NOVEL NEXT Ch. 12
Chapter 12: This Is the Standard, Memorize It!
In the office, there was only a shabby wooden desk and two long benches.
Leng Yanran sat on one of the benches.
Before her lay a huge piece of beast hide paper, densely filled with delicate handwriting — full of various processes and diagrams.
This was her “Mass Edition Qi Nourishing Pill V1.0 Standardized Production Process (SOP),” completed after three sleepless nights and painstaking effort.
For this document, she had poured in nearly all her decades of alchemy knowledge — from pharmacological analysis to optimizing the proportions of the sovereign, minister, assistant, and guide ingredients, and even the aggregation forms of spiritual energy molecules under different degrees of heat… Every single step pursued theoretical perfection.
She firmly believed that as long as this process was followed strictly, even with the worst-quality medicinal materials, the pill’s efficacy could be stabilized at seventy-five percent that of a normal Qi Nourishing Pill, and might even reach eighty percent at times!
This was absolutely a masterpiece that could shock any master of the Dao of Alchemy!
Her only concern was whether those three… employees — Zhang San, Li Si, and Wang Wu — could understand and carry out such a precise process.
At that moment, Chu Feng strolled in leisurely, hands clasped behind his back.
“Cold CPO, how’s it going? Have we finished our SOP?” Chu Feng asked cheerfully, plopping down across from her.
“Finished.” Leng Yanran replied coolly, pushing the beast hide paper toward him. There was a trace of subtle pride in her tone. “As long as this process is followed strictly, the yield rate can reach ninety-five percent, and the efficacy can remain at seventy-five percent.”
“Oh? That impressive?” Chu Feng grew interested and began reading the beast hide paper.
At first, he nodded and smiled.
But the more he read, the less he smiled, and the deeper his brows furrowed.
“Step One: Pre-treatment of materials. Dry the third leaf of the clover in the sunlight at noon quarter past the hour, to absorb its yang essence. Then grind it with a jade pestle eighty-one times, maintaining even force, until the powder turns pale green…”
“Step Two: Extraction of spiritual liquid. Control the fire — the flame must be light blue and three inches tall, heating in a spiral pattern…”
“Step Three: Pill condensation. At the moment when the medicinal liquid reaches its thickest state, insert the catalyst, envelop the liquid with divine sense, feel the change in internal spiritual energy, and when the spiritual vortex reaches the critical point…”
Chu Feng didn’t even get through one-tenth before slapping the beast hide paper onto the desk with a sharp “pa”.
“No.” Chu Feng shook his head, his tone leaving no room for argument.
“What?” Leng Yanran froze, thinking she’d misheard. This was her painstaking masterpiece, yet it was dismissed with just one word — “No”?
“Why not?” she demanded, her usually cold gaze now burning with suppressed anger.
“Too complicated!” Chu Feng pointed bluntly at the beast hide paper. “Cold CPO, did you forget what I told you? Who are our users? Who are our employees?”
He gestured toward the yard outside, where Zhang Daniu was leading a group of chores disciples in shouting slogans.
“You expect them to understand what ‘yang essence at noon quarter past the hour’ means? Or what ‘critical point of the spiritual vortex’ is? Forget them — even your three dear subordinates, Zhang San, Li Si, and Wang Wu — do you think they understand it?”
Leng Yanran was speechless.
Indeed, this process demanded far too much of the operators.
“I’ll repeat our core goals once more.” Chu Feng raised three fingers.
“One, efficiency! Two, cost! Three, reproducibility!”
“This thing you wrote — it pursues quality, it pursues artistry! You turned a simple task into something overly complex! It goes against our Group’s fundamental principle! Therefore—”
He pointed at the paper. “It’s just a piece of waste paper!”
The two words “waste paper” stabbed into Leng Yanran’s heart like needles.
“Then what do you say we should do?” she bit her lip, glaring stubbornly.
“I’ll teach you.” Chu Feng picked up a brush and, on the back of the beast hide paper, wrote out a brand-new SOP with sweeping strokes.
The style was utterly different from hers.
【Mass Edition Qi Nourishing Pill V1.0 (Chu Feng Revised Edition)】
【Position One: Grinding Worker (Zhang San in charge)】
Task: Grind all medicinal herbs into powder.
Standard: As long as you can’t tell what they used to be, it’s fine.
KPI: Grind ten catties within one incense stick’s time.
【Position Two: Mixing Worker (Li Si in charge)】
Task: Measure ingredients by weight according to the list and dump them into the basin.
Standard: Each item’s error margin cannot exceed one qian (five grams).
KPI: Prepare one hundred batches within one incense stick’s time.
【Position Three: Feeding and Fire Control Worker (Wang Wu in charge)】
Task: Knead the materials Li Si prepared into balls and toss them into the furnace.
Standard: Turn the fire to maximum and keep burning until the nearby sand timer runs out.
KPI: Refine ten furnaces within one incense stick’s time.
Simple. Rough. Completely devoid of aesthetics.
Leng Yanran stared at this so-called “SOP,” trembling all over in fury.
“This… this is an insult to the Dao of Alchemy!” she slammed the table. “With a process like this, how can the result even be called a pill? It’ll all be pill poison! It’ll kill people!”
“They won’t die.” Chu Feng’s tone was calm. “I calculated it. Using this rough process, the pill’s efficacy should retain around fifty to sixty percent. Yes, the pill poison will increase, but it’s still within the tolerance range of Qi Refining cultivators. Long-term use may harm their foundation, but for those chores disciples who can barely sense spiritual energy, having something to consume at all is already good enough — who cares about the rest?”
“Our motto is — first solve the problem of having it, then worry about whether it’s good!”
Chu Feng stood up, handing the S-O-P he wrote to Leng Yanran, his tone turning solemn.
“Cold CPO, put away that artist’s mindset! You’re a Product Officer now! What you should care about is not technical perfection, but market victory!”
“Now, take this SOP and give it to your three subordinates. Have them immediately, right now, strictly follow this standard and execute it!”
“I don’t care what methods you use — within one day, I want to see at least three thousand ‘products’ produced according to this standard!”
“That’s an order.”
With that, Chu Feng turned and left.
Leng Yanran stood there alone, clutching the absurd “process sheet” in her hands, her face pale, chest heaving violently with anger.
She looked out at the group of fervent “family members,” then back at the “order” in her hand.
Finally, she stomped her foot, pinched her nose, and walked toward her three “employees,” who were watching her eagerly.
She felt that her life on the Dao of Alchemy had, from this day onward, stepped onto a path of no return.