Li Mengxi, who had not recovered from the cold, was very excited. He said he could make a magical medicine, and then he hurriedly prepared it. Liu Bei, Guan Yu and others chased behind him and persuaded Li Mengxi to rest before he got busy.

Didn't listen at all.

Liu Bei and Guan Yu looked at each other with helpless faces.

It is another magical thing. There is a curved shaft plow in front of it, there is strong liquor, there is a steel-making method, there is a paper-making technique, there is activated carbon, and there is a steel-wrapping technique. These can all be called magical things. Now I heard that Li Mengxi has a new magical thing.

was born, Liu Bei and Guan Yu did not doubt whether Li Mengxi could make something, but they were just curious about what this new divine object was.

Li Mengxi ran all the way to the women's and children's camp. He went to find his younger brother. In a tent, there was a room full of children. The teacher was teaching the children to learn new characters. The characters he learned now had changed from simple flowers, birds, insects, and fish to complex ones.

Words like city walls and villages.

Li Mengxi came quietly. He looked around the tent and saw Xiao Bian and Zhang Ning in the front row. They were listening to the teacher's lecture together.

The teacher saw Li Mengxi coming and came to greet him.

"I'm looking for Xiao Bian." Li Mengxi said.

Li Mengxi was actually looking for Zhang Ning, and wanted to ask Zhang Ning where he found the willow tree.

After leaving the tent, Xiao Zhuan looked up at Li Meng seriously, "Brother, didn't you say you wouldn't let me stay with you if you were sick?" Xiao Zhuan asked seriously.

"I'm fine." Li Mengxi smiled.

Looking at Zhang Ning, Li Mengxi asked, "Sister Ning, do you know where there are willow trees? Can you help me get some willow branches? I have a lot of willow branches, so let's get...forty kilograms first."

Zhang Ning nodded and left to pick willow branches.

Li Mengxi took his younger brother to collect other testing equipment.

The test method is very simple, just put the willow branches in water, alcohol, oil, lime water, vinegar, starch solution, and boil them in various solutions.

Therefore, you have to find acids, alkalis, oils and alcohols. These things are easy to find, but utensils are difficult to find.

Li Mengxi went to look for the iron pots, but they were all still occupied. He had no choice but to find many large clay urns. After the servants cleaned the urns inside and out, the utensils were ready.

Taking into account what I just figured out a few days ago, when using the boiling method to extract medicine, the water temperature is too high, which will cause the decomposition of a large number of active ingredients, so vinegar must be used.

Li Mengxi went to look for vinegar, but there was not much vinegar left. He could not find so much vinegar.

There is no other way but to take another approach.

In the city lord's palace, Li Mengxi was setting up experiments. He directed people to set up the large urns one by one. After the urns were set up, various things such as spirits, butter, lime, vinegar, flour, etc. were put into the urns.

There is no need to add water to the wine, no need to add butter, and no need to add vinegar. After the lime and flour are mixed with water, the alkali solution and starch solution are prepared.

After thinking about it, I realized that the last solution should be water, so I set up another jar and added another jar of water.

After a while, Zhang Ning came with a lot of willow branches. With the willow branches, everything was ready.

Later, Li Mengxi, Zhang Ning and Xiao Zhuan pulled out the willow bark, and then used scissors to cut the bark into fine pieces for later use. During this process, only Li Mengxi and Zhang Ning worked seriously, while Xiao Zhuan,

Little Brick's little hands were weak and he couldn't pull the bark of the tree. After a while, Little Brick started playing with the branches.

Li Mengxi saw that the workload was a bit heavy, and he was still looking for someone to help. As a result, Liu Bei and others disappeared without a trace, and no one was seen.

Half the morning passed, and Li Mengxi and Zhang Ning finally finished handling the willow branches.

A large bundle of willow branches was stripped and cut into pieces and weighed on a scale. The bark weighed less than five kilograms, which was too little.

As a last resort, Li Mengxi walked outside the door, called the messenger, and ordered the messenger to take people to collect willow branches everywhere, as many as he wanted.

The messenger went to take the order.

——

Liu Bei and others who were walking in the city saw the messengers running around in a hurry to gather help. Curiously, they called the messengers over to ask what was going on.

The soldier who sent the order said, "The military advisor has given an order to find willow trees within a radius of ten miles, break off the branches and bring back as many as you want!"

Liu Bei and others laughed and discussed that Li Mengxi must be tinkering with something. Seeing the messengers being busy, Liu Bei smiled and asked the messengers to go to work first.

There are not many willows in Julu City, or to be more precise, there are not many trees of any kind. When we settled in Julu City last year, supplies were very expensive. In order to collect as much firewood as possible, the soldiers cut down all the trees in the city.

Already.

The willow tree that Zhang Ning was able to find was because it was inconspicuous and was missed.

Li Mengxi followed Zhang Ning to find the willow tree. When he went to the willow tree, Li Mengxi scratched his head and saw that it was a small willow tree as thick as an arm. All the branches of the willow tree were torn out and bald.

Zhang Ning pulled the tree bald, and Li Mengxi couldn't help but glance at Zhang Ning.

All the newly extracted branches of a small willow tree, after peeling off the bark, the net weight of the bark is only five or six pounds, which is a bit unexpectedly light.

——

Within a ten-mile radius of Julu City, the cavalrymen scattered out and looked for willow trees everywhere. Once they found one, they climbed up and pulled down all the branches with their cavalry guns.

The army's work efficiency was very high. Less than half an hour after the order was conveyed, the cavalry rushed back one after another and brought large bundles of willow sticks back to the city.

Fortunately it's spring, otherwise the willow trees wouldn't have sprouted, and I couldn't find them even if I tried to look for them.

