Teacher Sagi had been sufficiently pleased with the ten Cloudy Spiritual pills that Leon gave to him and even more so with the Still Mind Pills which had reduced impurities if compared to a standard Still Mind Pills. Even one concocted by himself might be of exceptional quality, but retain the expected amount of impurities. Naturally, he wanted to know how Leon had accomplished this.Leon admitted he wasn"t sure, it had been his first time concocting the pills after all. So the Teacher had him recite the recipe he used, patiently listening as Leon nervously stuttered through it, but the Teacher could see no differences in his method to the written one. So Teacher Sagi considered this again for a moment and then asked about the Serene Milk salts. Again Leon had to tell him the method he had used and it was here that the difference became apparent.
It was not the keg being used, though Teacher Sagi was surprised that Leon had purchased his own. Admittedly, apprentices in the outer school had limited access to supplementary equipment such as this and pill making stoves (to which they never touched at all) , most students had to rely on using their cauldron or a borrowed second. But even if kegs were readily available to perhaps second years and above, they would not reduce the number of impurities, just stop them from increasing!
What Leon had done to achieve this difference was such an insignificant step, yet exciting the same to an old hand like Teacher Sagi and this was to boil the water first!
Commoners had been boiling water to make it safe to drink for centuries that or they would brew beer, mead and wines to drink rather than risk illness. Wealthy folk relied on others to produce water for them, that had likely been treated before consumption and they would not know any better. Whether it was fair or not, for those centuries, the vast majority of alchemists stemmed from wealthier families. Even had they not, newcomers would follow the teachings of their Masters and not consider deviating from the recipe. Older Cultivators that had experience could fast and poor water would not effect them regardless, so boiling had become unnecessary and they would not think of all it could hide. Thus this one little additional step had never been considered for pill making.
Teacher Sagi excitedly dismissed Leon after praising him profusely, wanting to test the Serene Milk salts recipe for himself and the subsequent pill recipes that required it as an ingredient. He said that Leon"s four days were well earned and to come see him at the start of the next week. Leon thanked him and agreed, also wanting to scurry back to work on his own experiments.
Leon had stuck to making the two basic variations; burning energy pills and clear Spiritual pills before batching them into three. Each had one pill of each extreme and a standard pill. For example; the burning energy pills he had made were either a vivid, scarlet red, a mottled pill with various shades of red or a deep, dark burgundy colour. The first was a pill using only the bright red petal-leaves, the last was produced with just green leaves. And the mottled pill was what the burning energy pill usually looked like. He had never made burning blood pills, the slightly stronger variation of this pill that would be of use to cultivators of both Sun and Jin Li"s levels, so didn"t want to experiment with them yet.
As for the clear spiritual pills, these were all like clear marbles, however the one made of all tender roots appeared as if it had been polished until gleaming and the one made of all woody roots looked a little distorted within. It had definitely been more work using the woody roots as well, they did not dissolve as well or as easily as the tender roots, needing just a little more heat beneath them. This meant he had to carefully separate them from the rest of the herbs or they would cause the whole pot to fail. He"d never noticed this before as it seemed the tender roots would set off the reaction in the woody roots making this tiny difference unnecessary when using a standard recipe.
With this knowledge, he had also made a few sets of Cloudy Spiritual pills using the three variations. The first pill came out with a soft translucency, the standard pill was more like swirling mist and the last was almost smoky. Leon sighed looking over the three pills and their variations once more; he knew there was likely a difference between pills, but he had no clue on how to judge this. Unlike the pills Leo had improved, these could not be tested on animals nor beasts, the pills were for human cultivators thus really needed human test subjects. But Leon had not the heart to test these pills on anyone or anything!
Pouting, he pushed the problem aside, thinking he would consider the situation again in the morning. Perhaps he could ask Jin Li if he had any ideas, but knowing that man he would likely suggest threatening first years into taking them!
Jin Li sneezed while contemplating how to resolve his own recent issue... who was talking ill of him...?