Mage? Magic Engineer!-Chapter 109 - 106: Mr. Rorschach

Sunlight streamed into the office building. On the third floor, a laboratory was filled with all sorts of jars, bottles, and strangely shaped glass instruments, the light penetrating, refracting, and scattering through them.

Mr. Pierre Nixingen and the other partners followed the Alchemy Department’s every word. When the old hands threw out the blueprints, they built everything strictly according to the designs and even scoured Valuva City to procure all the experimental equipment the Alchemy Department required.

They were practically Valuva’s most wonderful business partners.

"Is the alcohol ready? And the glycerin."

"Yes, we sourced it from the manufacturer specified by the Alchemy Department."

After entering the lab, Rorschach immediately dismissed Pierre and his hulking Bodyguard. He needed an assistant, and it clearly wasn’t going to be either of them.

’Antoine is a pretty good fit. He’s sharp, interested in this field, and has a rich uncle. Perfect. Even if I get him hooked, I won’t feel guilty about it.’

As his uncle was leaving, Antoine saw him give a thumbs-up.

Two main ingredients were now laid out on the table before Rorschach and Antoine: Cow Gall Grass and mallow fruit. Rorschach had seen the former before. Its most striking feature was the specialized pulvinus under the leaf, which resembled a drooping sac covered in purple, vein-like patterns. It was said that the more numerous and darker the patterns, the higher the quality.

The mallow fruit came in two batches. One part consisted of whole, unprocessed raw fruit. The huge green pods were arranged radially in clusters of five, and you had to peel them open to see the seeds needed. The other half was made up of enormous, sun-dried and dehydrated seeds with purplish-red skin.

The existing process had also been finalized by the old hands at the Alchemy Department after much deliberation, so their temperatures and extraction methods were a valuable reference.

"What’s the heating temperature for the first kettle?" Rorschach asked.

"The Alchemy Department’s process manual says 110 degrees, but in practice, the workers aren’t that strict with the charcoal fires. They keep it between 100 and 130 degrees." 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

From this, Rorschach knew that, at the very least, the active ingredients wouldn’t decompose in large amounts or denature at temperatures below 130 degrees.

Rorschach could make a rough guess as to the type of active ingredients in the two plants. He held a finished Energy Potion up to the sunlight. When he swirled it gently, the slightly viscous, purple, turbid liquid coated the sides of the bottle.

The Cow Gall Grass was directly pressed, and the resulting product was viscous, suggesting it contained a large amount of lipids. The process for the dried mallow fruit, on the other hand, was to add water, steam, and concentrate it. This indicated its active ingredient was water-soluble and could boost energy, which meant it was likely a glycoside, alkaloid, or organic acid (or its salt).

"The masters say that if the mallow fruit extract isn’t concentrated enough, or if you add too much to the Cow Gall Grass juice at once, the whole batch becomes extremely cloudy. In severe cases, it’ll even separate into layers, and that batch is ruined."

"Because one is an oil phase and the other is an aqueous phase." Rorschach surmised that the two plants must also contain trace amounts of a surfactant that could act as an emulsifier. ’Normally, water and higher fatty acids are immiscible. The surfactant acts like a "matchmaker," forcing them together. If there aren’t enough "matchmakers" to go around, you get turbidity and phase separation.’

’If it were like before, just for the Alchemy Department’s own use or for internal consumption within the Magic Guild, who would care if it was clear or cloudy? You’d just GULP GULP GULP it down and be done with it. But now it’s meant to be a commercial product. In Rorschach’s eyes, this was substandard. A cloudy liquid is too easily associated with dirty sewage; a clear, uniform Potion is far more acceptable to customers.’

He used his Decomposition Skill, but the Cow Gall Grass sac didn’t completely break apart as Rorschach intended. It seemed that aside from ordinary chemical substances, the grass indeed contained components activated by Magic Power.

In that case, it was time for his assistant to step in. "Antoine, go chop up the Cow Gall Grass. I’ll set up the equipment."

’The glassware on hand is a bit different from my previous life,’ Rorschach thought. For distillation, all he had was a retort, and there was no condenser. ’Fortunately, the heating temperature isn’t high, and the neck of the retort is long enough. I can make do by wrapping a towel around it and constantly pouring water on it.’

