"Hm… how do I start this?

" Alex wondered. He had made too many mistakes the day before to simply just go back to trying to make a new pill. He wanted to take a different approach this time.

"Let's see… since the motion, temperature, and the rate at which the energy is released matters, I should start by learning how that works,

" Alex thought.

He went through his storage bags and brought out a bunch of common ingredients that he had an excess of. He was planning on first understanding how Motion affected the rate of energy released.

"So… since I am planning on testing just the motion, I need to set the temperature constant,

" he thought. He set the temperature at around 300 degrees and waited for his Golden Jade Cauldron to be hot enough.

Since he was only using single ingredients, he didn't have to worry about them blowing at all. Once the cauldron was hot, he put in his first ingredient.

The first ingredient was a normal Silver Grass that could be found just about anywhere. He put a single strand of the grass and started moving it clockwise such that it took him exactly 2 seconds to make a complete rotation.

When he finished one rotation, a bit of metal energy was released. He made the clockwise rotation again, and a bit more of the energy was released.

He had to do 4 complete rotations for all the energy in the grass to be released and the grass to finally crumble down to powdered form.

Once that was done, Alex brought everything out and threw it away. For the second turn, he kept the temperature the same and the speed of rotation the same as well, but he changed the direction in which the ingredient moved.

Surprisingly, there was no change in the rate of energy release at all. That confused Alex a little.

"If it doesn't change the rate or messes up an ingredient, why do the recipes bother explaining the direction of the motion?

" he wondered.

He brought out a set of ingredients for a normal pill and decided to try his theory on it. He first made a normal pill following the recipe that he knew and ended up making a pill with a Harmony of 52%.

It was a very good result, considering the pill's final energy wasn't Metal aligned.

He then took out another set of the same ingredients, only this time he was going to follow the recipe all the same except for the directions in which the ingredients were moved in.

He started with the first ingredient and moved it clockwise, despite the recipe stating that he had to move it counterclockwise. Once that was done, he proceeded with the next ingredient and moved it clockwise as well.

As he had expected, the energy released was the same as last time and they interacted the same way as well. Then the third, the fourth, the fifth… every subsequent ingredient he put into the cauldron, he moved it in a clockwise motion.

What kept on surprising him was that the energy mixed together exactly how they were supposed to. The motion didn't at all affect the rate of release or the quality of the energy released.

"What's going on? Does the motion have no effect on the pill?

" he wondered. It felt wrong given how all the recipes continuously focused on the motion of the ingredient so much.

It couldn't be that no one before him tried to do what he was doing, and yet the recipe still remained the same.

"I must be missing some information,

" Alex thought.

He continued putting in more and more ingredients and continued on moving it clockwise regardless of what the recipe spoke. Finally, he had put in all the required ingredients and turned it into powder.

"The resulting energy is still wood. It really made no difference that I changed all the direction of the motion for the ingredients,

" he said. Then, he moved on to form the pill.

He first tried to pass the energy in the air, into the powder. He used elemental guidance to move the energy and passed it through where the powder was.

"What?

" Alex was shocked when he saw what happened next. When the energy passed through the powder, as if the powder rejected the energy or the energy rejected the powder, the energy passed through the powder and came out on the other side with almost 90% of it still remaining.

"That's weird,

" Alex thought and used Elemental Guidance once more, but it didn't really affect much.

"What's wrong? Was it because of what I changed?

" Alex wondered.

He tried Elemental Guidance once more for the third and last time, and it didn't have any effect at all. He couldn't keep using it any longer, or his powder would end up burning.

So he started forming a pill. Suddenly, his pill-splitting Qi was released from his body which moved onto the cauldron and turned the powder into two separate spheres.

Two strong vortexes appeared from inside both of those spheres and started sucking in the energy from the surrounding. The energy that the Elemental Guidance couldn't push into the powder, was now being sucked by the vortex.

Alex waited for the vortex to be over. Finally, all the elements in the surroundings were gone, all devoured by the two newly formed pills.

He decided to take them out, but just then, as soon as the vortex was gone, the two pills suddenly spewed out a lot of energy that had just been sucked back into the cauldron.

They couldn't handle it all. Alex opened the cauldron and checked the two-pill inside. One of those pills was at 14% harmony, and the other one was at 12% harmony.

Even if they were together, the pill would barely be an Earth-grade pill. Compared to the Heaven Grade pill he made before this, the current pills were complete garbage.

"And that was all just because I changed the direction of the motion, wasn't it?

" Alex thought..

"I still don't know how it affects anything at all.

"