家庭老师的姐姐

[Ace POV],

For the past few days, I'd noticed that I'd become more expressive in my actions and words than I'd been since I was a child.

After I bonded with Blue and we began to express our emotions together, this became even more obvious.

Even though it was a peculiar sensation, I would never refuse it.

Putting my fairly complex emotional condition aside, I wasn't sure if I should add that I miss the times when making pills didn't seem that sophisticated and difficult.

In the past, all I had to do was mix everything together, and the pill was ready, allowing me to move on to the next one. But now, I have to worry about other things, like processing more herbs with higher value, employing more ways to make a better pill, and trying to get the perfect pill.

The aforesaid perfect pill was the outcome of a pill being free of any impurities.

The extraction and purification techniques theoretically allowed for the constant removal of impurities from the solution that would eventually form a pill, but in practice, this proved to be more difficult than it was worth.

For starters, it was possible that, even after entirely eliminating all natural impurities from a pill, one might later choose to disregard or even neglect a portion of the solution when creating the pill. When this occurs, the term "man-made impurity" is used because the pill does not end up being flawless but rather one of high quality, which was still acceptable from my perspective.

My knowledge tells me that the impurities an alchemist tries to remove are typically what hinders them from creating a perfect pill in the end.

Although it might sound complicated, it isn't.

Simply explained, the more impurities in a pill get removed, the more difficult it is to extract any additional harmful substances since the ones that are still present are so well hidden that the purification technique does not always detect them.

This either occurs because the alchemist uses the method too infrequently or because the impurity in the pill is so well-hidden that it cannot be detected regardless of the alchemist's proficiency in applying the technique.

My Knowledge in my head also stated that luck or fate would frequently play a role in the appearance of a perfect pill. It wasn't that one couldn't create a perfect pill with skill alone; rather, the knowledge in my head referred to alchemists who could accomplish such feats as "special beings."

Since I was obviously too far away to think about matters pertaining to perfect pills, I turned my attention back to creating the rank 1 pill once more.

Yes, I was going to try making the pill again because it was my first time and I didn't mind failing.

Although the knowledge in my head describes those who can make this type of pills as special beings, someone like me who isn't special should focus on other things they actually have a chance of doing. In my opinion, it was better for me to be concerned about successfully creating a ranked pill than stress about perfect pills.

I had never thought of myself as particularly special, so I wasn't going to start doing so now and begin to imagine that I might be one of the unique individuals the knowledge in my head was referring to.

My job and ranking on various leaderboards may have given the impression that I was extraordinary, yet all of this came about by coincidence.

I firmly believe this.

By chance, I was one of the first 100 persons to successfully clear a dungeon.

I was fortunate enough to get in touch with Alchemy early and get offered a legendary job that was promoted to a unique grade.

All of this came to me by chance; it wasn't something I gained through self-power and was delivered to me as a reward; it wasn't anything I could say I deserved.

Perhaps if I could accomplish this, then and only then would I truly regard myself as unique.

I finished cleaning the cauldron and placing the waste to one side as I considered all of this.

After doing this, I took a moment to collect myself  and thought about the steps and mistakes I had made during the previous concocting session. Then, as blue flames started to appear on the surface of my palm, I immediately started my second attempt at concocting the rank 1 pill.

Regardless of how confident I was, after placing the herbs in, I made sure I didn't make any mistakes when turning the herbs into the processed form.

It's natural that mistakes happen, but I didn't want everything to be lost in the early phases of the creation process.

If anything, this stage was one that I should excel at given that it was the one I was most familiar with. 

Nevertheless, without any unanticipated complications, I was able to breeze through the first step and arrive at the area where I had failed in the prior experiment.

I had already reached the point where I needed to utilise the extraction technique, so I took a moment to slow down and breathe deeply before focusing entirely on what I was doing.

I learned from my previous experiment that the best thing I could do at this time was to use the extraction technique slowly and carefully in order to avoid mistakes rather than rushing and increasing the likelihood that the pill wouldn't be successfully made.

Naturally, this used up more of my mana, but thankfully, I had already rested for a while before trying to concoct once more to make up for some of what I had lost in the previous experiment.

Although my mana pool was unable to return to its peak, it was more than enough for me to use during this section of concocting.

Even though using the extraction technique cost a lot of mana, it was still much more tolerable than using my origin ability.

As I was thinking about these things, I had already begun to slowly extract the impurities from the solution in the cauldron.