He couldn’t possibly join all of those powders right now. At least, not with the level of spiritual sense he had right now.

He could focus on multiple of these at once, so he decided to start with that. No matter how impossible it looked, he had to try.

So, he started doing it. He went around the cauldron, trying to find the individual specks of powder and brought them together. He moved them, twisted them, slid them into places, and finally managed to make a clump of the powders that perfectly fitted together.

His eyes beamed with joy, but then immediately dulled as he saw the other many individual specks he had to get to.

He sighed and got onto it. He split his concentration, putting all of his focus into the cauldron, and started fitting the other pieces together.

Once he had done the first one, the rest became easy. However, when he was just 10% of the way through, his physical body twitched and he immediately pulled his senses back.

That was when he realized that the aura inside the cauldron was extremely turbulent and was moments away from bursting open.

Alex immediately opened the lid and used Elemental Guidance to move the energy out of the cauldron.

The energy soon dissipated in the air, and the threat was subdued.

Then, he sighed again.

’I can’t lose focus of the energy while making the powder,’ he thought.

He cleared the cauldron and tried again.

This time, once he was done until the point before he had to form the pill, he split half his attention of the energy, moving it around, stopping it from going out of control.

While the other half of the attention formed the powder. The speed was half as slow. But, it was working.

The energy wasn’t going turbulent and he was halfway done with making the po—

Alex noticed something. When he looked for more specks, amongst the colorful specks of powder, he started seeing black specks.

When he focused on it, he realized that they were burnt powder. When Alex looked over the entirety of the cauldron, he noticed that a lot of the powders had been burned.

He sighed. Another failure.

Alex tried again and again, and each time he failed.

When he turned off the fire to not burn the powder, the powders wouldn’t stick together anymore to form the pill.

When he tried to hurry up, he would make mistakes.

When he tried to slow down, the energy would start breaking down with the constant heat put into them.

When he was done with the last pieces of the powder, he noticed that many of the fire pieces had fallen into individual pieces.

When he tried and tried and tried for days on end, after nearly 3 weeks, he finally managed to make a pill with no mistakes made at all.

Its harmony came out to be 60%.

60%. 3 weeks of effort, so many ingredients wasted to get a 60%. 60% was amazing, but that was not what he wished after such long period of effort.

When he wondered why that had happened, he intensely started searching for the answer.

He recalled the recipe, there was no mistake.

He recalled the structure and composition, he had done the best he could.

He checked for the gap, there were some in the pill itself as not everything had fit tightly snug together, but that was clearly not responsible for merely 60%.

Alex thought of the abstract concept of symmetry the Royal Alchemist had told him about, but it shouldn’t have been as important.

Then, the only problem could have been that Alex let the powders and energy remain in the cauldron for too long and they lost their potency.

Alex leaned backward, slamming his back onto the ground.

”I give up!” he said out loud. “I don’t want to do this.” After having tried the same thing over and over for the last week or so, he felt like he would rather take the BlueFlame Monkey’s exploding flower to the face than do this.

As he lay on the ground, a thought came to him. ‘Shit!’ he thought. He was getting motivated again for no goddamn reason.

’I really do love Alchemy, don’t I?’ he thought.

He breathed in and out for a while and got back up to make the pill again. This time, he wanted to try something he hadn’t tried in the last 3 weeks yet.

This time, he wanted to try nothing.

Every single time, he had ruined the ingredients trying to do something and failed. He now wanted to see how the recipe fared when he did nothing.

He followed the recipe with 0 mistakes, and when it came to the pill making turn, he moved the powder randomly, clumping it into a ball and letting the energy pass through it to collect as much as it could.

When the pill floated into his hand, Alex wanted to cry.

66%.

For something he had done randomly, he got 66%. But for something he had tried for 3 weeks straight, he got 60%.

Alex concentrated on the newly formed pill and noticed that about 70% of the pill had automatically done what he had been trying to do for the last 3 weeks.

The gap and symmetry were quite bad in the new pill as well, so he knew that had never been the problem.

’So I really need to finish it fast, huh?’ he thought.

He tried it once again to see if this one had been a fluke and came out with 67% harmony instead. No, that could not have been a fluke.

Alex started thinking. He needed to do something that would capitalize on the positives of both of these different methods of following the same pill.

He needed the 100% puzzle completion aspect of the manual pill-making process, while he needed the speed of the random pill-making process.

If he combined these two, he had no doubt he could reach the Immortal grade with his pill.

’How do I do that though?’ he thought. How in this godforsaken mountain range was he supposed to find a way to make perfect symmetrical, 100% energy-absorbing pills as quick as possib—

Alex jumped onto his feet. That couldn’t be it, could it? He had a thought come to him, but he wasn’t sure if he was being stupid or extremely intelligent at the moment.

He quickly calmed himself and thought if there was any way it would work at all.

”I won’t know if I don’t try,” he thought and brought out another set of ingredients.

With the cauldron hot, he put the ingredients into the cauldron one by one until he reached the moment when the ingredients had turned into powder, and he simply needed to form the pill.

Alex didn’t enhance his senses to join the individual specks together, nor did he randomly start moving the powder together for another pill.

Instead, he looked into himself and thought, ‘come!’.

Qi stirred in his naval region and started moving automatically through his meridians. With how large his meridians were at the moment, they took no time until they reached his arms.

Then, out of both his right hand and his stump, the Qi moved out on its own until it reached the cauldron.

Alex didn’t need to guide the Qi or make sure it didn’t do anything it didn’t need to. The Qi worked like it had a brain of its own.

It went into the cauldron, moved the powders together, brought it to a single clump, and then as if a knife had cut through that clump, it broke into two halves.

The Qi separated as well, moving into the two smaller clumps of powder and starting doing its magic.

Alex couldn’t tell how they did it, but they quickly formed the two halves into normal-sized pills with a lot of gaps in them, and a vortex formed above them that sucked in all the energy of the cauldron.

In less than a moment, the pills were done.

Alex pulled out the two-pill and looked at the two with absolute surprise.

46% and 46%.

Alex’s jaw dropped and there was only one thought in his mind.

”I need to learn this technique.”