At the Academic Palace, on the rear mountain, stood the experiment building.
Behind the attic, on the flat ground, a huge glass greenhouse had been erected. Within it, several small compartments were partitioned, each tightly sealed and fitted with glass windows, resembling a gigantic, segmented, constant-temperature cultivation box.
Li Ang, wearing a mask, stood inside one such cultivation chamber. He was dressed in a white coat sewn by Chai Chai, his expression serious as he surveyed the greenhouse for any oversights.
On the walls of the greenhouse hung a simple mercury thermometer he had made, and on the floor were Heating Talismans he had written himself, creating a constant-temperature workspace. The room had been thoroughly sterilized. Experimental equipment such as slant culture bottles, shaking flasks, seed jars, propagation jars, and fermentation jars had been moved in through an isolation buffer chamber and a sterile corridor door.
Due to his past contributions and good reputation, the materials for these expensive devices were all reimbursed by the Academic Palace. Masters and Doctors like Tantai Leshan and Su Feng were ready to comply with any request, providing all their support.
However, Li Ang wasn’t entirely confident.
He turned, waved to Chai Chai outside the greenhouse, then used Telekinesis to remotely close the door of the isolation buffer chamber.
The ideal medicine for the pale spiral body, or Treponema pallidum, was Penicillin.
The reproduction cycle of the pale spiral body is 30-33 hours. Penicillins, with their beta-lactam structure, can bind with proteins crucial for bacterial cell wall synthesis. This causes damage to the cell wall, thereby blocking the reproduction of Treponema pallidum.
Since human cells lack a cell wall, Penicillin kills pathogens without harming the body, making it an excellent antibiotic. For more chapters visit N0v3l.Fiɾe.net
However, the difficulty in refinement lay in cultivation, fermentation, separation, and purification. A deviation in any step could neutralize the medicinal effect, or even turn a life-saving drug into a lethal one.
"Let’s begin..." Li Ang exhaled deeply.
Simplicity is key, he thought. Without premium strains, he began culturing Penicillium mold using his own leather boots, oranges, and pumpkins. Lacking the necessary corn steep liquor for fermentation, he substituted cottonseed cake—the residue left after oil pressing—for corn enzymatic products. Instead of stainless steel fermenters, he used small glass bottles. And without a refrigeration room, he relied on the Liliang Talisman.
Li Ang became completely engrossed in the extraction of Penicillin, sleeping only a few hours a day. Due to the lack of stirrers and shaking incubators, he had to regularly enter the constant-temperature cultivation chamber to manually shake the fermentation bottles. Lacking an air compressor, he used a hand pump, forcing air through a hose equipped with defatted sterile cotton and an antibacterial filter cloth into the bottom of the fermentation jars, ensuring sufficient dissolved oxygen in the culture fluid.
The entire process was extremely tedious and complex, consuming vast amounts of time and effort.
Initially, Yang Yu, Li Wei, and others visited him daily, relaying recent happenings at the Academic Palace through the glass walls of the greenhouse. They told him how microscopes had caused an uproar in the world of Natural Science. Every Academic Palace Doctor now possessed one, and some Doctors had even stopped teaching, spending all their days in their offices observing the fine structures of flowers, birds, insects, and fish. The elite of Chang’an also took pride in owning a microscope; the higher the magnification, the more wealth it demonstrated.
The common people were initially a bit panicked. After all, it had been discovered that water contained countless tiny organisms, and even food surfaces, people’s faces, and hands teemed with myriad microscopic creatures. But as time passed, they adapted, for these "bugs" were invisible to the naked eye. This discovery also encouraged many people to adopt the good habit of drinking boiled water.
Meanwhile, the verbal sparring between Zen and Daoism grew louder. Zen proponents claimed there were "eighty-four thousand beings in a drop of water" and that "all things possess a spirit." Daoism countered with the principle that "drinking water is taking life," accusing the monks of hypocrisy.
