Liquor of the Mysterious Water

Head of the Great One s Decade [ ] taiyi xunshou zhong shi). Icy Stone (bingshi). Purple Roaming Woman ziyou nil). Liquor of the Mysterious Water (xuanshui ye). Stone That Transmutes the Metals (jinhua shi), and cinnabar. Seal them together until they liquefy.. . . ... 

If the Medicine has not been fixed by the fire, it must be sublimated again. Add it to Liquor of the Mysterious Water xuanshui ye) and to Grease of Dragons (longgao ze). Mix to make the compound moist, and put it again [5 a] in the red earthenware crucible of the Mysterious and Yellow xuan-huang chitu fu). Seal the joints as in the initial method. Sublimate the compound over an intense fire for thirty-six days, and the Medicine will form after altogether seventy-two days. 

On the Liquor of the Mysterious Water see above, p. 169. The Secret Instructions, I2b-i3a, describes a preliminary step [After you prepare the Mysterious and Yellow,] add to it some Water of the Mysterious and Yellow in Nine Cycles of the Liquid Pearl (liuzhu jiuzhuan xuanhuang shut). . . and make it into a mud. Heat it in a vessel until it becomes scarlet then add to it some Liquor of the Mysterious Water. ... 

In 27 runs at various conditions, the operators of this pilot plant found to their distress that the furfural yields were only in the order of 30 percent, in harsh contrast to their expectations of 85 percent, derived from calculations based on the known kinetics in water. The designers had made a fundamental mistake They had measured the rate of pentose disappearance in the sulfite liquor, but not the rate of furfural formation, and as the rate of pentose disappearance was far greater than what had to be expected when the liquor s hydrogen ion concentration was used in the known kinetics of xylose disappearance in acid water, they had concluded that the lignosulfonate of the liquor had a special catalytic effect on the pentose-to-furfural conversion. They had overlooked that the fast disappearance of the pentose in the liquor was not due to a mysterious catalysis but caused by loss reactions of the pentose with lignosulfonate and other ingredients of the liquor. 

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