878 Going Wide

Alex planted some fences and then used a hoe to make some divots on the ground. Then, he handed some seeds to Whisker and told him to plant them.

Whisker took the seeds and ran along the side of the divots planting the seeds. He wasn't just planting the seeds either. He was using his knowledge about plants and gardening to plant the seeds appropriately.

From time to time, he would stop and look back at Alex to ask if a seed should go there.

"What would happen if their roots touch each other?" Alex asked the little mouse. Whisker tried to think but there was too much information in his mind to sort through immediately.

"They have contradicting elemental roots, so you don't want them touching each other," Alex said. "Which is why you have to plant them separately, far away from each other."

Whisker remembered the lesson from a while ago and nodded. Then, he continued planting the seeds.

It took about half an hour for Whisker to plant all the seeds. He could have done it faster, but he had to constantly stop and ask if he could do what he was going to do, or Alex had to stop him and explain why what he was doing was bad.

Alex was starting to instinctively know why something was bad and why something was good in regards to the plants, and he was explaining the situation to Whisker rather easily.

Alex then moved some snow from the side onto the dirt and then spread some ashes that he had requested from the sect on top of it. These were volcanic ashes that were very good for the soil, so he was mixing them here.

With a single thought, the snow on top of the dirt easily melted and started dissolving the ashes a bit. That helped the ashes penetrate the soil even better, and reached underground.

Once all that was done, Alex now just had to hope that the winter which was currently plaguing the land would soon be over so the land could see some more sunlight.

From what he had heard, it still snowed a lot in the summer too, but the atmosphere was generally hotter in the summer than in the winter.

Once his job at this little garden of his was done, Alex let it be and walked back into the house and went back to his room.

Today was his one free day in a week, so he was planning on cultivating all day, but he had already cultivated last night, so he was a little reluctant about that.

"Well, let's go back to the trusty Alchemy then," he thought. He was planning on making Whisker start making pills, but he was still having trouble learning how to manipulate things with Qi.

So, until he was able to use Qi to manipulate objects or even just fly, then there was no point in having him start Alchemy yet.

"Well, time for me to improve myself then," Alex thought.

But then, there was another problem. How did he improve himself exactly? What was there to improve even?

The only things that could be improved were either the ingredients or the technique with which the pills were formed.

Other than that, there was nothing else that could be improved. And unfortunately, these two things were something he couldn't consciously improve.

He couldn't suddenly make an ingredient better than it was, and he couldn't suddenly make the technique work better than it was supposed to.

The ceiling in making a 100% harmony pill was high, but he was already reaching it. Just 6% to 8% more and he would have made a perfect pill.

But those 6% to 8% were indeed reliant on luck, and that was not something he could improve upon.

If he couldn't touch the ceiling, then there was really just a single choice left. He would push away the walls.

"If I can't reach high, then it is time to reach wide," Alex thought.

It was time to make more than just a single pill at once.

There were 2 ways he understood he could go about making more than a single pill at once.

The first was to make pills in multiple cauldrons at once. The second was to make them all in a single cauldron.

There were advantages to both and disadvantages as well.

For the first part, making pills in multiple cauldrons allowed you to follow the recipe without having to alter it even in the slightest.

You didn't have to worry about figuring out how many ingredients went into a single batch, or figuring out if the heat needed to be adjusted because there were many ingredients this time around.

You could easily just follow the recipe and make the pills as you always had.

In fact, you could make two entirely different pills using this method too.

Only, there was a problem. You needed to be able to keep track of many things at once, perhaps even more so than a normal cultivator was capable of.

Alex was confident he could split his attention between two cauldrons and make the pills at the same time, only if they followed the same recipe.

Having to keep track of two different pills with all the ingredients, recipes, and different timings and such would be incredibly hard.

On the other hand, making pills in a single cauldron wouldn't really cause any increased problem to one mental ability to handle Alchemy as the number of things to keep track of would increase at all.

Also, he didn't have to split his Qi to manipulate anything other than the fire and the ingredients.

This was very easy, compared to the other method.

However, this one had more problems than the other one.

For starters, there was only a certain amount of pills one could make in a single cauldron. Too many ingredients and the energy in the cauldron would reach a point where it would be too compact to keep making the pill.

Even if one did indeed use intend to make maybe 2 or 3 pills at once, there were more problems one had to think of.

First of all, making different pills at once was just not something that was possible, not that one would intend of doing so with this method.

Another, more troubling problem was that having more ingredients meant that heat distribution wasn't proper at all.

Each ingredient had certain capabilities when it came to being able to absorb the heat from the cauldron. Adding more ingredients meant there needed to be more heat in the cauldron, which meant the temperature had to be different.

Because of that, to make multiple pills at once, you had to change the temperature portion of the recipe to match the new amount of ingredient so they all got the same amount of heat in the end.

"No, wait a minute," Alex frowned all of a sudden. "That would be true under a normal scenario, but I know the Dao of Heat. I can have the heat in the cauldron constantly be the same temperature using the dao."

"Which means I won't have to change the recipe at all. Only the amount of ingredients."

Alex's eyes shined. He knew what he was going to start with.