Successful Refinement (Please Keep Reading!)

If you wanted plenty to eat and wear, you had to do it yourself. After all, his Dragon Taming Power talent had quite a demand for supplements.

To put it extravagantly, he could say that he could not go a single meal without them.

One or two packets of medicinal powder were manageable, but relying entirely on buying such huge quantities wholesale from the medicine hall was rather unrealistic for Chen Wei.

Whenever he thought of the strange, faintly pitying look the salesgirl had given him when he had bought several large bags of Vitality Powder from the pharmacy at once last time, Chen Wei's teeth ached.

His body was in great shape, thank you very much. He was a bona fide tough guy.

With that in mind, Chen Wei hurriedly bought enough ingredients on the Beast Taming Mall app for ten batches each of Vitality Powder and Qi-Replenishing Powder, then specifically purchased a clay pot for making medicine.

As for why he had chosen a clay pot instead of an alchemy furnace, Chen Wei could only say that using a clay pot for refining medicine was currently the cheapest and quickest option he could find.

After all, even the small pill furnaces commonly used by apprentice alchemists were a little beyond what Chen Wei could afford.

In just a few minutes, more than ten thousand Star Coins had vanished from his account balance.

Fortunately, the cost of buying medicinal ingredients was not much. Compared with the Vitality Powder sold at Pill Cauldron Medicine Hall for three thousand Star Coins per dose, purchasing the ingredients for one batch of Vitality Powder cost him only a little over three hundred Star Coins.

Thinking of the tenfold difference in price between the two, Chen Wei felt a little pained over all the extra money he had spent on Vitality Powder before.

That afternoon, after returning to his apartment, Chen Wei casually picked up the delivery packed full of bag after bag of medicinal ingredients.

Once in the kitchen, Chen Wei first carefully washed the clay pot in his hands.

After soaking and cleaning it, he poured in plenty of water and began heating the pot.

Looking at all the medicinal ingredients before him, already sorted and packaged, Chen Wei carefully inspected each packet one by one, identifying the names and properties of the herbs.

Chen Wei scratched his head and pondered for a moment before deciding to begin with the simplest thing before him: Vitality Powder.

He first dried most of the herbs in his hands, such as agave, thousand-leaf grass, Dangling ginseng, and purple blossom fruit.

He then used a medicinal grinder to crush the dried herbs separately, grinding them into fine powder with granules of uniform size.

Looking at the dozen or so piles of medicinal powder neatly arranged before him, helplessness flashed through Chen Wei's eyes.

The process by which some alchemists made pills was nowhere near as troublesome as his. They only needed to toss the ingredients directly into an alchemy furnace, then use blazing heat to purify them and extract the medicinal essence in mere seconds.

In his case, refining medicine in a kitchen with insufficient flame temperature, he could only use the clumsy method of drying and grinding.

Medicinal ingredients processed this way would inevitably lose a portion of their trace medicinal properties.

Fortunately, this would only slightly weaken the efficacy of the resulting Vitality Powder and would not affect the success rate.

The ingredients were ready. Before formally beginning the refinement, Chen Wei still uneasily glanced at the notebook in his hand.

Although the process recorded in it was extremely detailed, with every point requiring attention during medicine-making specially emphasized, he was still somewhat nervous.

Slowly exhaling a breath of stale air, Chen Wei first turned the stove up to its highest heat.

Once he felt that the temperature inside the clay pot was about right, he hurriedly poured a bowl of Jade Dew Water into it.

Watching the Jade Dew Water gradually come to a boil in the clay pot, he added the powdered agave.

At once, a faint medicinal fragrance slowly drifted through the kitchen.

Chen Wei fixed his full attention on the pale-gray medicinal liquid before him as it underwent intense reactions. He did not want his first attempt to end in failure because of carelessness.

As the color of the medicinal liquid slowly deepened, Chen Wei added the powdered Dangling ginseng and purple blossom fruit to the clay pot, stirring continuously.

Fusing the medicines was no easy task; he had to keep stirring them with a slender jade rod.

Several minutes later, Chen Wei, sweating slightly from the heat, poured all the other prepared medicinal powders into the clay pot.

When he saw the liquid before him turn from gray to black and begin precipitating crystalline matter, Chen Wei swiftly picked up the Jade Dew Water from the table.

"Sizzle, sizzle!"

After he poured in the Jade Dew Water, billows of white smoke immediately rose from the clay pot. Chen Wei then added some powdered inferior fire-element source crystals.

The liquid in the clay pot gradually turned red, and a faint red glow appeared across its surface.

Chen Wei's main purpose in adding the source crystal powder was to raise the temperature inside the clay pot and better fuse and condense the medicines together.

Finally, Chen Wei directly put the lid on the clay pot.

He had meticulously followed every step required for refining medicine as described in the notebook. All he needed to do now was wait quietly for fifteen minutes.

Lifting the lid, Chen Wei looked at the medicinal powder in the clay pot, its surface glowing with a soft pale-yellow light, and a satisfied smile appeared on his face.

Judging by that color and sheen, his first attempt at refining medicine had been a complete success!

He casually took a spoonful of powder from the clay pot, lowered his head to sniff it lightly, then put it into his mouth and tasted it carefully.

"Ptooey, ptooey..."

Chen Wei's pupils suddenly contracted, and he hurriedly spat out the bitter medicinal powder in his mouth.

His brows furrowed tightly as he felt warmth slowly rise within his body.

He had drunk plenty of Vitality Powder before, and it had at least been barely palatable.

Why was the Vitality Powder he had made today so bitter?

After pondering for a long while without finding an answer, Chen Wei shook his head helplessly. Just then, he spotted Color Spirit not far away, watching him with curious eyes, and a wicked grin immediately spread across his face.

Color Spirit probably followed the scent of the medicine over afterward. She shouldn't have seen me grimacing and dry-heaving.

Perhaps this would be just enough to snuff out her interest in the Vitality Powder.

"Would you like to try the Vitality Powder I just finished refining and see how it tastes?" Chen Wei asked with a smile.

"Yi!" (^▽^) (Want to!)

Color Spirit's eyes lit up at once.

The Beast Master before her drank a huge bottle of Vitality Powder mixture every night. She had been curious about its taste for a very long time.

But whenever she wanted a taste, Chen Wei refused, always telling her that the medicine tasted bad and advising her not to eat it.

The moment she caught that strange fragrance, she knew it had to taste pretty good. Besides, if it really tasted bad, why would her Beast Master treasure it so dearly every day and never let it leave his side?

She was a Cold Jade Snake who had lived for over a month. Did he really think she was as easy to fool as a three-year-old human child?

She simply did not want to expose him, because she was smart.

Watching the eager Color Spirit before him, Chen Wei brought the spoon dusted with medicinal powder to her mouth, his gaze still carrying a trace of curiosity.

Color Spirit extended her forked tongue and sniffed lightly. That was right—it was that familiar, strange fragrance.

She had been unable to forget this thing for so long. Today, she could finally get to the bottom of it!

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