Ming Dynasty and New Rome and Infinite Magic Machine

Chapter 1445 Alchemy Furnace
"By the way," Zhu Xianxun asked Shangluo, "Do you know how the alchemy room makes elixirs?"

"Brother, you are a Dan cultivator, you ask me."

"No. I mean, I've never used a furnace from anywhere else. Have you forgotten when I asked you to help carry the goods?"

"what"

Shangluo remembered that when he first met Zhu Xianxun, Zhu Xianxun asked him to help distribute the plastic figurines of Wang Lingguan that he made to his classmates at school.

Since Zhu Xianxi didn't have any other alchemy furnace, he directly used the Taoist's furnace of heaven and earth in Yuxi Palace to refine the alchemy.

"To be honest, I have been to the laboratory and Yuxi Palace, but I have rarely used the ordinary alchemy room."

"I don't know, actually. But is there any special need that I need to figure out a solution for?"

"Well, it seems that Shangluo, you have never seen an ordinary alchemy room. After all, I have seen one, so I will take you to have a look."

Jinyiwei, Danfang.

This place is located in a secluded hillside near the Grand Palace. Contrary to what Shangluo had expected, this place did not seem to have any signs of industrial production, not even a chimney.

"Hey, why is the emperor here? And Shangluo with him?" Captain Qi had just returned and did not expect that Shangluo and Zhu Xianxun would also come together.

"Captain Qi, take Shangluo to see your alchemy furnace. The elixir for Governor Yuan is quite good. We need to figure out how to expand production."

Captain Qi nodded and led the two of them through the gate into a remote courtyard. In the middle of the courtyard were a dozen coal stoves, each with a crucible-like heat-resistant pot on top.

Many of the alchemy room employees were walking back and forth, carrying small scales for weighing medicines, as well as oil-paper bags and the like. There were also a few people watching the fire, holding cattail-leaf fans in their hands.

These employees all looked very professional, and many of them wore Taoist robes, as if they were sent from other alchemy sects. Although the high-gluten flour piled up nearby looked a little unreliable, the medicinal fragrance in the air made up for it.

"Where is the alchemy furnace?" Shangluo asked.

"That's all." Qi Qianhu pointed at the coal stoves in the middle. "Although there are other courtyards, they are all like this."

"Wait a minute." Although Shangluo had almost guessed it just now, it was not until Qi Qianhu really said it that Shangluo finally confirmed that the crucible on the coal stove was the alchemy furnace.

"Is this what an alchemy furnace looks like?!"

"So what do you think the alchemy furnace looks like?"

The alchemy furnace that left the deepest impression on Shangluo is of course the big furnace of Taishang Laojun in "Journey to the West".

The first alchemy furnace he saw in Daming was the Tiandi Honglu in Yuxi Palace, which looked exactly like the Taishang Laojun's furnace.

But the sight of these genuine alchemy furnaces in front of him made him slap his forehead -

"It turns out Wen Yang didn't fool me. It turns out that picking up a stove is real. It turns out that high-gluten flour is also real!"

"When did he fool you?" Zhu Xianxi asked, "That guy is pretty good, would he do something like this?"

This is a long story. This is indeed the beginning of a long story for him. When he first met Wen Yuan, Wen Yuan taught him how to make pills. At that time, he made his foundation-building pills in a random container - it was a cauldron, but not a very big one, it was about the size of a hot pot. He had to put all the messy materials on the stove and boil them like a hot pot.

The high-gluten flour also impressed him the most.

In the end, the refining of the foundation-building pill was actually successful. In fact, it was correct from the beginning, but the refining process was not completed after it came out of the furnace. He only realized this when he successfully built his foundation.

"So that's how it is. You thought Wen Yuan was fooling you, right?"

“It’s not a scam. But I think at least the high-gluten flour is okay.”

"High-gluten flour is a very practical adhesive." Qi Qianhu replied, "Sometimes soybean flour is also used. However, high-gluten flour works very well, so we later used flour. Because many pills are in a lump when they are refined, they need to be mixed with flour - this is called paste pill in terms of pill making method, and it is more commonly used."