Su Feng, a Doctor of Science who reveled in watching arguments, secretly joined the fray. Writing under a dozen pen names, he published articles in various publications, sometimes supporting Zen, sometimes Daoism. At times, he even unexpectedly backed Manichaeism, claiming the countless creatures invisible to the naked eye were actually the "light and dark factors" spoken of by Manichaeism. He asserted that Manichaeism held the truth, thereby attracting a great deal of animosity towards the sect.
Time flowed like a river, and a month quickly passed. Yang Yu, Li Wei, and the others felt they were on the verge of breaking through to the Mid Stage of the Body Concealing Realm, so their visits gradually became less frequent.
Only Chai Chai and Li Leqing continued to visit Li Ang, rain or shine. He Fanshuang would occasionally be dragged over by Li Leqing, who would paste classroom notes on the glass walls of the greenhouse to help Li Ang catch up with his lessons.
There was also Qiu Feng, the daughter of the Imperial Doctor’s Family. Upon hearing that Li Ang was developing a new medicine for epidemic diseases, she came to observe. Because she was skillful with her hands and also majored in Mind Study—meaning she could help shake the fermentation bottles—Li Ang, after some consideration, allowed her to enter the constant-temperature, germ-free workspace as his assistant.
However, the Penicillin extraction still did not go smoothly.
Failure. Failure. Failure.
Li Ang kept cultivating the bacterial strains and repeating experiments. Sometimes he even wanted to ask the Mountain Master, who had returned to the Academic Palace, if he could use the Mutated Objects in the Dongjun Tower—rumored to control time—to grant himself an extra twenty-four hours a day.
Below Mingde Gate, a long queue stretched out. Farmers, merchants, and travelers wishing to enter the city all waited here for the City Gate Guards to inspect their documents before they could pass.
In the waiting crowd, amidst the crowing of chickens, barking of dogs, mooing of cows, and the noisy chatter of people, many eyes were drawn to a group that stood out: the Turkic People. Or rather, the Turkic Mission.
Most of them did not wear turbans but sported sideburns, their faces appearing especially rough from the scorching sun and windblown sand. The robust Turkic guards loyally surrounded the carriages, their eyes fixed forward, ignoring the pointing fingers and murmurs of the Yu people. Their headgear, earrings, wolf tooth ornaments, crossbows, leather armor, waist knives, and leather boots all became subjects of talk and even jest for the Yu people. The officials from the Honglu Temple accompanying them, however, turned a blind eye, making no effort to stop their Yu countrymen from gossiping.
"A hundred, no, even fifty years ago, these Yu people would all have been afraid of us," a fourteen or fifteen-year-old Turkic girl in the mission’s carriage said to her brother in the Turkic language, after lightly lifting the window curtain.
"Times have changed," the young man in the carriage replied, shaking his head. "The Yu Country has become unprecedentedly powerful. Their armor is stronger than ours, their swords sharper.
"Although their horses are not as numerous as ours in Turkic lands, the Yu people have money. They can buy good horses from the Zhou Kingdom, from overseas, even from the Extreme West. In ten, fifty, or a hundred years, they will always be able to breed enough warhorses.
"Moreover, they have the Academic Palace."
"We have one too!" the Turkic girl raised her voice. Fortunately, the thick furs lining the carriage muffled the sound, preventing it from carrying outside.
"Merely an imitation," the young man said, shaking his head again. "Our Wolf Garden was established over fifty years ago by Mr. Zhang Yuan, modeled after their Academic Palace.
"Mr. Zhang Yuan brought books, Herbal Medicine, and craftsmen to us, the Turkic people. He helped us establish a calendar, improve water conservancy, optimize sheep breeds, and refine our weapons. The Great Khan greatly admired him, naming him Elteber and even appointing him as Yabghu.
"And those tribes, from initially looking down on and sneering at him, gradually came to respect him, acknowledging his contributions. They no longer called him by his name directly but addressed him as ’Mister.’
"Zhang Yuan is a great man to the Turkic, but in the Yu Country, he was merely a reject who couldn’t even pass the examinations to enter the Academic Palace. Think about it carefully, my sister."