Pill refining

TThe next day it was a usual school day. The first lesson was a magical theory lesson while the second was a pill refining lesson. When he entered the room together with Serge Miss. Klein was already waiting for them. After greeting them she directly got started.

"I bet both of you have used the break to try out pill refining right?", she asked the two of them, to which they both nodded.

"Great, that's the right way to learn pill refining. By learning through experience and experimentation. If you only learn from others, then you can never be a truly great pill refiner. But of course, that requires solid fundamentals. So the two of you show me how you refine a pill of your choice and then explain why you did it that way and we will then discuss it."

She then pointed at Serge, "You go first."

Serge didn't hesitate and pulled out his pill furnace from his inventory. It was the first time Ivan had seen a pill furnace from a close distance. He himself had never used one since he had gotten used to using the technique with the mana shield and Miss. Klein had never talked about them in class.

The pill furnace didn't seem to be anything special as it was made of simple iron. It consisted of two part. On the bottom, there was a fire pan where the coal was to be put, while the top was a globe, from which the top part could be taken off, to get access to its interior.

Next Serge took out a piece of coal and some herbs. Ivan was instantly able to recognize these herbs, as they were exactly the same he had used a multitude of time to craft the 'Lesser Healing PIll', the pill he was most proficient at crafting.

When he saw that Serge was crafting the same pill, he too had crafted a lot of time. Even though he had changed to the higher grade 'Small Healing Pill', he was still interested in how he would refine this pill. After all his tries were based on his own understanding and with a completely different technique.

Serge first placed the coal in the intended place and then ignited it. He had to wait for a bit until the pill furnace was completely heated since insufficient heat would lead to the medical component not fully separating. This would in the best case result in a lot of wasted material, but in the worst, it would completely ruin the pill. During this time he used his mana to distribute the heat evenly. To control the heat emitted by the coal was much simpler and energy consuming than directly creating a flame with mana.

With the special coal and the control, it didn't take long for the furnace to be uniformly heated up. Serge then started to put in the first herb, surprising Ivan. He had used a much higher temperature and had thrown in all the ingredients at the same time. From his analysis, only higher grade ingredients required one to put them in at different times. For these low-grade ingredients, it was just a waste of time and energy.

He then used his spiritual sense to observe the situation inside the furnace. What he saw surprised him. Unlike himself, Serge didn't use mental energy to mix the medical ingredients but instead used his mana, which was much less precise.

It was something he had realized soon after starting to practice using mental energy. Because it was directly able to influence the surroundings it was a much more precise way of controlling than with mana. With mana, it was like using one's hand to move something, but with mental energy, it was like the object was a part of the body and could directly be controlled.

As such, he found Serge's control over the medical ingredients to be crude and a bit clumsy, but he had to admit that he himself wouldn't be able to reach the same level of control if he would use mana.

Refining the 'Lesser Healing PIll' didn't take much time and soon the pill was formed. It was a good quality pill.

When Miss. Klein saw the result she nodded in satisfaction before merciless criticizing Serge for how he refined the pill.

"While the result is good there are many things you can improve on. First of all your heat control was still lacking which result in a decrease of quality, but more important, why the hell did you take so long to put in the ingredients?"

"Um,", Serge nervously answered, "I thought that since they require a different amount of heat and time to release their medical essence."

"You are right, they need different conditions to release their medical essence. But if you space it like this, you will waste a lot. After they have released their medial essence you have to keep the essence somewhere until the rest is finished and, since your heat control isn't good enough, during this time some of it will vanish, reducing the quality. It would be better to just throw in the ingredients at the same time since there isn't much difference anyway."

"So what I did was overkill?"

"Not really. Even with higher grade ingredients, working on one herb after the other wouldn't work. Of course, it is hard to do with mana, but you will have to learn to multitask, so you can treat each herb at the same time."

After that, she pointed out a few other minor things with his pill forming as well as giving tips at how to control heat, before turning towards Ivan.

"Now it's your turn. Did you practice any pill besides the 'Lesser Healing PIll'? Because I don't want to see you doing it too."

"Yes, Miss. Klein."

"Great, then get started."

Ivan took out the herbs for the 'Small Healing Pill', of which he still had a lot in his inventory and started to prepare them. Unlike the herbs for the 'Lesser Healing Pill', they required one to remove some unneeded parts, since otherwise, they would interfere with the pill forming. Seeing the herbs he had pulled out, Miss. Klein raised her eyebrows but kept silent.

After having prepared the herbs, Ivan then formed his mana sphere, that he always used for pill refining and created a mana fire at the same time. He then put the herbs one after another into the sphere. Between each herb, there was a small calculated delay. This delay was to accommodate the difference in time needed to make the herb release its medical essence.

Ivan was fully focused on controlling the flame, so each herb had the right temperature, and as such was unable to see the shocked expression on his teachers face. When the herbs released their medical essence, he used his mental energy to move it into a location at the center of the sphere, separating it from any heat and the essence from the other herbs. Although the heat was required for the herbs to release their essence, that wasn't the case for the forming of the pill. At least not for the 'Small Healing Pill', on the contrary, by cooling down the medical essence it became easier to merge them later on.

After all the herbs had released their medical essence, he expelled the dregs from the sphere and waited for the last bit of essence to cool down. He then started to carefully merge the essences. It was necessary to do this in the right order and ratio because some essence could have extreme reactions if coming into contact.

After successfully merging the medical essences into one, he split it into five evenly sized balls, into which he then injected some of his mana. With the injection of mana, the medical essence hardened to form the finished pill.

He then put his hand below the sphere and dismissed it, which lead to the pills falling down into his hand. All of them were good quality pills which satisfied him. Then, having finished his demonstration he looked at the stoic face of his teacher.

"Not bad. It seems like you have quite a good control over your mental energy.", then seeing Serge's confused expression she explained to him about mental energy.

"Besides that, your usage of the mana sphere as a pill furnace is well practiced, but you are missing the biggest advantage of using a mana sphere."

"The biggest advantage?"

"Haha, I guess you have only started to use it because you either didn't have a furnace with you when you started, or you didn't have the money."

When she mentioned his reasons for not using a furnace, Ivan couldn't help but be embarrassed.

"Don't take it to heart. It is good that you have started with the mana sphere. In my opinion, it is superior to any kind of pill furnace. Of course, that is only if one has the strength to support it and the control to use it in the right way. If you are only using it as a normal pill furnace then you are better off using a real one."