The purification process of the contents that Timothy had concocted in the cauldron, was as simple as it was complicated. In the grand scale of things, he wasn't building rockets here, for example, so one couldn't consider the process to be too complex, and in simple words, he was just purifying a combination of two gases here, nothing more. It wasn’t a ground-breaking task, however, if he was to be successful, there was still a minimum requirement of MQ that he had to meet, no matter how insignificant the task may be itself!
The requirement towered at four-hundred and fifty points of MQ for this task, and he had crossed that requirement by exactly one-hundred points, so he could carry on with the purification process without restrictions. If he had visited this city a couple of months earlier, then he would've failed to meet the requirement indefinitely, which would've enthralled him to do stupid things afterwards, but luckily that was not the case.