’Alcohol is good stuff. As a lower alcohol, it’s the most accessible "social butterfly" of solvents—miscible with water in any proportion, yet also able to dissolve many organic compounds.’ However, Rorschach didn’t plan to immediately soak and heat the Cow Gall Grass extract in alcohol from the start.

"It’s chopped. Is this size okay?" Antoine had completed the task Rorschach gave him, his hands covered in a brownish-green pulp.

"Looks good, thanks." Rorschach used Mage’s Hand to take the lump of raw material, stuff it through the wide opening of the retort, and then add enough water to completely submerge the pieces.

"Add water?" Antoine remembered that after juicing and filtering, the next step was to concentrate it by evaporating the water. He didn’t understand why Rorschach was doing the exact opposite.

"Yes, add water. Then we’ll let the water boil along with the oil phase in the plant." Rorschach judged that the oil in the plant was likely a light oil, with a concentration temperature close to the boiling point of water, so he could try steam distillation. ’Since water and the volatile component each have their own partial pressure when they co-boil, it will boil as long as the total pressure reaches atmospheric pressure. This allows them to be distilled out together at a temperature lower than either of their individual boiling points. For the organic oil, it’s equivalent to vacuum distillation.’

"You control the heat source. Keep the temperature at 90 degrees for now, and raise it if the distillation rate is too low." Rorschach inserted a thermometer into the oil bath. Since the heating temperature was around one hundred degrees, glycerin would work just fine.

Slowly, water and a green oil began to appear in the conical flask at the receiving end of the retort. As the volume increased, they separated into layers. The result was far clearer and purer than the brownish-green pulp from direct pressing.

Meanwhile, the extraction of the mallow fruit involved crushing the dried fruit, repeatedly extracting it with alcohol, and then evaporating and concentrating the solution to obtain a brownish-red paste. This was a method Rorschach chose based on experience; considering its active ingredients could be concentrated in an aqueous phase, this method would yield a paste that retained the glycosides, alkaloids, organic acids, and so on.

’If only I had a Soxhlet Extractor...’ Rorschach mused. Although he had the paste, the yield could be taken to another level with continuous extraction via alcohol circulation. He separated a portion of the paste, heated it further until it became a brown powder, and then carefully roasted the powder with a plugged glass funnel inverted over it.

This was delicate work. Rorschach didn’t know the temperature range at which the key component would sublimate versus when it would decompose, so he could only raise the temperature slowly and test it. He constantly adjusted the roasting temperature. Just as he had predicted, glistening, needle-like crystals slowly began to grow on the inner surface of the inverted funnel. To accelerate the condensation of the sublimated component, Rorschach even cast Touch of Frost with the hand holding the funnel.

"It’s so beautiful," Antoine couldn’t help but come closer to admire Rorschach’s masterpiece.

"Go, go, go, watch the temperature! Don’t let it boil dry!" Rorschach carefully scraped the crystals from the funnel.

On the other side, the co-distillation of the Cow Gall Grass extract and water was complete. Rorschach separated the phases of the liquid.

Antoine was starting to get the hang of it. "Do we need to distill it again to remove the water?"

Unfortunately, his prediction was wrong. Rorschach simply added crushed, dry chlorinated lime powder to the separated green oil. When the added powder no longer clumped together, it signaled that its water-absorbing task was complete. After a simple filtration, a refined oil with an extremely low water content was born.

Rorschach then took another portion of the refined Cow Gall Grass oil, added alcohol and a small amount of table salt, and stirred continuously, causing the phases to separate again. This time, however, he didn’t keep the oil. Instead, he took the alcohol-containing aqueous phase and concentrated it by heating, yielding a clear, yellowish-green liquid.

He now had four samples: the refined oil and the concentrated extract from the Cow Gall Grass, and the paste and crystals from the mallow fruit.

Rorschach mixed them in pairs. Each combination produced a purple Potion, but the one made from the concentrated extract and the crystals was the deepest purple, as well as the clearest and most translucent. There was only enough of the sample to fill the smallest-sized glass vial. Rorschach picked it up, and in the sunlight, it radiated a captivating, brilliant, crystalline purple light.

The experiment had started in the morning and continued until after four in the afternoon. Rorschach and Antoine had missed lunch, but neither of them felt hungry. They both stared, transfixed, at the tiny "Essence of Hercules."

"It’s beautiful. A breathtakingly beautiful purple."

"It should be purer than even the best product from the Alchemy Department," Mr. Rorschach said, extremely satisfied.