The city lord's mansion is filled with fresh green willows all over the floor and all over the house. There are so many of them, it must be enough for testing.

We went to the women's and children's camp to gather a large number of women. The women came together with scissors to help. The whole room was filled with the sound of scissors scissoring. With the help of many people, the willow trees were lifted one by one.

The skin is cut and gathered together.

With their hands free, Li Mengxi and Zhang Ning took the weighing portions seriously and weighed them one by one.

In the meantime, Liu Bei came back quietly once. When Liu Bei came back, he saw Zhang Ning weighing himself with a weighing scale, and Li Mengxi holding shredded willow bark and putting it in. The two of them cooperated very well. Liu Bei smiled and left quietly again.

.

This chapter is not over yet, please click on the next page to continue reading! It is currently unknown what the healing substances in the willow tree are, but Li Mengxi had a hunch that this kind of thing is probably very rare. Therefore, fearing that the materials are not enough, Li Mengxi increased each amount of materials to enough

More than eight kilograms.

Put eight pounds of willow bark into the alcohol, eight pounds into the lime water, eight pounds into the grease, eight pounds into the flour, eight pounds into the vinegar, and eight pounds into the water.

After the materials were put in, the formal extraction began. Because of the fear that the effective substances would be destroyed if the temperature was too high, we had to use intermittent heating, that is, heat for a while, remove the firewood, wait for a while, and then continue heating. With this artificial

Control the temperature in a lower range through regulation.

During the heating process, Li Mengxi kept adding and putting in firewood, and had to stand up and look inside the urn for fear that it would boil. Li Mengxi found it very troublesome to keep going back and forth. The most troublesome thing was that he could not see the water temperature.

Come out, there is no way to accurately judge the heating level. Li Mengxi once again thought of the thermometer. If there is a thermometer, insert it into the water. When you see the temperature rises to 50 degrees, immediately remove the heat, and then wait for the temperature to drop to 40 degrees before continuing.

Heating is much more efficient this way.

The question is, how do you make a thermometer? It seems to require a glass tube and mercury, both of which are difficult to get.

After a long time, more than an hour or maybe even longer, the house became smoky, filled with firewood smoke.

The heating time was long enough, but because it was heated intermittently, the water never boiled, so it was impossible to judge the extraction effect of the drug. I took a spoon and took a spoonful of water from the urn and looked at it. The water boiled into a light yellow with a little green.

s color.

The green stuff is probably the pigment chlorophyll. Once the chlorophyll is boiled out, other substances are probably boiled out as well.

Li Mengxi ordered the heating to be stopped. He ordered a new container to be brought in, using fine linen as a filter lining. After filtering the boiled willow solution several times, all the bark and residues were filtered out.

After several rounds of filtration, Li Mengxi went to check the filtration status of each jar. The extraction solutions used included alcohol, lime water, oil, flour water, vinegar, and water. All the solutions were filtered very cleanly and had no bark impurities.

However, after boiling, the solution became more or less yellowish and greenish in color.

Li Mengxi raised his head and thought for a moment. The yellow-green color is probably pigments such as chloroplasts, and the pigments are probably impurities. According to Li Mengxi's speculation, the pharmaceutical ingredients in willow branches are most likely much smaller than the chloroplasts. The pharmaceutical ingredients are

A molecule, a chloroplast, is a plant organ made up of hundreds or thousands of molecules.

Therefore, based on this speculation, Li Mengxi felt that activated carbon could be used for further impurity removal.

I have to ask, will activated carbon take away the drugs? Of course, it will absorb some of the drugs. However, compared with chloroplasts, chloroplast pigments are much larger, so they are more likely to get stuck in the pores of activated carbon. In contrast, the drug ingredients

It is a small molecule and is not easily absorbed.

After making this conjecture, Li Mengxi went to the side room to get a lot of activated carbon, wrapped the activated carbon in a linen bag, and then dropped stones to sink it into the solution. At the same time, he had to constantly stir the solution to make the solution rise and fall.

Toss to remove impurities more thoroughly.

During this process, Li Mengxi stirred around in the solution with a stick. He found that some small bark residues would float up. This discovery made him frown. It seemed that the filtration effect of linen was not very good.

Memory flashed, and Li Mengxi remembered that in middle school biology and chemistry classes, some white filter paper would be used to filter and remove impurities. The filter paper had an excellent effect on removing impurities.

Li Mengxi was wondering whether the production process of filter paper was different from that of ordinary paper, or whether ordinary paper could also have a filtering effect. He thought that next time, he could get some thicker paper and try it for filtering.

The color removal effect of activated carbon is very good. After several rounds and more than ten kilograms of activated carbon were used, the color of various solutions became clear.

After these three steps of boiling, filtration, and active impurity removal are completed, the last remaining step is evaporation, which removes water and separates useful substances from the solution.

As mentioned before, a temperature of 100 degrees may destroy the properties of the medicine. Therefore, the only way is low-temperature heating. But here is the problem. In the low-temperature state, the boiling evaporation state of the liquid cannot be reached, and the evaporation extraction process is bound to be lengthy.

This process was so long that from afternoon to night, Li Mengxi looked at the jar of solution in front of him, and there was no shortage of half a jar of solution in the jar.

Seeing this situation, Li Mengxi was also depressed.

At this rate, it would take several days to boil a vat of water dry over a low, tepid fire.

Difficulties loomed before him, and Li Mengxi had to recall what he had learned.

Li Mengxi thought of a similar problem. After washing his hair, his hair was wet, so how could the hair dryer dry it so quickly?

The answer is, one is wind and the other is temperature.
To be continued...