BXBX NOVEL Chapter 402 - Potion Distillation
It really wasn’t necessarily that complicated. After he made a mythril-covered steel pestle, he quickly added a simple metal ring with grooves inside of it to the ’handle’ part of it, and then made two more rings that were layed into each other. The outer ring of those two would make the inner ring move, in a circular motion, while the inner ring itself would properly hook into the grooves that Eisen made on the ring on the actual pestle before.
This was done with relatively simple enchantments, using ’magnetism’ and ’detection’ enchantments. Both the inner and outer ring had each four small crystals set into them, each at any time connected to only one of the four crystals of the other ring to cause a constant, quick circular motion. The inner ring would turn in a clockwise direction, although it was relatively easy to change it to counter-clockwise. If all the crystals that were attracted to each other were to be at the right position, directly touching each other, then the detection enchantment would notice this fact and switch out which crystal would be attracted to which.
If you saw it as a clock, the outer-ring crystal at 12 would now be attracted to the inner-ring crystal at 9 and vice-versa, the outer ring crystal at 3 would be attracted to the inner-ring crystal at 12, and so on. And that would constantly change and instantaneously switch to cause a fast-paced motion.
And it was actually rather easy to build in some resistance to allow different speeds for different materials by adding another gem to the inner ring to cause a changeable amount of ’Drag’ that would slow the motion down.
This might be relatively counter-productive for some materials, but in the end, this was the best choice that Eisen could come up with considering the different requirements for different types of materials. There were especially some that needed especially high-speed-grinding because certain parts needed to be ground down to a fine powder before the full-part could cause a reaction with the air.
And while Eisen could probably manage that, it was far easier to just do it this way. And because the ’Drag’ enchantment worked with a similar principle as the ’Magnetism’ enchantment, the different crystals interacted very nicely with each other and actually reduced the necessary amount of mana a little bit.
Now, the whole pestle just had to move in circular motions around the whole bowl, and for that, Eisen also had a little bit of a similar idea as before, just that it worked with a few more crystals than before. The ring would be hooked into a piece above the bowl to let it be moved around the whole area of the bowl properly without issues, and then the different magnetism-crystals would just be there to actually guide the ring in a circular motion, where only ever one or two crystal-pairs would be active at a time to make the whole thing move around steadily.
And just like that, the whole thing was finished, so now Eisen only had to properly enchant the pestle and the bowl for Alchemy to make it possible to actually grind down different materials that usually couldn’t be ground down, like mana-crystals for example, and of course to increase the quality of everything a bit more.
Then Eisen covered the top of the bowl up completely and made a small hatch on that cover that materials could be filled into and poured out of when everything was done, and poured his mana into the activation-spot at the center of the cover and made the settings appear, before he carefully placed some small mana-crystal chunks into the bowl and started to slowly get everything started.
Soon enough, the pestle started moving in a circular motion relatively quickly, and the mana-crystal was quickly ground down into small pieces. It was relatively even right now, but it took quite a while to properly grind the crystals down to the preferable stage.
"Hmm...." Eisen muttered to himself and quickly deactivated the whole thing, taking the de-tachable cover up with a small snapping sound before taking out the pestle to change that around a little more.
"Hmm... Maybe it’s too smooth right now..." The old man muttered to himself and slowly stood up, stepping over to one of his grinding wheels to roughen the mythril-surface up a little more.
If the surface of the pestle was too smooth, the crystals wouldn’t properly be broken down at all, mostly just being pushed around because there was no grip anywhere.
But when the surface was too rough, some pieces would get stuck in there, and it would be hard to grind things down beyond a certain fine-ness. It wasn’t really that tough to find the right roughness for the surface, so it didn’t take long to grind the mythril to that point either. The more annoying part was the surface of the bowl, because Eisen wasn’t able to actually use the grinding-wheel, so he had to adjust it by hand. But then again, that only ended up taking maybe half a minute longer, so it wasn’t a big deal.
He really just kind of skipped past this step, because he didn’t really need to do it when he tried it in his Deep Visualization. First of all, he couldn’t really test it out there anyway, and the Mythril probably naturally turned just the roughness that Eisen was thinking about subconsciously, so it wasn’t needed.
With a slight sigh, Eisen put everything back together, "At least now I know what to pay attention to while working in there, huh?" The old man muttered quietly, before he quickly put new crystals into the automatic-grinder to test everything out again.
