956 Improvement for the Improvement

To start off his learning process, Alex decided to start with pills that he would consider to have significant importance to anyone.

Those pills being healing pills. Under a normal scenario, he no longer required any healing pills, but it wouldn't be a bad idea to know how to make one just in case someone he is close to gets injured.

Saint-ranked healing pills were all capable of not just healing, but also regenerating lost body parts. Since they were so good, Alex started learning about the pill that he had downgraded for when he was a True realm cultivator.

The Saint Body Regeneration pill.

Alex started with the Blood Spirit Ginseng and closed his eyes to learn about it. Information that was stored in his mind slowly flowed into his brain, no longer a jumbled mess but an understandable piece of information.

He learned what sort of ingredient it was, what it looked like, and where it grew. Alex was surprised he knew how to extract it from its plant without damaging it.

He had been unconsciously doing that even when he wasn't a Saint realm cultivator, but it was only now that he realized just how he was able to do so.

Alex knew quite a lot about the Blood Spirit Ginseng, so it didn't take him a long time to learn a lot about it. Once he was done, he moved on to the next set of ingredients.

Alex had about 30 different Saint-ranked pill recipes, and of them, only 3 were healing pills. He had about 70% of the ingredients required for these pills, so it became easy to learn about them with the object in his hand.

It surprisingly took him half a day to learn about the 3 pills and every ingredient in them. There were maybe 30 or so ingredients in the 3 pills and yet he was so slow that each ingredient required him to spend at least 20 minutes to fully understand it.

He did try and understand every little aspect of the ingredient he was learning about, rather than just remember what he was learning. He wanted it to be such that he would know what ingredient to use in what situation, rather than try and go through his memories.

Also, he spent the majority of the time seeing if he could improve the recipes with just his mind. At first, he found it quite hard.

After all, he had never made these pills and thus had no idea how any ingredient would turn out under different circumstances. Without knowing the structure of the powder, it would be hard to improve the recipe since he wouldn't know the proper combination.

He had an idea in his head that he thought would work.

He thought of cutting up the piece of an ingredient into many different pieces and then refining them based on the various different conditions of temperature, the direction of movement, and speed of movement.

Previously, when he was just starting out with improving recipes, he couldn't do it at all. After all, cutting up a piece of ingredient messed up its size and the amount of heat it would absorb as well as many other variables that Alex couldn't even think of.

However, after learning the Dao of Heat and Heat Conduction, Alex wondered if he could tweak that part of the problem enough to compensate for the rest of the variables to remain stable.

He would have to try it out with True rank ingredients, but as far as he could think, he was certain he could figure it out.

"What else can I even do?" Alex wondered. "It's not like there are so many Saint-rank ingredients lying around."

Alex shook his head, realizing there was going to be quite a lot of trials and errors to go through to fix this idea he had come up with. After all, what else could he really do?

It was at that time that something struck his mind which completely threw him off the track.

"Wait… can I use that?" he thought with a shocked expression on his face.

When Alex entered the Saint realm, the Alchemy God's knowledge had given him the knowledge required to reverse engineer a pill's ingredients, and it had also given him the Supreme Elemental Accord.

However, it had given him one other piece of knowledge that Alex had skipped out on at the time because it was something that was going to lead him to learn about Structures and Combinations.

Since he already knew about it, he had decided not to spend his time on it. However, he was just starting to understand what a stupid move it was on his part.

After all, the knowledge he gained was apparently one that he could use to formulate all the different possible shapes of the ingredients using only 3 ingredients.

Using the speed of release of the energy provided by the recipe, Alex would first refine a single ingredient using the lowest heat possible and record the result.

Then he would use the highest heat possible and record the result. Then finally, he would record a result from somewhere in between the two.

Then, the 3 pieces of information would help him visualize the changes an ingredient went through as the heat changed. In this way, with just 3 ingredients, Alex could learn all the different structures of a single ingredient in a recipe, without having to necessarily spend dozens of said ingredients.

The only flaw in this technique was that he required at least 3 of the same ingredients to map out the results and thus change the recipe. If he needed to test out the original recipe, then he needed 4 different ingredients.

While that was dozens of times lower, Alex wasn't sure how he was going to possibly find 4 of the same Saint-ranked ingredients to figure out the structure of a refined ingredient. Not to mention, if he wanted to make a pill out of it, he would need one more ingredient.

That was incredibly annoying in Alex's mind.

As he thought of finding another method, an idea came to his mind. "Wait… what if I mix the two processes?" he thought.

Instead of refining 3 different ingredients, he could refine just a single one. The only difference was that he was going to cut up the ingredient into 3 pieces and refine those.

That way, instead of needing 4 sets of ingredients to figure out the perfect recipe, he would need only 2.

"That's going to take a lot of effort," he thought. "I still don't know if cutting ingredients into pieces makes it unusable as per the recipe. I will have to try that out."

"Also, the 3 ingredient technique to figuring out the structure is only usable for True rank ingredients. I will still have to see if they transition well for Saint rank ingredients too. That will require some heavy experimentation on my end," Alex thought.

Fortunately, there were quite a few Saint rank ingredients with him, some of which were likely to be not so important and many in number.

As long as Alex used those ingredients, he would be able to complete his experimentation.

"That should work," he thought.

After spending quite a bit of time thinking about the problem, Alex decided to spend the next few hours on cultivation.

Pearl was still cultivating and as such his body was still being cut up. Alex looked at Whisker who was sleeping without care and remembered that he needed to teach him how to make pills properly too.

It had been nearly 3 years since he last taught him anything. So, after he was done cultivating for the day, he started teaching Whisker more and more about Alchemy.

Since he was in the True realm now, he could start learning about True rank pills too, so Alex gave him some recipes to remember.

It would still take him a while before he had any chance of making pills, but just learning about it, for now, was enough.

After all, even Alex himself was only learning right now.

Once he had some free time, Alex continued on his path to learning about the different pills and their ingredients.

After the healing pills, he focused on poison and venom antidotes, and only after that did he learn the rest of the ingredients.

Within 10 days of starting, Alex completely learned about the ingredients for every Saint-ranked recipe he had on him.