"So this is also part of the pill making process?"

"Yes." Qi Qianhu nodded, "Making pills is a systematic science. Of course, it is not just about those mysterious prescriptions. How to make pills is also a part of it. This is actually very similar to the work of a pharmacy, but in pharmacies, there are generally more honey pills, which are made of honey and starch as adhesives, and then rubbed on a mold, and a handful of them will make a pile. In addition, there are water pills, wax pills and the like. When we refine pills, we usually use paste pills."

"It's mainly because paste pills are more suitable for use in metals." Zhu Xianxi added, "In the elixir we want to refine, we often use metals that are not used in general medicines. This is called 'Six One Mud' in medicinal mud."

"Why does it sound like Erba sauce?"

"Actually, the meaning is similar. Six-to-one mud means that standard medicinal mud uses six different powders and a binder, and the ratio is generally six to one. The mud is used to carry medicine. There are many traditional powders. In addition to flour, there are also yellow mud, clam powder, lime, red ochre and the like - of course, this is traditionally the case."

"what about now?"

"Nowadays, we usually only use flour. If we put too much red ochre and other things, it is easy to refine it into five-stone powder. In short, we can add some lime and yellow mud at most. Although the recipe is different, the basic structure of [Six-One Mud] is still maintained. The medicinal mud itself is used for shaping, mainly for sealing, storage, and convenient consumption. Because you can see that the things in front of you are all refined into a lump, and they need to be shaped before they can be used." "Then is there such a thing as the metal pill given to ancient emperors for cultivating immortality that I often see in dramas?"

"Ah," Zhu Xianxi shook his head, "This kind of thing should be found by a blacksmith. There is no way something baked in a normal furnace will directly solidify into a ball."

"Yes, there are." Captain Qi added, "But it's not here. If you go out and walk forward, you can see the gunsmith's site. They still have the molds used to make lead bullets in ancient times. It was like this in ancient times. The court usually didn't issue bullets, but lead strips. When they arrived at the place, they used the mold to melt the lead on the spot and made lead bullets. If you use a normal furnace, it is unlikely to make balls."

Shangluo noticed a key word:

"The 'normal' way? Then there are abnormal furnaces?"

"Well, this is the key." Zhu Xianxi replied, "When I use the Tiandi Honglu to refine the elixir, I don't need to use Liuyi mud. The elixir that comes out of it is indeed a round shape that has already been formed."

Qi Qianhu added: "The Great Furnace of Heaven and Earth of Daozu has the power of creation and contains the secrets of heaven and earth. The things it refines are incomparable to ordinary things. What it refines is indeed the shape of a ball."

Not only was the object refined into a perfect sphere, the effects of the pills were also clearly different from those found elsewhere.

After all, Xu Fu's own elixir does not have the effect of "immortality", but only "longevity". But longevity still has a price.

Governor Yuan was clearly dead, but he was still able to come back to life. This was the enhancement of the elixir by the Heaven and Earth Furnace - in theory. In fact, Zhu Xianxin sometimes found it difficult to figure out what part was enhanced.

"Then the question is," Zhu Xianxi said helplessly, "If what we want is not enhancement, but mass production, what should we do? Just rely on these small furnaces in front of us?"

"What is the output?" Shangluo asked.

"The output is not a problem. If all these furnaces are used, the output will be considerable - but the elixir is difficult to mass-produce. Xu Fu's recipe is extremely complicated and labor-intensive. For example, it took me three workers to make it."

"What do you mean by 3 jobs?"

"It is a method of calculating the amount of work. One work is the amount of work that one person does in one day." Zhu Xianxi answered, "For example, in the past, when a wealthy family married off their daughter, they would give her a set of 1-work bed, which is a large piece of furniture that requires 1000 workers to make. This means that it takes one person 1 days to make it, or two people 1000 days, or four people 2 days, and so on."

"If 1000 people were needed, could they complete the task in one day?"

