383 Shapes

"Can I even check the structure on my own?" Alex wondered for a second.

"Let's try with my spiritual sense," he thought. He brought out his spiritual sense and started looking at the pill on his hand.

Normally, he would just look at the pill and forget about it, but now, he had to check it properly. So, he focused on it with his spiritual sense.

Suddenly, it was as if a new world had been opened in front of his eyes. He could see every single small detail that he couldn't otherwise on a daily alchemy procedure.

He had never focused on a pill to see how it looked. He always had just assumed the powder to be nothing more than just decorative after all.

And to be fair, it was indeed decorative. The powder itself did nothing; it was the energy within the pill that created the various effect.

However, if the powder housed the energy just as Alex had just now learned, he would now have to start focusing on it as well.

Alex felt his spiritual sense quickly diminishing when he started checking the materials on a microscopic level.

The pill on his hands looked very weird when zoomed in through his spiritual sense. Normally, the pill had a slightly pinkish hue to it. This was the color the pill took after almost every iteration.

That was just the color the ingredients burned to.

However, under zoom, he could see that the pill was not pink at all. It was actually multicolored. Some were yellow, some were green, some were blue, and some were even black. But the majority of the powder was just red and white, leading to the pink color.

Alex ignored the color for now and checked the shapes of the powder particles. There were various shapes that he just couldn't describe properly. They were also all clumped together so it was quite hard to see the shapes.

So, Alex crushed the pill and put it on top of a metal plate. Finally, with the height of the 'pill' reducing to such a low amount, he could see the shapes with much more ease.

"Oh, so different," he thought. The powders were all mostly in different shapes. Some were spherical in shape, some were crystalline with cubic or rhomboid shapes, some were cylindrical, and some were even helix shapes.

Alex was surprised by how many types of shapes he could see. He quickly stopped focusing on his spiritual sense.

"Arghh… that's not a very fun feeling," he thought. It felt like the headache he got on days he didn't get much sleep.

He thought about what he saw just now and fell into thought. The shapes were all different and not something he could really tell if they were good or bad.

"Oh, wait a second," he thought and quickly rummaged through his storage bag. He came across a pill bottle that wasn't filled with pills, but rather just powder.

Every time he had tested with these ingredients, he had thrown away most of the powders but ended up keeping some into the pill bottle.

He gently dumped the content of the bottle in a straight line from the left to right. Starting from the left was the powder he made most recently, and at the right was the powder he had made the earliest.

He remembered every single instance of powder he made, all the changes he had made, all the test criteria he had set for them, so when he checked from left to right, he knew exactly what he had to do to get that result.

He forced his spiritual sense to check these powders again and started looking through the different patterns the powders had formed into.

"Those are just minute spheres. That was when I use 500 degrees with clockwise rotation for 3 whole turns at 2 seconds per turn."

"Those are just tinier spheres, but these ones are clumped together in groups. If I remember correctly, that was when I set the temperature to 350 degrees, with clockwise rotation at 4 seconds per rotation for 2 and a half rotations."

"Those are…"

He went through all of them. He quickly realized that temperature also played an aspect in the shape of the pills, albeit indirectly.

What truly affected the shapes were the speed at which the ingredient was moved in while it turned to powder and the direction it was moving in.

Depending on the temperature, some of the ingredients were in motion for a lot longer than other ones. These affected the shape as well.

Alex took out another pill bottle and dumped its content as well. This powder belonged to a different ingredient, so Alex checked this one as well.

While the shapes of the powder weren't the same as the ones for the other powder at similar test criteria, they followed a similar direction in terms of the shape.

Just to be sure, he took another one out and laid it on the metal. He checked it too and found out that the shapes indeed follow a pattern.

Depending on the time it took for the ingredient to fully turn to powder, the shape of the powder was different.

If the ingredient turned to powder very fast, it would end up being small flakes. If it moved for longer, it would start to clump together and form a cubic shape. Then it would deform to become a rhomboid shape, which it was moved for a much longer time, would slowly lose their shapes to become irregular individual blobs.

It didn't end there, however. If the ingredient was in the cauldron for longer, it would turn to thick, cylindrical in shape, that would elongate and it went on and start turning to a helix shape, which would then clump on itself to form small spheres that were attached to itself.

Finally, if it went for much longer, the spheres would separate and end up as individual spheres that moved around separately. By that time, there would be no more energy remaining in the ingredient no matter what ingredient it was.