This time around, everything worked a lot faster than the first time around, so Eisen could only nod his head in satisfaction.
"Alright, perfect." Eisen muttered out, and then quickly moved on to the next piece of the Potion-Mass-Production System, the piece that would combine any materials together.
This wasn’t hard to do, and just needed some fan-like blades at the bottom of a bowl that would be moved using magnetism enchantments just like before.
Then came the actual distillation system.
That in and of itself wasn’t complicated to make either, because this just required a simple metal bowl that could heat the liquid inside of it up properly. Although that was just the base-version of it. For the actual item that Eisen wanted to make for the regular potion-making process, Eisen also needed to use one of Jyuuk’s abilities, which allowed him to manipulate the essence inside of different plants.
While the heat would be pushed into the liquid, Eisen would also try to make it so that this ability was properly applied to the liquid at the same time, to keep the ’essence’ in place to make sure none of it would be carried off with the water.
And then, that water would be placed into another container where you could make sure it was properly rid of any possible impurities so that it could be re-used later on.
Then came the next part, using once more another container to make sure that all impurities were properly removed from the potion, which would be done by leading it through sifts of different strengths inside of a tube with a slightly roughened-up inner layer to grab onto any small pieces that may be inside that didn’t properly dissolve while the potion was made.
As for the last piece for the system to make regular potions that didn’t require any special methods, Eisen wanted to make a small Magical Refination system, to once more extract just the parts of the potion that were actually needed.
Eisen did something like that before already, while he was making the potion that allowed him to break through his Alchemy skill in the first place. That potion maybe made it a little easier to do so, but technically, the same process should be possible for regular potions as well.
For this, Eisen used part of the mechanism that he used for Alnico’s speakers, so that he could create a constant and steady pulse inside of the liquid to make the purest form of the potion split off from any amount of water that might not be needed. Of course something like this already happened by just making the water evaporate naturally, but Eisen was sure that everything could be condensed even more, to about half the volume that a potion usually had. At the very least that was Eisen’s goal with this.
The liquid would be slightly thicker than a normal potion, but that issue could be solved using simple liquification.
The Enchantment for this was once more pretty tough to figure out properly, but in the end, Eisen was sure that he managed to do just what he wanted to do. And when he tried it out with a potion that he had on hand, he found that it really did work surprisingly well.
With the pulse from above, the parts of the potion with the ’densest’ amount of essence in it were pushed to the bottom of the bowl, while the water stayed at the top. And of course, any essence that might have been pulled out of the potion together with the water would be pushed back toward the actual potion in the later pulses.
Then, the whole actual potion that sunk to the bottom would be like a singular entity sticking together perfectly, while the water at the top could be gotten rid of relatively easily.
Of course, Eisen also made some tubes to properly connect each piece to make everything more automated. Like that, with the activation of a small enchantment, a latch would open at the bottom of each bowl to make the potion run through to the next part.
The only part that Eisen was having a little bit of trouble with in this setup was the sifting-tube considering that the different sifts might get clogged up. But in the end, considering the size that it would have at the end and the low amount of impurities usually found in potions, it would probably be fine to just clean the tube at the end of a day of full production without any issues.
Like this, Eisen was now able to create an automatic production machine for common low and average grade potions!
Once everything for this small prototype was properly set up, Eisen quickly started to get to work, trying to test it out with a simple Low-Grade Health Potion, because it only really needed two different materials, mana crystals and amran petals.
First, Eisen placed some amran petals for a single potion into the first bowl and had it grind them down, before making the hatch open and the powder poured into the bowl underneath it in the setup. Then the hatch closed again before Eisen placed the mana crystals inside and repeated this same thing. In the actual set-up, Eisen would probably make a bowl for each different material, so that it would simply be ’cleaner’ in some way, but for now, for this small setup, this should probably more than just fine.
Either way, after everything was ground down, Eisen activated the process for the ’Mixer’, which would fill it up with water and properly stir everything together, before letting it pour into the next bowl.
There, the actual distillation happened and the water ended up in a small bowl Eisen set at the end of the tube for it, and then the actual potion entered the tube with the different sifts, before entering the ’refination’ bowl, where the pulses started to happen relatively soon. Then after that, the bowl was tilted to the side to let the water out through a very fine sift, before the actual, very thick and jelly-like potion was now poured into another seperate bowl.
And just like that, Eisen made an extremely refined potion.