it, as any novice could pick it up immediately. Thus, he didn't want to bother with it himself and simply bought finished, extracted materials.

In any case, he was currently in the experimental phase, buying large quantities of cheap, basic materials.

Karen spent almost no time at all on this stage.

Next came the harmonization phase. Since Karen had skipped the potion-making stage, he spent half a day getting familiar with the process of blending materials.

Although the materials for basic potions didn't contain magic, they still required careful blending.

Most alchemists start by crafting simple potions, gaining plenty of experience in material blending by the time they move on to complex concoctions.

Karen, however, went straight to crafting potions and skipped that step. It didn't matter much, though; it just cost him an extra half-day of practice and a pile of wasted materials. As for the losses from his failures, the wealthy Karen considered it mere pocket change.

For the remaining two and a half days, Karen was locked in a struggle with the blending of materials.

Although the recipe provided detailed instructions on ingredients and methods, the units of measurement were vague—things like "one part," "two parts," or "one breath," "two breaths."

What exactly constituted "one part" or "one breath," or the precise range of measurement, was something that could only be felt, not described. And this was just for one recipe.

One had to remember that every recipe was written by a different person, and everyone's perception of these units surely differed slightly. While these minute differences might not necessarily lead to failure, they would certainly impact the quality of the potion.

Alchemy was clearly a grind; one would need countless attempts to determine the optimal measurements for every single recipe.

This wasn't even the hardest part of the harmonization stage. The true difficulty lay in the process itself.

Exactly when should an ingredient be added? Should it be after the previous materials have harmonized, just as they reach equilibrium, or before? During the addition, should it be poured in all at once, or added in a slow, steady stream?

Sometimes multiple ingredients had to be added simultaneously—should they be added from two sides, mixed at the same contact point, or added sequentially with a tiny interval?

Although these were explained in the recipes, it remained a case of "only to be felt, not described," and one had to figure it out through trial and error.

Furthermore, until you had fully mastered the proportions, you wouldn't know if a failure was due to the measurements or your technique.

After 50 practice runs, Karen had skillfully mastered the alchemy of the Basic Strength Potion by noon. A 2% success rate?

No, the beginning was all experimentation. It was only during the final five attempts that Karen fully mastered it and began the formal production phase. Looking at it that way, he succeeded once every five tries—a 20% success rate—and as his proficiency increased, the success rate would rise as well.

Was this success rate high or low?

According to what Karen knew, a mid-level mage like him would normally have a 10% success rate when first attempting this Basic Strength Potion, rising to 50% once proficient.

It seemed his success rate was actually quite high, exceeding the average. However, having only succeeded once, the data wasn't accurate; he needed more attempts to get a precise figure.

If his average success rate exceeded 20% after making ten bottles, it would mean his talent for alchemy was quite good—he could be considered a minor genius.

Karen continued to craft for another 26 attempts, succeeding 9 times. Adding that to his previous data, he had succeeded 10 times out of 31 attempts, a success rate of over 33%. It seemed he was indeed quite talented at alchemy.

Looking at the quality of the potions: 1 inferior, 5 ordinary, 3 excellent, and 1 superior.

Potion quality was divided from worst to best: inferior, ordinary, excellent, superior, and perfect.

Using the efficacy of an ordinary potion as the baseline, inferior potions were those that were worse than ordinary but hadn't failed. Excellent potions were 20% more effective than ordinary ones, superior were 50% more effective, and perfect were 100% more effective.

Of course, some potions couldn't reach 100% effectiveness; for those, anything exceeding 60% while not falling below the limit published by the Alchemy Guild was also considered a perfect potion.

Potions solidified with ordinary techniques were usually of ordinary quality, with a less than 10% chance of exceeding that. Karen used an advanced technique, which theoretically gave him a 20% chance of producing higher-than-ordinary quality.

Yet, Karen's data showed over 40%, and he had even achieved a superior grade once.

Although he had produced one inferior potion, that was his very first success. It seemed his talent for alchemy was indeed quite good.

He could develop in the direction of alchemy; perhaps in the future, he could reach the pinnacle of the craft as a Grandmaster Alchemist.

After all, he had the talent, he was a long-lived species with plenty of time, and he was wealthy enough to practice without fear of failure or the need to hesitate. Thinking about it, he really was cut out for this. Alright, it was decided: he would focus on this secondary profession.