Ning walked up to the old lady Gaani, standing next to her and looking down on the various ingredients she had laid in front of her.
He knew the name of all of the ingredients, except for the ones that had been completely peeled, unshelled, or made powder off.
For those, he could have to use his sense of touch, smell, and maybe even a little taste sometimes.
Ning looked at the bone fragments on the platter of ingredients and gave a disapproving look, but the old woman Gaani didn't see it, and neither did Ning want her to.
"To know how to make potions, you need to know ingredients first," the old woman said.
Ning certainly didn't need much help in understanding the ingredients, but he let the woman explain anyway.
"A portion, as you have seen before, is made by boiling these ingredients. There is no exact recipe for the potions aside from the measurement of these very ingredients," the old woman said.
She picked up a small flower and showed it to Ning. "These ingredients will help me make a potion that soothes a person's spirit and helps them overcome insomnia, stress, trauma, nightmares, anxiety, and even helps you fight through sleep paralysis demons in most cases to get a gentle night of sleep."
Ning nodded to her, thinking to himself that this was likely the potion that the Lord had ordered, the order of which he had seen in the small notebook she had taken out the other day.
"This flower in my hand is its main ingredient," she said. Ning looked at the flower in her hand and recognized it as a Night Crown. It had 5 white petals around a tiny green circle at the center.
From the center, many tendrils of white strings fell down even below the petals themselves. The flower had been plucked from quite a bit away from the flower, but Ning knew that it was only the petals and white strings which held the materials that would inevitably be dissolved in the water.
One could have a gentle sleep with just the Night Crown plants gathered around them with flowers blooming in them, but they had to be alive for that, and there had to be enough to fill the air with their essence.
Ning knew that it was not really possible for everyone that wanted a good night of sleep to go around finding these flowers.
A monarch or noble could certainly do so, but a normal civilian would have no choice but to buy potions if they ever wanted their nights to be sound.
"This is called a Night Crown flower," the old woman started explaining what Ning already knew. In fact, when the old woman ended, Ning realized that she didn't really know anything.
She only knew that the flower was what made the humans fall asleep.
She then put the flower down back onto the pile and brought out another one of the ingredients. This time, it was a pale blue colored thick strings of some sort.
Ning strained a bit to see what it was properly, and when he did, he realized exactly what it was.
"It's the tendon of a four-legged Aether beast with branching horns," she said. Ning understood she meant to say antlers, but this world had no deers so most of the words that would be common to most worlds were not available here.
"This tendon contains properties that help slow down a person's mind, making it easier for the other ingredients to influence it," she said.
Next, she picked up a small piece of paper with about 4 pinches of powder on it. "Ground up bones of the same beast as earlier. It helps make the blood circulation smoother and gives a calming sensation to the taker," she said.
After that, she picked up a half-cut fruit that looked closer to a half-cut bulb of garlic more than anything.
The old woman picked it up and started peeling it to reveal the slightly pinkish fruit on the inside.
"Lotus Berry is just there to add a sweet flavor to the potion and can be ignored, but I do believe it is helpful in some other ways too. Although, I do not know as of yet," she said.
Ning nodded, and in the back of his head recalled the entire information of Lotus Berry that was nearly 20 pages long if he were to write it down.
When it all boiled down, the Lotus Berry was there to infuse vitamins into the potion, the lack of which might have been the cause of many of the disorders in a person's body that might have been causing them to lose sleep.
All in all, the potion was starting to sound more like medicine than some magical elixir to Ning now.
However, he knew that wasn't the only thing potions could do. There were some ingredients that could do things that could only be explained as being 'miraculous'.
One after another, the old woman explained the remaining 8 of the other ingredients and Ning acted like he was absorbing all of the information.
Even if he didn't want to, he couldn't help but have his Eidetic memory store everything that was happening for review in the future.
Once the old woman was finished explaining all of the ingredients and what they did, she then went on to explain the portions of those ingredients.
A single mature flower of Night Crown. A half bulb of peeled Lotus Berry. A meter and a half long tendon of the deer-like Aether beast. 40 grams of crushed bones of the deer-like Aether beast.
Roots, barks, eyes, fur, and the various other ingredients in front of Ning also had a portion assigned to them.
Once it was all ready, the old woman turned to Ning. "Once it is all ready and portioned, we dump it all into the water."
She gestured for Ning to do it. So, he nodded and made the entire set of ingredients fall into the boiling water.
