Chapter 212 — The Alchemy Factory

Beside them, Amber sidled quietly up to Jenny and muttered to her in a low voice, "Don't you think the way these two talk to each other makes them seem like their brains have holes in them?"

Jenny had by now grown used to the atmosphere in Cecil's domain, but she could not get used to Amber's mouth, and for a moment had no idea how to respond. "I… I don't know what to say…"

"Tch, no fun at all." Amber cast a scornful glance at the runesmith lady who refused to play the straight man, then turned to Gao Yang. "Old Zongzi, are you going or not? Bickering with your granddaughter—is that any fun…"

The moment Amber opened her mouth, she successfully diverted the attention of both Gao Yang and Rebecca, and the latter's conflict evaporated at once…

Be that as it may, in the end, worn down by Rebecca's relentless pestering, Gao Yang still brought along this over-curious bullheaded girl, and the three of them followed Amber to the alchemy factory at the edge of town.

Even with "black technology"-grade new construction techniques, the alchemy factory was still far from complete; only Workshop No. 1 and its supporting storage facilities had been finished so far, and within Workshop No. 1 only a single set of reaction vessels had been fully assembled and sealed. In Gao Song's conception, at least three workshops and twelve sets of reaction vessels were needed here to meet the production of basic alchemical potions—plant-catalyzing agents for agriculture, soil conditioners, weed suppressants; druidic healing potions, weak mana potions, various disease-dispelling mixtures for people, and so on. There were more than a dozen varieties of basic potions all told. In the hands of a traditional alchemist, these potions were all made in a tiny alchemical laboratory with a single alchemy bench and a few reaction flasks—but such an operation obviously could not be used in a factory: the reaction vessels in a factory would run continuously, and both the addition of materials and the output of finished product would be batch-based and uninterrupted. So save for a few special cases, each potion had to correspond to its own dedicated set of reaction vessels.

Accordingly, Piyun had divided the basic potions by their properties into twelve "production lines" and three different workshops, with the workshops isolated from one another to form distinct zones, ensuring that the finished potions would not be mixed and stored together and cause accidents. In fact, by Gao Song's requirements, potions for ordinary people, potions for superhumans, and potions for agriculture should not even be produced in the same factory—only the domain's conditions were limited for now, and the cost of running three alchemy factories at once was terrifyingly high. Add to that the fact that druidic potions were fundamentally different from the "pesticides" Gao Yang knew from his previous life, and that the currently planned basic potions posed no great pollution risk, and he had permitted the practice of putting all three workshops in one factory.

He had, however, specifically laid down a requirement for Piyun: should higher-grade potions with greater efficacy and greater toxic side effects be produced in the future, the entire production chain must be completely isolated—from raw materials to semi-finished products to finished products, there must be no risk of any mixed contamination whatsoever.

The towering reaction vessels stood in the still-spacious production workshop, where Piyun, the apprentices he had trained, and the ordinary workers they had recruited bustled around this brand-new equipment. It was an apparatus unprecedented in this world—unlike any alchemical vessel that had ever existed here, unlike the various mana-powered machines flourishing throughout the domain, and of course unlike the chemical equipment in Gao Yang's memories of his previous life.

At its center was a vertical iron tank two meters tall; several curved pipes connected the tank to the small reaction vessels around it, together forming a radial, almost star-shaped structure. Those pipes were not only conduits for materials and gases—they were themselves part of a magic array. Where these "pipe-runes" joined the reaction vessels, one could see druidic divine-art runes and all manner of magic runes gleaming and reflecting one another; on the surfaces of some reaction vessels, arrays large and small could also be seen emitting a faint glow; and on the "base" of the whole apparatus—the surface of the concrete platform standing a dozen or so centimeters above the ground—lay the key to everything: the inversion array.

It drew magical energy from the mana-net underground and converted it into "natural divine power" that the druidic divine-art array could recognize. Through such a wondrous process of conversion, humanity had seized the power that once belonged to the gods.

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