"On the Feasibility of Lightning-Fire Pill Refining"

Ever since the idea of replacing wood energy with lightning to refine pills had occurred to Xiao Yu, it had swept through his mind like an unstoppable flood. He had even written the first research paper in the Battle Through the Heavens World specifically for this idea.

"On the Feasibility of Lightning-Fire Pill Refining"

To flesh out this concept, Xiao Yu began experimenting.

He had no money to spare right now. His entire savings amounted to just five hundred gold coins, set aside over the years from the allowance Xiao Zhan had sent him.

Five hundred gold coins was already a considerable sum, enough to let an ordinary family live comfortably. But when it came to buying medicinal ingredients and magic cores, it was still far too little.

Even a portion of low-grade medicinal ingredients with few years of growth cost at least several dozen gold coins. As for a rank-one magic core, that went without saying: four or five hundred...

The biggest problem was the medicine cauldron. Even a basic medicine cauldron cost over a thousand gold coins, putting it completely beyond Xiao Yu's means.

He had no intention of pouring those five hundred gold coins down the drain, so the surrounding flowers, grasses, and trees suffered instead.

Since he had no medicinal ingredients, he would use flowers, grasses, and trees in their place. Xiao Yu wasn't actually trying to refine a pill yet; he only wanted to test the Lightning-Fire Pill Refining Method. These plants would be enough.

Xiao Yu spent the entire morning collecting a huge pile of flowers and grasses, along with a few trees and some fruits and vegetables.

As for a pill furnace, Xiao Yu planned to substitute iron cooking woks.

He fitted two iron woks together, then welded them with fire attribute Dou Qi. He added three short iron legs underneath for support, then punched two round holes into the lower part of its belly to serve as flame inlets.

A makeshift (ramshackle) two-inlet cauldron appeared before Xiao Yu.

"Phew..."

Letting out a long breath, Xiao Yu flexed his hands. "All right, everything's ready. Time to refine pills!"

Xiao Yu extended his left hand, and yellow flames surged forth. Normally, producing tangible flames from Dou Qi without the aid of a medicine cauldron required the strength of a fourth-tier alchemist. But Xiao Yu had a special constitution, along with two source flames that were at least as powerful as heavenly flames, so that restriction naturally didn't apply to him.

He carefully guided the flames into the medicine cauldron. A momentary lapse made the flame inlet show signs of melting, frightening Xiao Yu into hastily lowering the flames' temperature.

These were his only two cooking woks. If he ruined them, he would have to buy replacements.

Once the flames had stabilized, Xiao Yu picked up a wild weed with his right hand and tossed it into the medicine cauldron.

The instant the weed touched the flames, it withered and blackened. Within seconds, only a layer of ash remained at the bottom of the cauldron.

Xiao Yu shook his head slightly. "To think my very first extraction failed. The flames were still a little too hot."

"Well, these aren't real medicinal ingredients, after all. It's only natural that they don't withstand heat very well."

"Keep going."

He wasn't discouraged. If it didn't work this time, he would try again.

And so it went.

The second attempt failed.

The third attempt failed.

The fourth attempt failed.

Finally, on his ninth attempt, Xiao Yu successfully extracted a glob of pink essence from a flower.

Looking at the flower essence inside the medicine cauldron, Xiao Yu gave a pleased smile.

It actually took me nine attempts to extract essence for the first time. Looks like my talent for refining medicine is a little lacking.

That was what he thought.

But every endeavor was hardest at the start. Now that he had successfully taken the first step, the remaining extractions became much easier.

Following the previous procedure, Xiao Yu began extracting them one by one: a blade of grass, a piece of wood, a grape, a sweet potato.

Whatever he had, he tossed it in. With his earlier extraction experience, things went much more smoothly this time.

After extracting the essences of all those plants, Xiao Yu began the next step: purification!

A dazzling bolt of lightning appeared in his right hand. Its violent energy surged, held firmly captive by his palm as Xiao Yu carefully guided it into the medicine cauldron.

With his earlier experience controlling the flames, Xiao Yu didn't dare be careless this time. He reduced the lightning's intensity to the minimum.

The extracted essences sizzled the instant they touched the lightning, sending black smoke streaming upward. Xiao Yu paid it no mind, because that black smoke was precisely the impurities still remaining in the essences.

Once all the essences had been purified, Xiao Yu found that they were much clearer than before, their luster brighter and more vivid.

This step could be viewed as electrolytic purification: removing impurities and retaining purity, bringing the true nature to perfection.

The final step was Pill Fusion, the hardest step of all. After all, medicinal ingredients had different medicinal properties. Without proper control of the flames, the essences could turn to ash in an instant, and the energy within the ingredients could erupt, causing the furnace to explode.

This was also why wood energy was used as a catalyst. Medicinal ingredients belonged to the wood element, so wood energy could harmonize their medicinal properties and catalyze their fusion into a pill.

Xiao Yu slowly brought the purified essences together, watching the situation inside the medicine cauldron with some nervousness.

When the essences touched, Xiao Yu's spiritual perception detected resistance, though it wasn't very strong.

He understood immediately. These weren't medicinal essences, after all, so there were no conflicting medicinal properties, only a slight barrier between their characteristics.

If that was the case, Xiao Yu could simply force them together, but he didn't intend to do that.

After all, the focus of this experiment was whether lightning could truly replace wood energy and resolve the problem of conflicting medicinal properties.

Xiao Yu introduced lightning into the cauldron again, beginning his tests at the lowest possible power.

He tested it bit by bit, but the essences still showed no sign of merging. Gradually, evening arrived.

Xiao Yu didn't lose patience and continued the dull, monotonous process of fusion.

Finally, after he increased the lightning's intensity to one-tenth of the power he could release, the essences inside the cauldron shuddered and rapidly merged.

The lightning had finally broken through the barriers between the characteristics of the plant essences, allowing them all to fuse.

Just as a substance's properties were determined by its molecules, and molecules were composed of atoms, merging two substances with different properties so their characteristics combined to produce better ones required rearranging the atoms of both substances into new molecules, forming a new substance.

Refining medicine worked the same way: reshaping different medicinal ingredients at the molecular level, combining the atoms of many ingredients into new molecules. A substance's properties were determined by its molecules, so a new molecular arrangement became a new substance-a medicinal pill.

Water was one example. Water was composed of water molecules, and each water molecule consisted of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.

The role of lightning was to disrupt the original molecular structures of the essences and rearrange them together into new, stable molecules. Those new molecules then formed a substance, and when that substance was molded into a sphere, it became a medicinal pill.

Xiao Yu had already completed Pill Fusion, the hardest and most crucial step. What came next was pill formation. This step was very simple: he only needed to wait for the fused essence to stabilize, cool, and set into the shape of a pill before taking it out of the furnace.

This step didn't take Xiao Yu much time.

Before long, a freshly refined "pill" appeared in Xiao Yu's hand.

"Hahaha... I did it! Fuck, I actually did it!"

Looking at his own masterpiece in his hand, Xiao Yu smiled, utterly delighted. Even during his twenty-three years on Earth, he had never studied anything so seriously or devoted himself so earnestly to a task.

Yet here in the Battle Through the Heavens World, he had broken the ironclad rule that had existed throughout the Dou Qi Continent's history: an alchemist's fire had to contain wood. His sense of achievement was beyond description.

If this world had a research paper system, Xiao Yu could absolutely win an alchemist's lifetime achievement award with "On the Feasibility of Lightning-Fire Pill Refining"!