Alchemy Talent

In a sealed room, a sturdy, corrosion-resistant table made of mosswood stood in the center. Bottles and jars were neatly arranged across its surface.

At the center of the table sat a cauldron. Golden liquid churned inside it, and just as it bubbled most violently, a pair of hands quickly poured two bottles of liquid into the cauldron. The second was added two seconds after the first.

This was Karen, working on alchemy in his Alchemy Laboratory.

"In the game, the most basic potions are the Lion King Potion and the Basic Healing Potion. Both only need two herbs.

"Here, Healing Potions are intermediate-level, and I don't have the ability to make them yet. The simplest potion I can make now is this Basic Strength Potion, which slightly increases the user's Strength attribute. (For beginner-level classes with a Strength attribute; users with other attributes must be intermediate-level or higher.)

"Apparently, not just anyone can use these potions. They contain magic, after all, and ordinary people really can't absorb or adapt to it.

"Other potions of the same type include the Basic Agility Potion and the Basic Intellect Potion. Their effects and usage requirements are about the same; they're all the most basic of potions.

"Even this lowest-level potion needs three magical ingredients and seven nonmagical ones. That's ten ingredients to combine, and the difficulty is worlds apart from the game. In the game, you only needed to click the skill and wait a few seconds for the potion to be made. Here, every potion takes several steps, and you have to stay completely focused and watch every detail. Even making a simple potion takes half an hour.

"And the success rate isn't high. I've failed dozens of times already. I wonder if I'll succeed this time."

The liquid in the cauldron had fully blended and reached a stable stage. It was ready for the final solidification. Karen steadied himself and used an advanced solidification technique to adjust the magical structure of the ingredients until they solidified.

Once he was done, Karen poured the liquid from the cauldron into a prepared crystal bottle. He sensed that the magic in the liquid had stabilized. Giving the bottle a shake, he saw no change. It looked like he'd finally succeeded.

Karen had spent a full three days making this potion.

At first, during the extraction stage, Karen tried the basic extraction process a few times just to get a feel for it.

Extracting the ingredients was so simple and easy that Karen saw no need to practice. Any beginner could do it, so he didn't want to handle it himself. He simply bought ingredients that had already been extracted.

Besides, he was still in the experimental stage, and he was buying basic ingredients in bulk because they were cheap.

He had spent almost no time on this stage.

Next came the blending stage. Since Karen had skipped the potion-making stage, he wasn't familiar with blending the ingredients, and it took him half a day to get the hang of it.

Although the ingredients for potions didn't contain magical materials, they still needed to be blended.

Most alchemists started by making potions, so by the time they moved on to elixirs, they already had plenty of experience blending ingredients.

Karen had gone straight to making elixirs and skipped that step. But it wasn't a big deal; he'd only spent an extra half day learning the process and wasted a pile of ingredients. As for the cost of his failures, to a rich man, it was just pocket change.

For the next two and a half days, Karen kept working on blending the ingredients.

The recipe described the ingredients and procedures in detail, but its units of measurement were things like "one portion" or "two breaths."

What exactly counted as one portion or one breath, or how to measure them precisely, was something you could only grasp intuitively. And that was just one recipe.

After all, every recipe had been written by a different person, and each person's understanding of these units was bound to differ slightly. That slight difference might not necessarily cause a failure, but it would certainly affect the potion's quality.

Alchemy was clearly a painstaking craft. It would take who knew how many attempts to find the ideal measurements for every recipe.

That wasn't even the tricky part of the blending stage. The real difficulty was in the blending process itself.

When exactly should you add each ingredient? After the previous ingredients had fully blended, as soon as they reached equilibrium, or before they did? Should you add everything at once, or pour it in slowly, little by little?

Sometimes you had to add multiple ingredients together. Should you pour them in from opposite sides, mix them at the same point, or add them one after another with only a short interval between?

Although the recipes explained all this, it was still the same story: the instructions could only be understood intuitively, not explained outright. You had to figure it out for yourself.

And until you'd mastered the measurements, you wouldn't know whether a mistake came from the quantity or your blending technique.

After fifty tries, Karen had become proficient at making the Basic Strength Potion by noon. His success rate was 2%?

No. The first attempts had all been experiments. It was only in the final five tries that Karen had fully mastered the process and begun making potions in earnest. So he'd succeeded once in five attempts, for a 20% success rate, and it would improve as he gained more practice.

Was that a high or low success rate?

From what Karen knew, a mage of his intermediate level would normally have a 10% success rate when first making this Basic Strength Potion, rising to 50% with practice.

It seemed his success rate was pretty good, above average. But one success wasn't enough data; he'd need to try more times to get an accurate figure.

If his average success rate exceeded 20% after making ten potions, that would mean he had a decent talent for alchemy—he might even be considered a minor prodigy.

Karen went on to make the potion another twenty-six times and succeeded nine times. Including his earlier attempt, he'd succeeded ten times in thirty-one tries, for a success rate above 33%. It seemed he really did have a talent for alchemy.

Now to check the potion quality: one was inferior, five were ordinary, three were excellent, and one was outstanding.

Potion quality, from worst to best, was divided into inferior, ordinary, excellent, outstanding, and perfect.

Compared with an ordinary potion's effects, an inferior potion had weaker effects but wasn't a failure. An excellent potion's effects were 20% stronger than an ordinary potion's, an outstanding potion's were 50% stronger, and a perfect potion's were 100% stronger.

Of course, some potions couldn't possibly exceed an ordinary potion's effects by 100%. For those, a potion was also considered perfect if its effects exceeded the ordinary version by 60% and were no more than 5% below the limit published by the Alchemy Guild.

Potions solidified with ordinary techniques were generally ordinary quality, and the chance of producing anything above ordinary quality was less than 10%. Since Karen used an advanced technique, the theoretical chance of getting above ordinary quality was 20%.

But Karen's results were above 40%, and one potion had even reached outstanding quality.

Although one potion had turned out inferior, that was the first one he'd successfully made. It seemed his talent for alchemy really was pretty good.

He could develop his alchemy skills. Perhaps one day he could reach the pinnacle of the field and become a master alchemist.

After all, he had talent, and as a long-lived race, he had all the time in the world. He was rich, too, so he could afford to practice without fearing failure and keep trying new things. Come to think of it, he really was made for this. All right, he'd decided: he'd focus on his secondary profession first.