123: Chapter 123: Alchemy? This is an assembly line for me.
Jiang Ning pressed the start button. The reactor, which Sun Siyuan called a "lump of iron," began to work with a hum.
There was no fire, and no medicinal fragrance.
There was only the sound of machinery running and the blinking of indicator lights.
The audience present, especially those alchemy masters, shook their heads at the sight.
"Does this even count as alchemy? It's just nonsense."
"It's all dead, lifeless iron gadgets without a shred of spirituality; it would be a miracle if it could refine any pills."
Sun Siyuan crossed his arms and watched coldly from the side, just waiting for Jiang Ning to make a fool of herself.
On the high platform, Lin Yuan and several students were nervously staring at the data streams on the screens.
"Report, Instructor! Raw materials have been loaded! Weight and purity are both correct!"
"Report! Phase one, low-temperature extraction, has begun! Temperature, pressure, and spiritual energy concentration are all normal!"
"Report! Phase two, high-temperature catalysis, has begun! All parameters are stable!"
Unlike Sun Siyuan, who relied on feeling and experience, every step on their side was precisely controlled by computers, strictly executing the program Jiang Ning had set.
Time passed second by second.
Five minutes... Ten minutes...
The smile on Sun Siyuan's lips grew wider.
It only took him half an hour to refine pills, but this "lump of iron" had been preheating for nearly a quarter of an hour; the efficiency was simply abysmal.
He was just about to open his mouth to make a few sarcastic remarks.
The reactor's indicator light turned green.
A synthesized female voice echoed through the auditorium.
"First batch, 'Standardized Spiritual Energy Supplement Liquid,' production complete."
"Entering cooling and bottling sequence."
As soon as the voice finished, the fully enclosed conveyor belt connected to the other end of the reactor began to move.
Everyone's gaze was involuntarily drawn to it.
At the end of the conveyor belt, a robotic arm grabbed a bottle from the exit and placed it steadily onto the belt.
It was a very ordinary brown glass bottle, similar to common oral liquid medicine.
The bottle moved along the conveyor belt to the next position, where another robotic arm quickly applied a label to it.
Then the third, the fourth...
Small brown bottles emerged from the production line one after another, so quickly that it was hard to see clearly.
In less than a minute, a small mountain of them had piled up at the end of the conveyor belt.
"Is... is that it?"
"Is this the stuff that was refined? Isn't it just medicine water?"
"It doesn't even have the shape of a pill; you call this alchemy?"
The people below the stage were all stunned.
Sun Siyuan was laughing so hard his stomach hurt.
"Hahahaha! I thought you were going to come up with something impressive! But in the end... you just made a pile of medicine water?"
He walked over to the pile of bottles, casually picked one up, and shook it dismissively.
"Little girl, I admit your factory is efficient. But did you forget that we are competing to refine 'pills'? Something like this, which doesn't even count as a 'pill,' is worthy of competing with me?"
"Who decreed that pills must be round?"
Jiang Ning walked over, took the bottle from his hand, and retorted.
"Pills, plainly speaking, are just energy compressed together. Does what they look like matter?"
She unscrewed the cap. A pure medicinal fragrance, a hundred times stronger than when Sun Siyuan was refining his pills earlier, burst from the bottle opening!
This fragrance was no longer just the simple scent of herbs.
It was a kind of... vibrant, purest spiritual energy!
Everyone in the entire auditorium felt refreshed and invigorated just by smelling it!
The smile on Sun Siyuan's face froze.
He stared intently at the small bottle in Jiang Ning's hand, full of disbelief.
This scent... How is that possible?!
How could the spiritual energy contained in a small bottle of medicine water be more concentrated than the high-quality pills he refined using century-old spiritual herbs and Samadhi True Fire?!
"Don't believe it?" Jiang Ning glanced at him and instructed the staff below the stage, "Bring up the testing equipment."
Soon, two of Kunlun Academy's newest "Spiritual Energy Component Analyzers" were brought up.
One was to test Sun Siyuan's nine golden, high-quality peiyuan pills.
The other was to test a bottle of "oral liquid" casually taken from Jiang Ning's factory.
Everyone's gaze was focused on the screens next to the two instruments.
The results came out quickly.
For Sun Siyuan's peiyuan pills, the screen displayed:
"Spiritual energy purity: 87.3%."
"Active ingredient absorption rate: approximately 65%."
"Impurity content: 2.1%."
Seeing these data, the alchemy masters below the stage were full of admiration.
"My goodness! The purity exceeds 87%! This is already the cream of the crop among high-quality pills!"
"Young Valley Master Sun is truly a once-in-a-century genius! I couldn't reach this data even if I spent my whole life refining pills!"
Sun Siyuan also breathed a sigh of relief, his confidence returning to his face.
This achievement was the best level he had ever reached in his life.
He didn't believe that the medicine water created by that iron gadget on the other side could be better than this.
Then, everyone's gaze shifted to the other screen.
On the screen, the results for Jiang Ning's bottle of "Spiritual Energy Supplement Liquid" were displayed.
When the data on the other screen jumped out, the entire auditorium fell silent.
"Spiritual energy purity: 99.99%."
"Active ingredient absorption rate: 99.8%."
"Impurity content: below 0.001%, negligible."
Everyone was stunned.
They looked at that string of near-perfect numbers, rubbing their eyes, thinking they had misread them.
99.99% purity?
This... this is no longer a pill. This is a pure energy block!
Sun Siyuan stood there dumbfounded, as if struck by lightning, his mouth agape, unable to utter a single word.
His proudest "artwork" had been utterly defeated in the face of data that was precise to several decimal places.
"Do you see?" Jiang Ning's voice sounded in his ear.
"This is the power of standardization."
"Your nine pills are not bad. You spent half an hour, used expensive medicinal materials, and ended up with nine 'artworks' with over 80% purity."
She paused and pointed to the assembly line still running behind her.
"But my 'lump of iron,' in the same amount of time, using the most ordinary materials, can produce 30,000 bottles of 'industrial products' with 99.99% purity."
"Mr. Sun," Jiang Ning looked at him and asked the most heart-wrenching question, "Tell me, if you had to choose, would you choose your nine pills, or my 30,000 bottles of medicine water?"
Sun Siyuan's lips trembled, his face turned deathly pale, and he couldn't answer a single word.
He had lost. He lost even more miserably than the immortal envoy named Sect Leader Lu Yun last time.
Sect Leader Lu Yun was just inferior in strength. But for him, even his means of livelihood and the foundation of his proud "alchemy" had been uprooted from the very base by someone.
"No... impossible... my alchemy... my heritage..." He muttered as if he had lost his soul, on the verge of a breakdown.
But Jiang Ning did not intend to let him off just like that.
"Oh, right, I forgot to tell you." She pointed to another exit of the reactor, where some black dregs were being automatically collected.
"When you refine pills, don't you end up with a lot of useless medicinal dregs?"
"My factory doesn't."
"These so-called 'waste materials,' after secondary processing, become high-concentration 'spiritual energy organic fertilizer,' which is sent back to the spirit plants base to grow the next batch of medicinal materials."
"From beginning to end, the energy utilization rate is close to 100%."
"This is called 'sustainable development.'"
"It is also the true 'Dao' that a small workshop like yours will never understand."
Jiang Ning's last sentence completely crushed him.
Sun Siyuan spat out a mouthful of blood with a "pfft."
He looked at the pile of black medicinal dregs under his own furnace, then at the "factory" opposite that could recycle itself, and with his vision going black, he fell straight over.