1310 Splitting the Splitting technique
After Alex prepared the Saint Poison Neutralizing pill, he finally moved on to the Pill Splitting Qi. He hadn’t left it for the last or anything. He had been consciously observing how it worked while making the pill.
So, now that the pill was done with, he could just sit back and use what he learned to improve it.
The pill-splitting Qi did exactly 3 things one after another.
First, it split the powder in the cauldron into two equal halves.
Second, they then took each pile of powder and turned them into a spherical shape. It didn’t just make a spherical shape at all but also made sure to have the Structure and Composition of the pill be as best as it could.
Third, they pulled the energy in the cauldron into the pills using some sort of vortex created by his Qi.
The second thing the technique did was the most important part that Alex could not mess up, followed by the vortex. As for the first one, he did not need it. For now.
It was a complex problem that Alex was trying to solve and even as he started, he could already tell that it was going to take him months to complete this.
Even with the Dao of technique, making a completely new technique out of an existing one was not something he was sure he was capable of.
To start off, Alex had memorized the route the Qi took while coming out of his body. He knew how to use the technique, so there wasn’t much to it. The only thing about this route was just how many minor meridians the Qi had to go through before coming out.
The Qi started at the neutral spiritual root as the Qi had no elemental affinity to it. It then went through one of the four major meridians that each spiritual root had, the one that made the Qi control physical stuff with it.
Since the Pill Splitting Qi did not create something, help cultivate, or reinforce something that already exists, it could only go through that major meridian.
Since forming the pill from the powder and pouring energy into did not require any of the other 3 major meridians, Alex could be sure from the start that just which one he was supposed to start with.
There were two directions Alex could go from here.
The first method could take anywhere between a few days or a few years to get the result Alex wanted.
The second method would take a few months for sure, but it would definitely not take a year at all, even with how complex the technique was.
The first method included him brute forcing his way into finding the technique. Of course, it wouldn’t just be brute forcing as he knew thanks to his experiments and the Dao to which Meridian did that.
Unfortunately, given that the pill splitting Qi was a complex technique that combined 3 separate similarly complex techniques into one, even just separating the 2 techniques was difficult.
Even with what knowledge he had about the meridians and pathways, he still needed to go through the millions of possible combinations of pathways to test it all out.
Fortunately, his Dao would help him a lot here. His Qi would never have to make the complete route for him to know whether or not the technique would do what he intended to do based on the pathway it was on.
Meaning, he wouldn’t have to wait for the Qi to release out of his body and waste his time. He could instead immediately move on to the next series of pathways.
It also helped a ton since he could reuse the same Qi over and over without having to waste it. It sped up the process a lot.
With this method, Alex could cut down the time required to find the technique.
Without the dao, Alex could maybe do a thousand different tries in a single day, which would take him nearly 3 years to go through the million different possibilities.
With the dao, Alex could certainly do over ten thousand, if not more tests, that too without using much Qi. The only Qi he would use would be a few bits of Qi that the heavens would take away as a cost for using the Dao.
Every Dao had its cost, so Alex didn’t care much for it.
Going through this direction, Alex had millions of possibilities to try. He could find the technique in just a few thousand tries if he was lucky, or it could take millions if he was not.
The second method was far less of a gamble.
Since the pill splitting Qi started with separating the powder into two halves, Alex could just try and figure out that part of the technique.
Given how simple the technique was, it would take Alex no more than a week, if even that to figure out the technique behind splitting the powder.
Once he had that technique, he could compare it against the actual Pill-splitting Qi, and contrast the two to figure out what sort of pathways would work the best for the second and third part of the technique.
This would most definitely take Alex some time to figure out exactly how to remove the First part of the technique without removing the second and the third, giving him an understanding of the possible pathways to achieve what he wanted.
The possible pathways there would amount to no more than a tenth of that of the first method, giving Alex an advantage. There was also an element of gambling here, but it was so small that it couldn’t even be called that.
Alex thought for a bit as to exactly what he wanted to do.
If he were in some sort of a hurry or a deadline, Alex would definitely choose to gamble. However, given that he had ample time, he decided to go with the 2nd method.
There was another reason why he wanted to go for the 2nd method, but that was way too advanced for him to just try out without first learning more about the Dao of techniques.
Once he figured out more, he would then decide whether to try his hand at what he had planned as well.
After his preparations were made, Alex began his task.
He spent the majority of the time of the day figuring out the first half of the problem. Removing the splitting part of the technique from the whole technique turned out more difficult than he imagined.
He had improved some techniques before, so he knew it wasn’t supposed to be this difficult, so the only reason he could give was that the technique he was trying to change was just that complex.
Alex had a suspicion that he was trying to change a Divine grade technique, if not a Celestial grade. He wouldn’t even be surprised if it was actually a God-grade technique given how incredible it was.
After finally figuring out what remained after removing the first part of the technique, Alex now only had to test about a million or 2 different possibilities.
Around a million possibilities and 7 months in total later, Alex finally got the technique he wanted so badly.
From now on, he could make pills with pill veins with just a single set of ingredients.