"Well, when I was reading history books, I read that in the Northern Dynasties, Cui Hao once compiled the national history, and after it was completed, it was engraved into an inscription. It was said that those inscriptions took 300 million workers. Sometimes I also think that if one person takes 1 million days to engrave, 300 people will take 10000 days to engrave - this shouldn't be calculated that way. The increase in the number of people will have a marginal effect. The more people there are, the harder it is to manage, and the more people there are, the easier it is to slack off. So for a huge project like 300 million workers, there should be a lot of water in the calculation of the working hours. But this, the 300-worker pill is really real. It took me 3 days to make it."

[And this doesn't seem to take into account the required skill proficiency. Because obviously, people like your brother can't be found everywhere. ]

Shangluo asked: "What level of alchemist is needed to make this?"

"That's the problem - my cultivation is pretty good, but I still need three days of work. If all the Jinyiwei in the alchemy room work together, they can probably refine hundreds of pills in a month. But it's impossible for the Jinyiwei to do nothing and just refine pills here all day long."

"That's true." Captain Qi felt a little sorry, but he had to say it. "We, the Jinyiwei, although we have the status of the court, can't work from nine to five like ordinary people. After all, as cultivators, we also need some personal time. Although in emergencies, military orders are as heavy as a mountain, but normally we don't go to work every day. This alchemy room is usually only in operation half of the time every month."

"What if you work non-stop? Working all 30 days a week?"

"It's not like we haven't worked non-stop before. If there's a war, the Royal Guards can certainly step up, as this is the duty of a soldier. However, it's actually impossible for us to keep operating at this high intensity all the time."

"There is a reason for doing this." Zhu Xianxun replied, "Because most immortal cultivators don't actually need our wages to live, and we can't offer enough wages to buy out the immortal cultivators' time - let alone the current Jinyiwei, even those palace masters a long time ago only went out a few times a month. If we use the same standards to restrict the current Jinyiwei. And... Putting aside the treatment, the most important reason is that immortals need to be free."

This is the most important thing.

Jinyiwei were still soldiers after all. If the court was really in trouble, the soldiers could certainly overcome it. But monks had to practice, which was an impossible hurdle to overcome. The cultivation of monks required a lot of time to maintain. If they were asked to work non-stop, or even to maintain high-intensity combat, their cultivation would begin to decline.

“Can I use medicine to supplement it?”

"Well," Zhu Xianxi shook his head, "Of course there are medicines, and we can refine some pills to replenish spiritual energy. But taking pills all the time is not a solution after all - because it is not just the body that needs to rest, but also the state of mind. Qigong practitioners need to cultivate their state of mind, which is an inevitable loss. If you only rely on pills for a long time, instead of cultivating your state of mind like a real immortal, then it is no different from a magic weapon."

Although Zhu Xianxin was also helpless, Shangluo could understand it.

Each furnace here needs someone to take care of it. If all the alchemists were asked to work, and each of them was assigned a furnace to make alchemy, that would not be a problem. The Jinyiwei also did not object to working overtime occasionally.

But the quantity Shangluo requires cannot be achieved by occasionally working overtime.

"So Shangluo, I think we have to at least improve the alchemy room. Both in terms of equipment and system. Otherwise, I'm afraid we won't be able to ask the Jinyiwei to produce pills according to your requirements. After all, we expect that we need tens of millions of pills."

"Wait a minute." Qi Qianhu was shocked. "Tens of millions? Wouldn't that require hundreds of millions of workers? We only have 20 alchemists here! Each one needs 500 million workers on average? We can't finish refining the pills in the furnace even if we spend years! What are we going to do with the extra pills? To eat them?"

"Well," Shangluo shook his head, "Of course it's not for eating, it's for the tributary states. We have higher-level ones, but we also have to prepare them for the tributary states. But now it seems that the lower-level ones also need to improve the process. By the way, Senior Brother, can this alchemy furnace be built bigger?"

"what are you thinking?"

"It's too slow to make one small pot at a time. I think we should at least get a big cauldron - a real big cauldron, preferably one that can produce a lot of pills at a time. Then, it would be best if we can cast the key parts like we cast lead bullets, and then let them take them back and make them into pills. We only do irreplaceable work here, and as for the ordinary work of making pills, let those who want to eat pills figure it out themselves."

(End of this chapter)