Kyle blew out the candle, and when he approached the bedroom, he saw that both his wife and daughter were still busy sleeping. Afterward, he stepped out of the house and closed the door quietly behind him.
The house His Royal Highness had assigned to him laid in a district west of the castle. Comparing the new house with his former house in Silver City there were a lot of differences. The walls were now made out of brick instead of the quickly molding wood he had seen in Silver City. Furthermore, the house was also many times more comfortable and the kitchen utensils and furniture were all stocked with everything that they needed.
Although he hadn’t spoken about it out loud, deep down he was much more satisfied with this new life. His disciples lived in another district, two blocks away from him. Their house was much smaller, and they didn’t have a room for themselves. Their house was a bit like an inn, where a bedroom had to be shared with four people.
When he came to his laboratory at the Redwater River, he saw that his disciples have already been busy. They had all been carefully selected by Kyle. They had worked in the Alchemy Workshop almost from their childhood onwards, learning how to clean and sort the materials. By now all of them had already reached an age between twenty and thirty years old. Seeing that all the laboratory utensils and shiny glass containers were clean, Kyle nodded in satisfaction.
“Good morning, Chief Instructor,” seeing him enter, all the disciplines bowed and greeted him.
“Let’s start.” Kyle took a pair of gloves from one of the cupboards, full of enthusiasm. These gloves were extremely slim and elastic. They were most probably made out of animal intestines.
When he had worked in the Alchemy Workshop before this, they never had any provisions such as these, but the Prince had repeatedly stressed how dangerous it was to work and experiment with the chemicals. So, all the operating rules had to be strictly followed, such as when working with corrosive materials, they had to wear gloves the whole time and keep all of the windows open.
Another difference between his previous work in the workshop and now was that he now had a clear task assigned to him. He had to make acid for His Royal Highness.
The double stone acid method had already been used by his disciplines many times before, so Kyle only had to visit them from time to time and no longer needed to guide them through each and every step of the way.
The two acids that they had to produce were described in detail in the book “Primary Chemistry”, one was called sulfuric acid, and the other was called nitric acid.
During his time in the Alchemy Workshop they had used different names for them, the former had been known as green vitriol acid and the latter as niter acid. Even though they had used different names for it, the preparation method was basically still the same, through the dry distillation of green vitriol and saltpeter, they could get acid vapor and then by condensing them together, they were able to collect the needed acid liquid.
Green vitriol was usually mined together with sulfur, while there were special nitrate fields to satisfy the great demand of the big cities, so they were both a commonly found raw material.
But His Highness stressed the point that the two acid concentrations had to be as high as possible, so he had deliberately decided to explain the purification method to Kyle.
For example, the collected sulfuric acid could be heated up again, so that the remaining water evaporated until finally a concentration of up to 98 % concentrated sulfuric acid could be reached.
However, nitric acid was a lot of more trouble. According to His Royal Highness, nitric acid itself wasn’t stable, it was actually pretty volatile. Because of this, using the usual method they could achieve a high concentration only to a certain extent, and if it then came in contact with light it would quickly break down again. So, they had to dilute the nitric acid with the concentrated sulfuric acid, only then could it be heated. The concentrated sulfuric acid would absorb water, while the nitric acid would evaporate.
Regarding the problem with the light, the nitric acid had to be stored in a brown glass bottle. To make all of this possible, His Royal Highness had already specially prepared a thermometer for him.
