Concocting a potion sounded straightforward, but the actual details and techniques were, unsurprisingly, complicated and involved a significant amount of manual labor. The preparation process for each ingredient was even more intense than with Potions #1 and #2. There were over a hundred auxiliary herbs required for Potion #3, each of which had to be prepared with painstaking care.

It took Zhang Lie an entire day and a half of preparatory labor before he was ready to brew the potion in earnest. In front of him were over a hundred herbal essences of various shades and colors, and what Zhang Lie had to do now was to add these essences to each other in an orderly, sequential manner.

Despite the seeming simplicity of this process, the slightest error could propagate, and timing was of absolute importance. For instance, if two of the essences being combined were at different temperatures, the temperature gradient...